SIDNEY
BERKELEY^
LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY Of
CALIFORNrA
^
J
JOHN KEATS
JOHN KEATS
HIS LIFE AND POETRY
HIS FRIENDS CRITICS
AND
AFTER- FAME
BY
SIDNEY COLVIN
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1917
COPTKIOHT, 1917, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published November, 1917
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 con-
nected account of his life and poetry together in the
light of oiu" present knowledge and with help of all
the available material. Ever since it was my part,
some thirty years ago, to contribute the voliune 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 pubhcation 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 inform-
ing, the special student. I have tried to set forth
consecutively and fully the history of a life outwardly
vii
viii PREFACE
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 pre-
servation and unreserved publication of his letters,
lying bare almost more than any other to our know-
ledge. 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 linea-
ments and relations, so far as these can be re-
covered, more fully than has been attempted before.
I beheve also that I have been able to trace more
closely than has yet been done some of the chief
sources, both in Uterature 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 imtil
to-day. By English I mean all those whose mother lan-
guage 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 fuU 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
PREFACE ix
in France, where our literature has during the last
generation been studied with such admirable inteUi-
gence 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 hghts as have appeared
while my task was in progress, I have drawn from them
some conclusions, both biographical and critical, which
I beheve 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 — Si great and most interesting part —
which is expressed in them but has not foimd 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.
X PREFACE
First and foremost, to Lord Crewe for letting me have
free and constant access to his imrivalled 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/). Speak-
ing 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 docu-
ments 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 dih-
gence by his Hbrarian Miss Greene. For other illustra-
tive 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 Hmited
edition de luxe of the book specially illustrated from
their material, a condition the pubUshers judged it im-
possible to carry out, at any rate in war-time.
Foremost among my scholarly helpers at home has been
my friend Professor W. P. Ker, who has done me the
great kindness of reading through my proofs. For in-
formation and suggestions in answer to enquiries of one
kind or another I am indebted to Professor Israel GoUancz
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; and to my former pupil and col-
league Mr A. H. Smith, Keeper of Greek and Roman
PREFACE xi
Antiquities at the British Museum. Mr George Whale
suppHed 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, unfortimately not yet conclusive, of the re-
searches made by him as a zealous Comishman 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 1859 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 1818, copied and recopied by him-
self, 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 structm-e 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
xii PREFACE
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 featm*e 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 imagina-
tion. The reproductions of autographs, one of his own
and one of Haydon's, speak for themselves.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
1795-1815: Birth and Parentage: Schooldays and
Apprenticeship --- 1
CHAPTER II
October 1815-March 1817: Hospital Studies: Poetical
Ambitions: Leigh Hunt - 27
CHAPTER III
Winter 1816-1817: Haydon: Other New Friendships:
The Die Cast for Poetry 59
CHAPTER IV
The 'Poems' of 1817 85
CHAPTER V
April-December 1817: Work on Endymion - - - 130
CHAPTER VI
Endymion. — ^I. The Story: Its Sources, Plan, and
Symbolism ---164
xiii
xhr CONTENTS
CHAPTER VII
PAGB
Endymion. — ^11. The Poetry: Its Qualities and
Affinities -- 206
CHAPTER VIII
December 1817-June 1818: Hampstead and Teign-
mouth: Emigration of George Keats - - - 242
CHAPTER IX
June-August 1818: The Scottish Tour - . - 272
CHAPTER X
September-December 1818: Blackwood and the Quar-
terly: Death of Tom Keats - - - - - 297
CHAPTER XI
December 1818-June 1819: Keats and Brown House-
Mates: Fanny Brawne: Work and Idleness - 321
CHAPTER XII
June 1819-January 1820: Shanklin, Winchester,
Hampstead: Trouble and Health Failure - - 358
CHAPTER XIII
Work of 1818, 1819.— I. The Achievements - - - 385
CHAPTER XIV
Work of 1818, 1819. — II. The Fragments and Experi-
ments " 424
CONTENTS XV
CHAPTER XV
PAGE
February- August 1820 : Hampstead and Kentish Town :
Publication of Lamia Volume - - - - 455
CHAPTER XVI
August 1820-February 1821: Voyage to Italy: Last
Days and Death at Rome ----- 485
CHAPTER XVII
Epilogue --- - 513
Appendix ----- 551
Index ---------- 559
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE PAOB
I. Head of Keats Frontispiece
From a posthumoiis oil painting by Joseph Severn in the
possession of the Marquis of Crewe, K.G.
n. Portrait of James Henry Leigh Hunt - - 46
From an engraving by Mayer after a drawing by J. Hayter.
III. Portrait of Benjamin Robert Haydon - - 62
From an engraving by Thomson after Haydon.
IV. Life-Mask of Keats 144
From an electrotype in the National Portrait Gallery.
V. 'Onward the Tiger and the Leopard Pants,
With Asian Elephants' ----- 230
From an engraving after a sarcophagus relief at Wobum
Abbey.
VI. A Sacrifice to Apollo 264
From an engraving by Vivares and Woollett after Claude.
VII. The Enchanted Castle 266
From an engraving by Vivares and Woollett after Claude.
«
VIII. 'And there I'd sit and read all Day like a
Picture of Somebody Reading' - - - 338
From an oil painting by Joseph Severn in the National
Portrait Gallery.
xvii
xviii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FLiATK PAGE
IX. 'Figures on a Greek Vase — A Man and Two
Women' 342
From an etching in Piranesi's Vasi e Candelabri.
X. Page from Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil - - 394
From an autograph by Keats in the British Musemn. -"^
XI. The Sosibios Vase: Profile and Frieze - - 416
From an engraving in the Musie Napolion.
XII. *What Pipes and Timbrels? what wild Ecstasy?' 418
Bacchanalian friezes, (A) from the Townley Vase in the
British Museum, (B) from the Borghese Vase in the Louvre.
XIII. Page from a Letter op Haydon to Elizabeth
Barrett, 1834 532
JOHN KEATS
CHAPTER I
1795-1815: 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
Qiieene — 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 bom 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,
1
2 OBSCURE FAMILY HISTORY
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
coxmt as offspring of their age, with its forces and fer-
ments, its violent actions and reactions, rather than of
their ancestry or upbringing. And yet, if we will, we
may fancy Byron inspired in Hterature 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
wajrward 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 mediaeval
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 Drydenwith
a difference, — ^it was through channels hidden from our
search. From his case less even than from Shake-
speare'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
THE FINSBURY LIVERY-STABLE 3
of head ostler in a K very-stable kept by a Mr John
Jennings in Finsbmy. Seven or eight yeare later,
about the beginning of 1795, 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 Hve in the country, at Bonder's End near
Edmonton, leaving the management of the business
in the hands of his son-in-law. At first the young
couple Hved at the stable, at the sign of the Swan
and Hoop, Finsbury Favement, facing the then open
space of Lower Moorfields. Here their eldest child,
the poet John Keats, was born prematurely on
either the 29th or 31st of October, 1795. A second
son, named George, followed on February 28, 1797;
a third, Tom, on November 18, 1799; a fourth, Edward,
who died in infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the
3rd of June, 1803, 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
4 THE SURNAME I^ATS
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 princi-
pally in Warwickshire: in the variants Keat (or Keate)
and Keats (or Keates^ it occurs in many of the mid-
land, 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 head-master 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, pubHshed 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
^ 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 EngUsh habit of phonetic carelessness and sUpshod pro-
nunciation. I learn from a correspondent belonging to the very nimierous
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
famiUes 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.
ORIGIN PROBABLY CORNISH 5
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 Tiver-
ton, and in Cornwall, especially in the parishes of St
Teath and Lanteglos, — ^that is round about Camelford, —
3.nd also as far eastward as CaUington 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 bom in 1768, the birth-year of our poet's
father according to our information. A ^Thomas
Keast', however, is registered as having been bom
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 circum-
stance which may be held to add to the likehhood 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 1770 of the marriage of a John Jennings to a
Catherine Keate at Penyrn; and it is a plausible con-
jecture (always remembering it to be a conjecture and
no more) that the prosperous London stable-keeper
John 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
6 CHARACTER OF PARENTS
as son-in-law, there existed some previous family con-
nexion or acquaintance. These, however, are matters
piu-ely 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 re-
spectability,' 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 Hvely 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
Hall, 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 quaHties
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
TRAITS OF CHILDHOOD 7
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 Kved 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 Hked 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
1 This document, a memorandum written for the information of Keats's
friend and publisher, John Taylor, was sold in London in 1907. 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.
8 THE ENFIELD SCHOOL
aspect and surroundings. The school-house had been
origmally 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
facade, with its fine proportions and rich ornaments
in moulded brick, was transported to the South Ken-
sington (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 fuU 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'^oups 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 Endfield
School. His skuU was fractured: he was picked up
unconscious about one o'clock and died at eight in
the morning. This was on the 16th of April, 1804.
Within twelve months his widow had taken a second
husband — one William Rawlings, described as 'of
Moorgate in the city of London, stable-keeper,' pre-
sumably 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 EDMONTON HOME - 9
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 Hve at Edmonton, in the house
of her mother, Mrs Jennings, who was just about this
time left a widow. The family was well enough pro-
vided for, Mr Jennings (who died March 8, 1805) having
left a fortune of over £13,000, of which, in addition to
other legacies, he bequeathed a capital yielding £200
a year to his widow absolutely; one yielding £50 a
year to his daughter Frances Rawlings, with reversion
to her Keats children after her death; and £1000 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 (1806-1811) 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 recol-
lections 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 after-
wards by way of foolishness to amuse his young sister,
and testify to a partiality, common also to Httle boys
not of genius, for dabbling by the brookside and keeping
small fishes in tubs, —
There was a naughty boy Of the Maid,
And a naughty boy was he Nor afraid
He kept little fishes Of his Granny-good
In washing tubs three He often would
In spite Hurly burly
Of the might Get up early
10 THE PYMMES BROOK
And go The size
By hook or crook Of a nice
To the brook Little Baby's
And bring home Little finger —
Miller's thumb, O he made
Tittlebat 'Twas his trade
Not over fat, Of Fish a pretty kettle
Minnow small A kettle —
As the stal A kettle —
Of a glove Of Fish a pretty kettle
Not above A kettle I
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 squahdly 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
TESTIMONIES OF SCHOOLMATES 11
bright and mettlesome outside there lay deep in his
nature, even from the first, a strain of painful sensibiHty
making him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion
and self-tormenting melancholy. These he was accus-
tomed 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
manhness 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 foimd 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 pro-
tecting 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 1818, 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
12 EDWARD HOLMES
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 un-
expectedly. 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 ani-
mation 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 afore-
mentioned Charles Gowden 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 : —
1 Houghton MSS.
CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE 13
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 resem-
blance; 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
* Charles Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 1878.
14 NEW PASSION FOR READING
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 con-
tinues : —
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, Lempriere's Classical
Dictionary, which he appeared to learny 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 ^neidy 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 1810. We are told with what
devotion her eldest boy attended her sick-bed, — 'he
LEFT AN ORPHAN 15
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 imder the
master's desk) as awakened the liveliest pity and sym-
pathy in all who saw him.'
From her, no doubt, came that predisposition to con-
sumption 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 con-
trast 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 feeHng and undis-
turbed 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 deaHngs with his fellow-men, though
not over the inward frettiugs 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, 4n 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
* Bawlings v. Jennings,
.16 APPRENTICED TO A SURGEON
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 responsibiHties of the
trust. Under his authority John Keats was withdrawn
from school at the end of the summer term, 1811,
when he was some months short of sixteen, and made
to put on harness for the practical work of life. With
no opposition, so far as we learn, on his own part, he
was bound apprentice to a Mr Thomas Hammond, a
surgeon and apothecary of good repute at Edmonton,
for the customary term of five years.^
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
1 She was buried at St Stephen's, Cohnan Street, Deer. 19, 1814, aged 78.
2 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 1810, the end of his fifteenth
year. It should have been the late summer of 181 1, 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 KeatsShelley Memorial, Rome, 1913, p. 23). On the other hand
we have material evidence of his having left by the following year, in
the shape of ah Ovid presented to him from the school and inscribed
with a fine writing-master's flourish, 'John Keats, emer: 1812;' 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' earUer 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 1807. 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.
RELATIONS WITH HIS MASTER 17
him inestimable, of proximity to his old school, which
meant free access to the school Hbrary and continued
encouragement and advice in reading from his affec-
tionate senior, the headmaster'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 siagle written
reference to them except the much-quoted phrase in
a letter of 1819, in which, speaking of the continual
processes of change in the human tissues, he says,
'this is not the same hand which seven years ago
clenched itself at Hammond.' It was natural that the
same fiery temper which made him as a small boy
square up against an usher on behalf of his brother, —
an offence which the headmaster, according to his son
Cowden Clarke, 'felt he could not severely punish,' —
it was natural that this same temper should on occasion
flame out against his employer the surgeon. If Keats's
words are to be taken literally, this happened in the
second year of his apprenticeship. , Probably it was but
the affair of a moment: there is no evidence of any
habitual disagreement or final breach between them,
and Keats was able to put in the necessary testimonial
from Mr Hammond when he presented himself in due
course for examination before the Court of Apothecaries.
A fellow-apprentice in after years remembered him as
'an idle loafing fellow, always writing poetry.' This,
seeing that he did not begin to write till he was near
eighteen, must refer to the last two years of his appren-
18 READINGS IN THE POETS
ticeship and probably represents an unlettered view of
his way of emplo3dng 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 Home
('Orion' Home), another alumnus of the Enfield school
who lived to make his mark in literature. Home
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, yoimg Home, 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 literatiu'e and
the imagination was not to be stifled, and how at Ed-
monton 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 JEneid, 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 poHtical
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
THE FAERIE QUEENE 19
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 do\\Ti
to Camus and LyddaSj — '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 inno-
vating critics, with Leigh Hunt and HazHtt 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 imi-
tators, 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 dehght in Seattle'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 whole-
heartedly 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 per-
ceive its faults now of scholastic pedantry and now
of flagging inspiration, the perplexity and discon-
tinuousness 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 revela-
20 THE SPENSER FEVER
tion 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 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 himseK up, and looked
burly and dominant, as he said, "What an image that
is — sea-shouldering whales V^ '
Spenser has been often proved not only a great
awakener of the love of poetry in youth, but a great
fertiHzer 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 develop-
ment 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
OTHER POETIC INFLUENCES 21
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 contem-
poraries, that Keats was in these days gaining acquain-
tance. Not quite in his earliest, but still in his very
early, attempts, we find clear traces of familiarity with
the work both of William Browne of Tavistock and of
Michael Drayton, and we can conceive how in that
charming ingenuous retrospect of Drayton's on his
boyish vocation to poetry, addressed to his friend
Henry Reynolds, Keats will have smiled to find an
utterance of the same passion that had just awakened
in his own not very much maturer self.
Let it be remembered moreover that the years of
Keats's school days and apprenticeship were also those
of the richest and most stimulating outburst of the new
poetry in England. To name only their chief products, —
the Lyrical Ballads of Coleridge and Wordsworth had
come while he was only a child: during his school
days had appeared Wordsworth's still richer and not
less challenging volumes of 1807, and the succession of
Scott's romantic lays (but these last, in spite of their
enormous public success, it was in circles influenced by
Leigh Hunt not much the fashion to admire): during
his apprentice years at Edmonton, the two first
cantos of Byron's Childe Harold and the still more
overwhelmingly successful series of his Eastern tales:
and finally Wordsworth's Excursion, with which almost
from the first Keats was profoundly impressed. But
it was not, of course, only by reading poetry that
he was learning to be a poet. Nature was quite as
much his teacher as books; and the nature within
easy reach of him, tame indeed and unimpressive in
comparison with Wordsworth's lakes and mountains,
had quite enough of vital English beauty to afford fair
seed-time to his soul. Across the levels of the Lea
valley, not then disfigured as they are now by factories
and reservoir works and the squalor of sprawling suburbs,
22 INFLUENCES OF NATURE
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 South-
gate towards the Barnets, and thence in a sweep by the
remains of Enfield Chase, was a rich tract of typically
EngHsh 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 con-
sciousness and discover with effort and practice the
secret of rightly expressing themselves in words.
After Keats, imder the stimulus of Spenser, had taken
his first plunge into verse, he went on writing occasional
sonnets and other pieces: secretly and shyly at first
like all other young poets: at least it was not until
some two years later, in the spring of 1815, that he
showed anything that he had written to his friend and
EARLY ATTEMPTS IN VERSE 23
confidant Cowden Clarke. This was a sonnet on the
release of Leigh Hunt after serving a two years' sen-
tence of imprisonment for a poHtical 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 Hberty but
knew and admired personally, when Keats met him
and tm^ned 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 presei'ved, and like the work of almost all
beginners are quite imitative and conventional, failing
to express anything original or personal to himself.
They include the aforesaid Spenserian stanzas, which
in fact echo the cadences of Thomson's Castle of Indolence
much more than those of Spenser himself; an ode to
Hope, quite in the square-toed manner of eighteenth-
century didactic verse, and another to Apollo, in which
style and expression owe everything to Gray; a set
of octosyllabics recording, this time with some touch
of freshness, a momentary impression of a woman's
beauty received one night at Vauxhall, and so intense
that it continued to haunt his memory for years; two
sets of verses addressed in a vein of polite parlour
compliment to lady friends at the seaside; and several
quite feeble sonnets in the Wordsworthian form, among
them one on the peace of Paris in 1814, one on Chat-
terton 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
24 EARLY SYMPATHIZERS
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 WyHe, 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 foimd 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 Felt on Mathew, was a youth of sensibility aad
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 ilitimacy 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 literatiu'e, were in many respects as different as two individuals
could be. He enjoyed good heahh — a fine flow of animal spirits
GEORGE FELTON MATHEW 25
— ^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 innova-
tions which were making progress in his time. A faultfinder
with everything established. I, on the contrary, hated contro-
versy and dispute — dreaded discord and disorder — loved the
institutions of my country. . . . But I respected Keats's opinions,
because they were sincere — ^refrained from subjects on which
we diifered, and only asked him to concede with me the imper-
fection of human knowledge, and the fallibility of human judg-
ment: 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 Merciu-y, 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;
26 MOVE TO LONDON
Nay followed him till he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air; and then
Have turned mine eye and wept/
Early in the autumn of 1815, a few weeks before his
twentieth birthday, Keats left the service of Mr Hammond,
his indentures having apparently been cancelled by
consent, and went to live in London as a student at
the hospitals, then for teaching purposes united, of
Guy's and St Thomas's. What befell him during the
eighteen months that followed, and how his career as a
student came to an end, will be told in the next two
chapters.^
1 Surmise, partly founded on the vague recollections of former fellow
students, has hitherto dated this step a year earlier, in the autumn of
1814. 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 1, 1815. If he had moved to London,
as has been supposed, a year earUer, he would have had nothing to do
there, nor is it the least hkely 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 exphcit statement of his fellow-student and sometime house-
mate, Mr Henry Stephens. It results that the period of his Ufe as hospital
student in a succession of London lodgings must be cut down from the
supposed two years and a half, October 1814-April 1817, to one year and
a half, Oct. 1815-April 1817. 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 1815-MARCH 1817 : HOSPITAL STUDIES : POETICAL
AMBITIONS: LEIGH HUNT
Hospital days: summary — Aptitudes and ambitions — Teachers — Testi-
mony 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 personahty 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 Ubrary — 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 1, 1815, 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 3, 1816, he
entered for a further term of twelve months. On July
25, 1816, 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 1817,
being now of age and on the eve of publishing his first
volume of verse, he determined to abandon the pursuit
27
28 HOSPITAL DAYS: SUMMARY
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 1815 till about the new year
of 1816, Keats lodged alone at 8 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 1816, 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 1817,
they all three moved for a short time to 76 Cheapside.
For filHng up this skeleton record, we have some tradi-
tions of the hospital concerning Keats' s teachers, some
recollections of fellow students, — of one, Mr Henry
Stephens, in particular, — ^together with further reminis-
cences 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
1 Another account says Mitchell.
APTITUDES AND AMBITIONS 29
of practice evidently did not feel himseK 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 realised 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 respon-
sibilities 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 liighly 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 shuflfling 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
30 TEACHERS
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 lectiu*er 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 AngHan 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 informar
tion in 1847.^
Whether it was in the latter part of the year 1815 or the early
part of the year 1816 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
1 In The Asclepiad, April 1884. * Houghton MSS.
TESTIMONY OF HENRY STEPHENS 31
hospitals. His passion, if I may so call it, for poetry was soon
manifested. He attended lectm*es 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
shewing 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 Sp^enser, his Faerie Queene was a great favourite
wi^ him. Byron was also in favour. Pope he maintained was
no poet, ohly 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
32 PRIDE AND OTHER CHARACTERISTICS
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 ai^d
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.
f
The last words need to be read in the light of the con-
vivial 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
sHps 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
EVIDENCES OF A WANDERING MIND 33
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 mediaeval 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 trans-
lation 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 Hngering 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
* Le Grand : Fabliaux ou Contes, 1781. G. L. Way : Fabliaux or Tales,
London, 1800; 2nd ed. 1815. See Appendix I.
* This notebook is in the collection bequeathed by the late Sir Charles
Dilke to the public Ubrary at Hampstead,
34 SERVICES OF COWDEN CLARKE
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 wind-
ings, yet No 8, 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 1815, 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 simmier of the next. For his brother
George to send to his fiancee. Miss Georgiana Wylie, on
Valentine's day, Feb. 14, 1816, 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
INTRODUCTION TO LEIGH HUNT 35
Leigh Hunt, and was in the habit of going up to visit
him at the cottage where he was now Hving at Hampstead,
in the Vale of Health. Some time in the late spring of
1816 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 con-
siderable, 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 5th, 1816, Keats's sonnet, 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 grati-
fied 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 char-
acter 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,
1 In a review of Keats's first book written the next year {Examiner,
July 9, 1817) Hunt says that when he printed the 'Solitude' sonnet he
knew no more of Keats than of any other anonymous correspondent:
but this probably only means that he had not yet met Keats personally.
36 SUMMER WALKS AT HAMPSTEAD
and Spartan deference in attention, with fascinating conversa-
tional 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 connection 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 unen joyed, 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 29th were almost certainly the fields of
Hampstead, and there is no reason to doubt Hunt's
statement that the ^little hiir from which Keats drank
the summer view and air, as told at the opening of his
poem / 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,
HOLIDAY EPISTLES FROM MARGATE 37
and that it was not until after Keats's return from his
summer hoHday 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 ?
38 RETURN TO LONDON
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 ahnost to triteness, which is his first high
achievement, and one of the masterpieces of our lan-
guage 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,
'Ocf 1816, John Keats.' The doubts expressed have
been due partly to the overlooking of this fact and
FIRST READING OF CHAPMAN'S HOMER 39
partly to a mistake in Cowden Clarke's account of the
matter written many years later. After quoting Keats's
invitation of October 1815 to come and find him at
his lodging in the Borough, Clarke goes on: —
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 Chap-
man's translation of Homer had been lent me. It was the pro-
perty 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 * f amousest' 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 An tenor's vivid por-
trait of an orator in Ulysses, beginning at the 237th 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 ^gas 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
40 DATE OF THE CHAPMAN SONNET
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. Recol-
lections not of one, but of many, Homer readings are
here compressed into a couple of paragraphs. They
will have been readings carried on at intervals through
the autumn and winter of 1816-17: an inspiring addition
to the other intellectual gains and pleasures which fell to
Keats's lot during those months. There is no reason
to doubt the exactness of darkens account of the first
night the friends spent together over Chapman and its
result in the shape of the sonnet which lay on his table
the next morning. His error is in remembering these
circumstances as having happened when he and Keats
first foregathered in London in the autumn of 1815,
whereas Keats's positive evidence above quoted shows
that they did not reaUy happen until a year later, after
his return from his summer holiday in 1816.^ Before
1 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 ClerkenweU
INTIMACY WITH LEIGH HUNT 41
printing the Chapman sonnet, Leigh Hiuit 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 pleasm'e of entertaining at dinner Mr God-
win, 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 w^as 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 shoiild fix clearly in our mind
Hunt's previous history and the place held by him in
the Hterary 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 Bar-
badoes, who having married a lady from Philadelphia
had migrated to England and exercised his vocation
in the northern suburbs of London. Brought up at
by ten o'clock. The longer walk to and from the Borough, had the date
been a year earUer, would have made the feat more difficult. Moreover
the feat itself becomes less of a miracle when we recognise 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 owti explicit dating of the piece, the point
seems to need no labouring: or else it might be pointed out that if
Clarke had really introduced him to Chapman in October 1815 Chapman
would assuredly not have been left out of the fist of masters whom he
quotes as having known through Clarke in his epistle of the following
August quoted above (pp. 37, 38).
42 THE EXAMINER: HUNT'S IMPRISONMENT
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 Ofiice: an occupation
which he abandoned at twenty-four (in 1808) in
order to take part in the conduct of the Examiner
newspaper, then just foxmded by his brother John
Himt. For nearly five years the brothers Hunt, as
manager and editor of that journal, helped to fight
the losing battle of Hberalism, in those days of tense
grapple with the Corsican ogre abroad and stiff
re-action and repression at home, with a dexterous brisk
audacity and an unflinching sincerity of conviction.
So far they had escaped the usual penalty of such
courage. Several prosecutions directed against them
failed, but at last, late in 1812, they were caught trip-
ping. 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 flat-
terers, 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 com-
panion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just
closed half a century without one single claim on the
gratitude of his coimtiy 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 pro-
secution could not be doubtful: and the two Hunts
were condemned to a fine of £500 each and two years
imprisonment in separate jails. Leigh Hunt bore him-
self 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
HIS VISITORS IN CAPTIVITY 43
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 Hfe 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 aU 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, in-
cluding 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 Himt
managed in his series of verse skits. The Twopenny
Post Bag, to go on playing with impimity 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
44 HIS OCCUPATIONS
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 Himt by such fond
young spirits and adopted by Keats.
During his captivity Hunt was allowed the full use
of his hbrary, and his chief reading was in the fifty
volumes of the Parnaso Italiano. As a result he
acquired and retained for life a really wide and familiar
knowledge of Italian poetry. He continued to edit the
Examiner from prison and occupied himself moreover
with three small volumes in verse. One of these was
The Descent of Liberty , A Mask, celebrating the downfall
of Napoleon in 1814, and embodying gracefully enough
the Liberal's hope against hope that with that catas-
trophe 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 Words-
worth admonished (but Wordsworth in much more
lenient terms than in the first edition) and dismissed.
Himt'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
THE FEAST OF THE POETS 45
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 parti-
sans of reaction both at home and abroad, the bitterness
of the 'Lost Leader' feehng, conmion 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 accoimt 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 perver-
sities, of Wordsworth; but his treatment of Scott, as
Httle more than a mere money-making manufacturer
of pinchbeck northern lays in a sham antique ballad
dialect, is idly flippant and patronising. The point is
of importance in Keats's history, for hence, as we shall
see in the sequel, came probably a part at least of the
peculiar and as it might seem paradoxical rancour with
which the genial Hunt, and Keats as his friend and
supposed follower, were by-and-by to be persecuted in
Blackwood.
When Hunt's ordeal was over in the first days of
February 1815, he issued from it a butt for savage and
vindictive obloquy to the reactionary half of the lettered
world, but little less than a hero and martyr to the
reforming half. He retained the private friendship of
many of those w^ho 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.
46 HUNT'S PERSONALITY AND CHARM
fxill 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 expen-
diture, 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 J 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 pro-
fundity.
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 under-
bred strain of airy and genteel vulgarity, hard to recon-
cile with what we are told of his acceptable social
Pl. II
JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT
FROM A\ ENGRAVING BY MAYER AFTER J. HAYTER
J
HIS IDEAS OF POETICAL REFORM 47
qualities in real life.^ He was as enthusiastic a student
of our sixteenth and seventeenth century Hterature as
Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had more appreciation
than they of the characteristic excellencies of what he
always persists in caUing 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 Enghsh
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 con-
ventions 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
pubHshed a year after his release, in February or
March, 1816. 'With the endeavom*,' so he repeated
himself in the preface, 'to recur to a freer spirit
of versification, I have joined one of stiU greater
1 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 Uberality in praising
(Bryan Walter Procter, An Autobiographical Fragment, 1877, pp. 197-200).
48 THE STORY OF RIMINI
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 I
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 cHmax, 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 Paolo turned, scarce knowing what he did.
Only he feh 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
ITS POPULARITY 49
terribly in original composition. The passages of Kght
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
realise 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 tar-
nished 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 some-
thing fresh and homefelt in Leigh Hunt's Riminiy 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 Engle-
iield 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.
50 DANTE AND NAMBY-PAMBY '
with or even before the cooling of his regard for the
author. But it is an instructive comment on standards
of taste and their instabihty 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, succes-
sively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a
familiar ease of manner to variety of movement in
this metre, Shelley, it need not be said, was in no danger
of falling into HunT^'s faults of triviality and under-
breeding: but Keats was only too apt to be betrayed
into them.
Hunt had spent the first months after his release in
London, but by the end of 1815, some time before the
publication of Rimini, had settled at Hampstead, where
he soon made himself a sort of self-crowned laureate of
the beauties of the place, and continued to vary his
critical and political labours with gossiping compH-
mentary 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
scandf^ls attending his separation from his wife. This
is in Hunt's refoniied 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 Hke 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;
HUNT'S LIFE AT HAMPSTEAD 51
And the bee's weighty murmur comes by us at noon.
And the cuckoo repeats his short indolent tune,
And Httle 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 lanthoms, — 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 suppKed 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 sym-
pathy 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 recognised
their beauty or power, he could never wed himself to
any as representing ultimate truth. In matters of
52 HUNT AND KEATS COMPARED
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 Himt 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 Hmit 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 spiritualised 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 never-
theless served him for a library and had prints after
Stothard hung on the walls and casts of the heads of
poets and heroes crowning the bookshelves. Here the
young poet was made always welcome. The sonnet
beginning 'Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and
there' records a night of October or November 1816,
when, instead of staying to sleep, he preferred to walk
home under the stars, his head full of talk about Petrarch
KEATS AT HUNT'S COTTAGE 53
and the youth of Milton, to the city lodgings where he
Uved with his brothers the life affectionately described
in that other pleasant sonnet written on Tom's birth-
day, November 18, beginning ^ Small, busy flames
play through the fresh-laid coals/ The well-known
fifty lines at the end of Sleep and Poetry , a poem on which
Keats put forth the best of his half-fledged strength this
winter, give the fullest and most engaging account of
the pleasure and inspiration he drew from Hunt's
hospitality : —
The chimes
Of friendly voices had just given place
To as sweet a silence, when I 'gan retrace
The pleasant day, upon a couch at ease.
It was a poet's house who keeps the keys
Of pleasure's temple. Round about were hung
The glorious features of the bards who sung
In other ages — cold and sacred busts
Smiled at each other. Happy he who trusts
To clear Futurity his darling fame !
Then there were fauns and satyrs taking aim
At swelling apples with a frisky leap
And reaching fingers, 'mid a luscious heap
Of vine-leaves. Then there rose to view a fane
Of liny marble, and thereto a train
Of nymphs approaching faMy 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
54 PRINTS IN THE LIBRARY
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 overlooked 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 port-
folios and worked on his imagination afterwards : — Pous-
sin'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 sug-
gested by this or that figure in a picture; how pictures by
or prints after old masters have been partly responsible
for his vision alike of the Indian maiden and the blind
Orion; what various originals, paintings or antiques or
both, we can recognize as blending themselves into his
evocation of the triumph of Bacchus or his creation of
the Grecian Urn.
On December the 1st, 1816, Hunt, as has been said,
did Keats the new service of printing the Chapman
sonnet as a specimen of his work in an essay in the
Examiner on 'Young Poets,' in which the names of
Shelley and Reynolds were bracketed with his as poetical
THE INTERCORONATION SCENE 55
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 Decem-
ber 30 of the same year, when the chosen theme was
The Grasshopper and the Cricket: — ^ The event of the
after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which
have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affec-
tionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity
and perfectly unpretentious encouragement. His sincere
look of pleasure at the first line: —
The poetry of earth is never dead.
'^Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he
came to the tenth and eleventh lines: —
On a lone winter morning, when the frost
Hath wrought a silence —
"Ah that's perfect ! Bravo Keats ! '' And then he went
on in a dilatation on the dumbness of Nature during the
season's suspension and torpidity.' The affectionate
enthusiasm of the younger and the older man (himself,
be it remembered, little over thirty) for one another's
company and verses sometimes took forms which to the
mind of the younger and wiser of the two soon came
to seem ridiculous. One day in early spring (1817) the
whim seized them over their wine to crown themselves
'sdter 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, Mariane, and their yoimg
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
56 SONNETS OF HUNT TO KEATS
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 J
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 rusthng 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: —
* 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.).
SONNETS OF KEATS TO HUNT 57
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 — cripplings 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 hoHday rimes of the previous
summer, the mood of ardent expectancy for an inspira-
tion that dechnes (and no wonder considering the
circimistances) 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, —
58 KEATS'S PENITENCE
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 dehghts, and its openiag
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 peni-
tence 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
1 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 pa^ of 'A pet-
lamb in a sentimental farce.'
CHAPTER III
WINTER 1816-1817: 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 — HazHtt and Lamb — Friendship of Hunt
and Shelley — Lamb and HazHtt on Shelley — Haydon and Shelley:
a battle royal — Keats and SheUey — A cool relation — John Hamilton
Reynolds — His devotion to Keats — The Reynolds sisters — James Rice
— Charles Wells — WiUiam 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
Himt 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 tem-
porary 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
59
60 HAYDON AND THE ELGIN MARBLES
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
famiharity 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 en-
deavour 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 con-
flict 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 feehng and aspiration. 'Never/ wrote he about this
HAYDON AS PAINTER AND WRITER 61
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 Hay don. 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 hun. 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 exult-
ingly 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 sur-
prisingly loose, empty, and inexpressive. Even in
drawing from the Elgin marbles, as he did with passion-
ate 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 por-
trait 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
1 These drawings are preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings
at the British Museum.
62 VANITY, PUGNACITY, AND PIETY
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 con-
temporaries 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 hoUowness 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 perpendi-
cular 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 deliver-
ance 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
Pl. Ill
•r^€
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON
FROM AN' ENGRAVING BY THOMSON AFTER HAYDON
HAYDON ON LEIGH HUNT 63
faith and conduct while he was hving without scruple
on their bounty.
In October 1816; the first month of Keats's intimacy
with Hunt, Haydon also made a short stay at Hamp-
stead. He and Hunt were already acquainted, and
Hunt had pubHshed in the Examiner the very able,
cogent and pungent letter with which Haydon a few
months before had clenched the Elgin marble contro-
versy 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 contem-
porary estimates of Rimini.
27 October, 1816.
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, meta-
physical, 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, acute-
ness, and taste of his dramatic criticisms he raised the rank of
64 KEATS AND HAYDON MEET
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 31, we find Keats writing
to Cowden Clarke of his pleasure at Hhe thought of
seeing so soon this glorious Hay don 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 begin-
ning of their acquaintance, on the 19th of November,
AN ENTHUSIASTIC FRIENDSHIP 65
1816, 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 Rey-
nolds, 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 Words-
worth — 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 more-
over 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
66 KEATS AND THE ELGIN MARBLES
those of their common acquaintance, and discussed with
passionate eagerness most things in heaven and earth,
and especially poetry and painting. *I have enjoyed
Shakespeare,' declares Haydon, ^with John Keats more
than with any other human being.' Both he and
Keats's other painter friend, Joseph Severn, have
testified that Keats had a fine natural sense for the
excellencies of painting and sculpture. Both loved to
take him to the British Museum and expatiate to him
on the glories of the antique; and it would seem that
through Haydon he must have had access also to the
collection of one at least of the great dilettanti noblemen
of the day. After a first visit to the newly acquired
Parthenon marbles with Haydon at the beginning of
March 1817, Keats tried to embody his impressions in
a couple of sonnets, which Hunt promptly printed in
the Examiner. It is characteristic of his unfailing
sincerity with his art and with himself that he allows
himself to break into no stock raptures, but strives
faithfully to get into words the confused sensations
of spiritual infirmity and awe that have overpowered
him: —
My spirit is too weak — mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time — with a billowy main —
A sun — a shadow of a magnitude.
j<
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: —
SONNETS AND PROTESTATIONS 67
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 Hay don'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.
68 HAZLITT AND LAMB
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 Marl-
borough 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 imerring critical touch, paid to Keats^s best
work while he was still living a tribute as splendid as
it was just. Keats on his part, after the publication
of Hazlitt's lectures on the characters of Shakespeare
in 1817, reckoned his 'depth of taste' one of the things
most to rejoice at in his age, and was a diligent attendant
at his next course on the English poets. But he never
frequented, presumably for lack of invitation, those
Wednesday and Thursday evening parties at the Lambs
of which Talfourd and B. W. Procter have left us such
vivid pictures; and when he met some of the same
company at the Novellos^ the friends of his friend
Cowden Clarke, he enjoyed it, as will appear later, less
FRIENDSHIP OF HUNT AND SHELLEY 69
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 Himt 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 earHer,
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
sHght communication; but when Hunt included Shelley
on the strength of his poem Alastor, among the young
poets praised in his Examiner essay (December 1, 1816),
a glowing correspondence immediately followed, and a
few days later Shelley came up from Bath to stay at the
Hampstead cottage. The result of a week's visit was
an immediate intimacy and enthusiastic mutual regard,
with a prompt determination on Shelley's part to rescue
Hunt from the slough of debt (something like £1400)
70 LAMB AND HAZLITT ON SHELLEY
into which during and since his imprisonment he had
cheerfully muddled himself.
It was the eve of the most harrowing crisis in Shelley's
life, when his principle of love a law to itself entailed in
action so dire a consequence, and his obedience to his
own morality brought him into such harsh collision
with the world's. First came the news of the suicide of
his deserted wife Harriet (December 14) and three
months later the sentence of Lord Eldon which deprived
him of the custody of his and Harriet's children. On
the day of the first tragic news he writes to Mary Godwin,
whom he had left at Bath, ^ Leigh Himt 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 fre-
quent 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-com-
plexioned, 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,
HAYDON AND SHELLEY : A BATTLE ROYAL 71
He tells how, on the evening of their first meeting,
Shelley, looking hectically frail and girHsh, 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 aiiily complacent way kept skirmishing in on
Shelley's side, until ihe 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 imfaiHng 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 en-
thusiasm 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 Himt 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 yoimg 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 Httle 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
72 KEATS AND SHELLEY
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 Hkely his knowledge that nearly aU
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 yoimg 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 pas-
sionate 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 himianitarian
A COOL RELATION 73
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 sym-
pathies 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
imfettered 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 sunMner's work, Shelley Laon and Cythna,
afterwards called The Revolt of Islam, and Keats Endy-
mion. 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 Himt'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
74 JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS
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 Septem-
ber 1796. Part of his boyhood was spent in Devonshire
near Sidmouth, a countryside to which he remained
always deeply attached; but he was still quite young
when his father came and settled in London as mathe-
matical 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 Himt were frequenters of their house
in Little Britain, and Mrs Reynolds is reported asliolding
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 preco-
ciously 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 pre-
sentation copy in a kind and careful letter several pages
long. Two years later, just about the time of his first
introduction to Keats at Leigh Hunt's, the youngster
had the honour of receiving a similar attention from
Wordsworth in reply to a presentation of another poem.
The Naiad (November 1816). Neither of these two
youthful volimies, nor yet a third, The Eden of Imagina-
tion, shewed 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 shewed
in serious work made him when he chose a deft, some-
times even a masterly, parodist in the humourous vein,
and his work done in this vein a few years later in colla-
boration 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
HIS DEVOTION TO KEATS 75
gave up the hope of a Hterary career and went into
business as a sohcitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell
sonnet to the Muses in a copy of Shakespeare which he
gave to KeatS; and in 1821 he writes again
As time increases
I give up drawling verse for drawing leases.
In point of fact he continued to write occasionally for
some years, and in the end failed somewhat tragically
to prosper in the profession of law. During these early
3^ears he was not only one of the warmest friends Keats
had but one of the wisest, to whom Keats could open
liis innermost mind with the certainty of being under-
stood, 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 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 hand of freshness ne'er bereaves.
Go on ! and keep thee to thine own green way.
Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung;
^ Cowden Clarke, writing many years later, suggests that this was Keats's
first acquaintance with Chaucer. He is certainly mistaken. It was on
Feb. 27, 1817, that Keats called and found him asleep as related in the
text. Within a week was published the volume of Poems, with the prin-
cipal 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.
76 THE REYNOLDS SISTERS: JAMES RICE
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, Mariane 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 Hvely
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-
plajdng 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 aiHng 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 un-
congenial 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 dispar-
aging 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
CHARLES WELLS: WILLIAM HASLAM 77
Clowes, being charged especially with the revision of
the Quarterly proofs.
To turn to other close associates of Keats during the
same period, known to him not through Hunt but
through his brothers, — a word may suffice for Charles
Wells, to whom we find him addressing in the summer of
1816 a sonnet of thanks for a gift of roses. Wells had
been a schoolmate of Tom Keats and R. H. Home, 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 foimed 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 acquain-
tanceships, 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
78 JOSEPH SEVERN
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,
shewing a precocious talent for drawing, was appren-
ticed 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 educa-
tion 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 begin-
ning 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
KEATS JUDGED BY HIS CIRCLE 79
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 com-
panions. 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 power-
ful, 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 Hay don, —
'an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like
a Delphian priestess who saw visions': and again Leigh
Himt, — Hhe 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 com-
piled 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
undemote of response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some
animal, the changing of the green and brown Hghts and furtive
shadows, the motions of the wind — ^just how it took certain tall
80 DESCRIBED BY SEVERN
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 de-
lightedly, 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 com, 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-Jquarters 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.
HIS RANGE OF SYMPATHIES 81
In regard to Keats^s social qualities, he is said, and
owns himself, to have been not always quite well con-
ditioned or at his ease in the presence of women, but
in that of men all accounts agree that he was pleasant-
ness 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 indig-
nation 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 natiu-e. '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
reKsh of actualities. To complete our picture and illus-
trate the wide and unf astidious range of his contact with
fife 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 refine-
ment 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 per-
formance not having begun, Keats was near to, and watched, a
82 HIS POETIC AMBITION
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 pre-
scribed 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 sig-
nifying to his pupil. * My eyes ! Bill Soames giv' me sich a
licker!' evidently grateful, and considering himself compli-
mented upon being included in the general dispensation. Keats's
entertainment with and appreciation of this minor scene of low
Hfe 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 £3000 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
THE DIE IS CAST 83
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 containiug 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 con-
vivial 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 Oilier, 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 com-
pany, 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 passed 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.
84 FIRST VOLUME GOES TO PRESS
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 1817.
J ■
CHAPTER IV
THE 'POEMS' OF 1817
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 —
Chapmaa and Sandys — Decay of the free system — William Chamber-
layne — Milton and Marvell — Waller — Katherine Phillips — 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 Himt — Epistle to George Keats —
Epistle to Cowden Clarke — Sleep and Poetry and I stood tip-toe — 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 /
stood tip-toe — Intended induction to Endymion — ^Relation to Eliza-
bethans — Relation to contemporaries — Wordsworth and Greek Mythol-
ogy — 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: — v^
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
85
86 SONNETS AND RIMED HEROICS
affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the
exercise of the art itself which expresses and com-
municates 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 naturalised by Chaucer, revived
by the Elizabethans in all manner of uses, narrative,
dramatic, didactic, elegiac, epistolary, satiric, and em-
ployed ever since as the predominant English metre out-
side 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 imita-
tors; the Address to Hope of February 1815, quite
in the conventional eighteenth-century style and
diction, though its form, the sextain stanza, is ancient;
the two copies of verses To some Ladies and On receiving
a curious Shell from some Ladies, composed for the
Misses Mathew, about May of the same year, in
the triple-time jingle most affected for social trifles
from the days of Prior to those of Tom Moore; and
the set of seven-syllabled couplets drafted in February
1816 for George Keats to send as a valentine to Miss
Wylie. So far as their matter goes these exceptions call
for little remark. Both the sea-shell verses and the
valentine spring from a brain, to quote a phrase of
Keats's own,
— ^new stuff' d in youth with triumphs gay
Of old romance, —
especially with chivalric images and ideas from Spenser.
Of the second set of shell stanzas it may perhaps be
noted that they seem to suggest an acquaintance with
Oberon and Titania not only through the Midsummer
NigMs Dream but through Wieland's Oberon, sl romance
poem which Sotheby's translation had made well known
in England and in which the fairy king and queen are
THE CHAPMAN SONNET 87
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
* 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 Hv/m 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 1798) and played
a part in the Enghsh 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
Ehrase from it seems to have lingered subconsciously in his memory and
een turned to gold, thus: —
Oft in this speechless language, glance on glance,
When mute the tongue, how voluble the heart !
Oberon c. vi, st. 17.
No utter'd syllable, or woe betide !
But to her heart her heart was voluble.
The Eve of St Agnes, st. 23.
88 THE 'HOW MANY BARDS' SONNET
our mind's eye the human vision of the explorer and his
companions with their looks and gestures, then sjm-
bolically evoking through that vision a whole world-wide
range of the emotions of discovery.
Much have I traveird in the realms of gold, >
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; (^
Roimd 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' Hues 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 I
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 unnumbered 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
1 March 1816 according to Woodhouse.
THE SEX-CHIVALRY GROUP 89
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 reminis-
cences 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 natiKe 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, idealising boyish worship of woman and beauty
1 The Prelude, book v.
90 THE LEIGH HUNT GROUP
with an acute critical sensitiveness to flaws of character
defacing his ideal in actual women: a sensitiveness
which grew with his growth and many a time afterwards
put him ill at ease with his company and himself.
A large proportion of the remaining sonnets centre
themselves more or less closely about the figure of
Leigh Hunt. Two introduce him directly by name and
had the effect of definitely marking Keats down, in the
minds of reactionary critics, as a victim to be swooped
upon in association with Hunt whenever occasion
offered. The two are the early sonnet composed on
the day of Hunt's release from prison (February 5, 1815),
and shewn shyly as a first flight to Cowden Clarke
immediately afterwards, and the dedicatory sonnet
already quoted on the decay of the old pagan beauty,
written almost exactly two years later. Intermediate
in date between these two come two or three sonnets
of May and June 1816 which, whether inspired directly
or not by intercourse with Hunt, are certainly influenced
by his writing, and express a townsman's enjoyment
of country walks in a spirit and vocabulary near akin
to his: — ^To one who has been long in city pent' (this
opening comes with only the change of a word from
Paradise Lost), ^0 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
THE HAYDON PAIR 91
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 qn what principle he made his
choice of the specimens to be published in this 1817
volume. Among those excluded, he may well have
thought the early attempts on the peace of 1814, on
Chatterton, and on Byron, too feeble, though he has
included others scarcely better. That headed ^As
from the darkening gloom a silver dove' he may have
counted too conventionally pious; and that satirizing
the starched gloom of church-goers too likely on the
other hand to give offence. The second Haydon pair,
on visiting the Elgin marbles, and the recently discovered
pair on receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt,^ 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 earHer date. But why
leave out 'After dark vapours' and 'Who loves to
peer,' and above all why the admirable sonnet on
* See above, p. 68.
92 THE LEANDER SONNET
Leander? The date of this was March 16, 1816, the
occasion the gift by a lady of one of James Tassie's
coloured paste reproductions of an engraved gem of
the subject. ^Tassie's gems' were at this time
immensely popular among lovers of Grecian taste,
and were indeed delightful things, though his originals
were too uncritically chosen and included but a small
proportion of true antiques among a multitude of
Renaissance and eighteenth-centujty 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 Nvx)va} The last three lines are an example,
hardly to be bettered, of condensed expression and of
imagination kindHng 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 chastened light
Hid in the fringes of your eyeHds 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 bewildered '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 I see how his body dips
Dead-heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile:
He's gone: up bubbles all his amorous breath 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.
2 In the earlier editions this sonnet is headed On a victure of Leander,
A note of Woodhouse (Houston MSS., Transcripts III) puts the matter
EPISTLES 93
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 Spen-
serian 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-coimtry 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
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.
94 HISTORY OF THE ^ HEROIC^ COUPLET
use, as illustrated in a part of the prayer of Emilia to
Diana in the Knightes Tale : —
chaste goddesse of the wodes 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 aboughte cruelly.
Chaste goddesse, wel wostow that I
Desire to been a mayden al my lyf,
Ne never wol I be no love ne wyf.
1 am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,
A mayde, and love hunting and venerye.
And for to walken in the wodes wilde.
And noght to been a wyf, and be with childe.
Noght wol I knowe companye of man.
Now help me, lady, sith ye may and can.
For tho thre formes that thou hast in thee.
And Palamon, that hath swich love to me.
And eek Arcite, that loveth me so sore,
This grace I preye thee with-oute more,
As sende love and pees bitwixte hem two;
And fro me tume awey hir hertes so.
That al hir bote love, and hir desyr.
And al hir bisy torment, and hir fyr
Be queynt, or turned in another place;
And if so be thou wolt not do me grace.
Or if my destinee be shapen so.
That I shal nedes 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.
THE CLOSED AND FREE SYSTEMS 95
On the other hand it is as often as not used to divide
the couplet by faUing at the end not of the second but
of the first Hne, 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 treat-
ment. 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 grammati-
cally 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 monot-
ony of beat and lack of freedom and variety in sentence
structm*e. 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
Hne; 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 inverte-
brateness and a tendency to straggle and wind itself
96 MARLOWE
free of all real observance of rime-effect or metrical
law.
Most of the Elizabethans used both systems inter-
changeably, now a string of closed couplets, and now
a flowing period carried through a succession of couplets
overnmning into one another. Spenser in Mother
Hubhard^s Tale and Marlowe in Hero and Leander were
among the earliest and best revivers of the measure,
and both incHned to the closed couplet system, Spenser
the more strictly of the two, as the satiric and epigram-
matic 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 parled by the touch of hands:
li True love is mute, and oft amazed 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
DRAYTON 97
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, hke 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, me thinks, amaz'd thou shouldst not stand.
Nor seem so much appalled 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 Drajrton 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.
98 WILLIAM BROWNE
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, WiUiam 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 syl-
lables too light or too grammatically dependent on the
word next following to allow naturally any stress of
CHAPMAN AND SANDYS 99
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 I
That greedy flesh, by flesh should fat become !
While by one creature's death another lives I
100 DECAY OF THE FREE SYSTEM
Contemporary masters of elegiac and epistolary verse
often deal with the metre more harshly and arbi-
trarily still. Thus Donne, the great Dean of St Paulas,
though capable of riming with fine sonority and rich-
ness, chooses sometimes to write as though in sheer
defiance of the obvious framework offered by the
couplet system; and the same refusal to stop the
sense with the couplet, the same persistent slurring
of the rime, the same broken and jerking movement,
are plentifully to be matched from the epistles of
Ben Jonson. In later and weaker hands this method
of letting the sentence march or jolt upon its way
in almost complete independence of the rime developed
into a fatal disease and decay of the metre, analogous
to the disease which at the same time was overtaking
and corrupting dramatic blank verse. A signal instance,
to which we shall have to return, is the Pharonnida
of William Chamberlayne (1659), a narrative poem not
lacking momentary gleams of intellect and imagination,
and by some insatiate students, including Southey and
Professor Saintsbury, admired and praised in spite of
its (to one reader at least) intolerable tedium and
wretched stumbling, shuffling verse, which rimes indeed
to the eye but to the ear is mere mockery and vexation.
For example: —
Some time in silent sorrow spent, at length
The fair Pharonnida recovers strength,
Though sighs each accent interrupted, to
Return this answer: — * Wilt, oh ! wilt thou do
Our infant love such injury — to leave
It ere full grown ? When shall my soul receive
A comfortable smile to cherish it.
When thou art gone ? They're but dull joys that sit
Enthroned in fruitless wishes; yet I could
Part, with a less expense of sorrow, would
Our rigid fortune only be content
With absence; but a greater punishment
Conspires against us — Danger must attend
Each step thou tread'st from hence; and shall I spend
Those hours in mirth, each of whose minutes lay
Wait for thy life? When Fame proclaims the day
WILLIAM CHAMBERLAYNE 101
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 interest-
ing to read in connexion with the poems expressing
Keats's early aspirations, showed how the metre could
stiU be handled nobly in the mixed EKzabethan
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;
102 MILTON AND MARVELL
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 harmonic
In willing chains and sweet captivitie.
But the strictly closed system advocated by Sir John
Beaumont prevaHed in the main, and by the days of the
Commonwealth and Restoration was with some excep-
tions generally established. Some poets were enabled
by natural fineness of ear and dignity of soul to make it
yield fine rich and rolHng modulations: none more so
than Andrew Marvell, as for instance in his noble poem
on the death of Cromwell. The name especially associ-
ated 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 parlia-
mentary 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:
WALLER: KATHERINE PHILLIPS 103
few better than Katherine Phillips ('the matchless
OrindaO, who was a stickler for the strictest form of
the couplet and wished even to banish all double
endings. Take this from her elegy on the death of
Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (1662) : —
Although the most do with officious heat
Only adore the living and the great,
Yet this Queen's merits Fame so far hath spread.
That she rules still, though dispossest and dead.
For losing one, two other Crowns remained;
Over all hearts and her own griefs she reigned.
Two Thrones so splendid as to none are less
But to that third which she does now possess.
Her heart and birth Fortune as well did know.
That seeking her own fame in such a foe.
She drest the spacious theatre for the fight:
And the admiring World call'd to the sight:
An army then of mighty sorrows brought.
Who all against this single virtue fought;
And sometimes stratagems, and sometimes blows.
To her heroic soul they did oppose:
But at her feet their vain attempts did fall.
And she discovered and subdu'd them all.
Cowley in his long 'heroic' poem The Davideis admits
the occasional Alexandrine or twelve-syllable line as a
variation on the monotony of the rhythm. Dryden,
with his incomparably sounder and stronger literary
sense, saw the need for a richer variation yet, and
obtained it by the free use both of triple rimes and of
Alexandrines: often getting fine effects of sweeping
sonority, although by means which the reader cannot
but feel to be arbitrary, imported into the form
because its monotony calls for relief rather than
intrinsic and natural to it. Chaucer's prayer, above
quoted, of EmiHa 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;
104 DRYDEN
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 feathered 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 collo-
quial 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, instan-
taneous effect both upon ear and mind, which completely
POPE AND HIS ASCENDENCY 105
dazzled and subjugated not only his contemporaries
but three full generations of rimers and readers after
them. Ever^'one knows the tune; it is the same
whether applied to purposes of pastoral sentiment or
rhetorical passion or playful fancy, of Homeric trans-
lation or Horatian satire, of witty and plausible moral
and critical reflection or of savage personal lampoon and
invective. Let the reader tiu^n 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 moraHz'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 imhappy
Bayes : —
Swearing and supperless the hero sate,
Blasphem'd his gods, the dice, and damn'd his fate;
106 REACTION: THE BROTHERS WARTON
Then gnawM his pen, then dash'd it on the ground,
Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound I
Plunged 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 quahties 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 profoimd 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 brilHant blunder
SYMPTOMS OF EMANCIPATION 107
of the Rowley forgeries, with the interest which it excited,
the profound impression created by the pseudo-Ossian
of Macpherson, and the enthusiastic reception of Percy's
Reliques. But current critical taste did not recognize
the meaning of these signs, and tacitly treated the breach
between our older and newer literatures as complete.
Admitting the older as a worthy and interesting subject
of study and welcoming the labour of scholars — even
those of pretended scholars — in collecting and publishing
its remains or what purported to be such, criticism none
the less expected and demanded of contemporary
production that it should conform as a matter of course
to the standards established since language and style
had been ^polished' and reduced to 'correctness' by
Dryden and Pope. Thomas Warton, wishing to celebrate
in verse the glories of the Gothic architecture of Oxford,
finds himself constrained to do so strictly in the dominant
style and measure. His brother, the protesting Joseph,
actually has to enrol himself among Pope's editors, and
when for once he uses the heroic couplet and lets his
fancy play upon the sight of a butterfly in Hackwood
Park, must do so, he too, in this thoroughly Popeian
wise: —
Fair child of Sun and Summer, we behold
With eager eyes thy wings bedropp^d with gold;
The purple spots that o'er thy mantle spread.
The sapphire's lively blue, the ruby's red,
Ten thousand various blended tints surprise.
Beyond the rainbow's hues or peacock's eyes:
Not Judah's king in eastern pomp array'd.
Whose charms allur'd from far the Sheban maid.
High on his glitt'ring throne, like you could shine
(Nature's completest miniature divine) :
For thee the rose her balmy buds renews,
And silver lillies fill their cups with dews;
Flora for thee the laughing fields perfumes.
For thee Pomona sheds her choicest blooms.
William Blake, in his Poetical Sketches of 1784, poured
scorn on the still reigning fashion for Hinkling rhymes
and elegances terse', and himself struck wonderful
108 COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH AND SCOTT
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
Mil tonic blank verse, or confined themselves to lyric
or elegiac work like Gray, — even they continued to
be hampered by a strict conventional and artificial
code of poetic style and diction. The first full and
effective note of emancipation, of poetical revolution
and expansion, in England was that struck by Coleridge
and Wordsworth with the publication and defence of
their Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800). Both these young
masters had written in the established mould in their
quite earliest work, but afterwards disused it almost
entirely (The Happy Warrior is of course a conspicuous
exception); while their contemporary Walter Scott
avoided it from the first.
The new poetry, whether cast in forms derived from
or coloured by the old ballad literature of the country,
or helping itself from the simplicities and directnesses
of common every-day speech, or going back to Miltonic
and pre-Miltonic tradition, fought its way to recognition
now slowly, as in the case of Wordsworth, in whose style
all these three elements play their part, now rapidly in
the face of all opposition, as in the case of Scott with
his dashing Border lays. But the heroic couplet on the
Queen Anne model still held the field as the reigning
and official form of verse; and among the most admired
poets of Keats^s day, Rogers, Campbell, and Crabbe in
the older generation, each in his own manner, still kept
sounding the old instrument essentially to the old tune,
with Byron in the younger following, in The Corsair
and Lara, at a pace more rapid and helter-skelter but
with a beat even more monotonous and hammering than
any of theirs. We have seen how Leigh Hunt declared
his intention to try a reform of the measure, and how
he carried out his promise in Rimini. He did little
more than revive Dryden's expedients of the occasional
LEIGH HUNT AND COUPLET REFORM 109
triplet and Alexandrine, with a sprinkling of Elizabethan
double-endings; failing withal completely to catch any
touch either of the imaginative passion of the Eliza-
bethans or of Dryden's fine virile energy and worldly
good-breeding.
Rimini was not yet pubhshed, nor had Keats yet met
its author, when Keats wrote his Epistle to Felton
Mathew in November 1815. If, as is the case, his
strain of social ease and sprightliness jars on us a little
in the same manner as Hunt's, it is that there was reaUy
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
earhest model in the handling of the metre will, I think,
be apparent to any reader who will put the passage from
Britannia^ s Pastorals above quoted (p. 98), with its
easily flowing couplets varied at intervals by whole
clusters or bunches of double endings, alongside of the
following from Keats's first Epistle: —
Too partial friend ! fain would I follow thee
Past each horizon of fine poesy;
^Here, for instance, are verses of Keats that have often been charged
with Coclmeyism 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 loved 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.
110 KEATS TO MATHEW: BROWNE^S INFLUENCE
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, J
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 writings but obviously sincere,
and interesting as showing how early and instinctively
both Greek and mediaeval 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
CALIDORE: INFLUENCE OF HUNT 111
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 cos-
tume 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 inter-
cede 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 Lyddas 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 water's 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 famihar epistles, one to his brother George, the
other to Cowden Clarke. To bis brother he expresses
112 EPISTLE TO GEORGE KEATS
frankly, and in places felicitously, the moods and aspira-
tions 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 Ho 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 con-
cerning 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 fore-
sees 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
EPISTLE TO COWDEN CLARKE 113
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, Hkening the way in which poetic inspiration
eludes him to the sKpping 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 him-
self 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 friend-
ship and from his sense of owing to it all he knows of
poetry. Recurring to the pleasantness of his present
smroundings, he says that they have inspired him to
attempt the verses he is now writing for his friend,
which would have been better only that they have been
too long parted. Then follow the lines quoted farther
back (p. 37) in affectionate remembrance of old Enfield
and Edmonton days.
In these early attempts Keats again ventures some
way, but not yet far, in the direction of breaking the
fetters of the regular couplet. He runs his sentences
freely enough through a succession of Unes, 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 Une with a full
114 SLEEP AND POETRY AND 7 STOOD TIP-TOE'
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 EHzabethan word-forais, or
forms modelled for himself on EHzabethan usage.
Somewhat more free and adventurous alike in metre
and in diction are the two poems. Sleep and Poetry and
*/ stood tip-toe/ which Keats wrote after he came back to
London in the autimm. 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 crystallise 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 bene-
ficent wonders of whose bridal night he hopes himself
one day to reteU.
ANALYSIS OF SLEEP AND POETRY 115
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 '/ stood tip-toe^ was not finished until the
end of December 1816. Sleep and Poetry cannot well
have been written later, seeing that the book was
published in the first days of the following March, and
must therefore have gone to press early in the new year.
What seems likehest 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 '/ 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 fines 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 char-
acteristic, for it is the way of his imagination to be
continually discovering active and dynamic quaHties 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:
* It is to be remembered that in his famous volume of 1820 Keats prints
first the poem he had last written, Lamia.
116 DOUBLE INVOCATION
The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy.
Chasing away all worldiness 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 Hfe is ended.
Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice.
And from the heart up-springs, rejoice ! rejoice I
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 ad-
mitted to Hhe 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 'Hke 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 I 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;
VISION OF THE CHARIOTEER 117
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 imager}^
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 nym-
phdsque 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 re-
present 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 calHng 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.
118 BATTLE-CRY OF THE NEW POETRY
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 nothing-
ness. 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 imagina-
tion 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 expHcit 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 thei 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
ITS STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 119
His glories: with a puling infant's force
They sway'd about upon a rocking horse
And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal souFd !
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roU'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 (1800), Coleridge in the
luminous retrospect of the Biographia Literaria (1816).
In the interval a cloud of critics, including men of such
gifts as Lamb, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, were in their
several ways champions of the same cause. But none
of these has left any enunciation of theory having power
to thrill the ear and haunt the memory like the rimes
of this young untrained recruit, John Keats. It is easy,
indeed, to pick his verses to shreds, if we choose to fix
a prosaic and rational attention on their faults. What
is it, for instance, that imagination is asked to do?
Fly, or drive? Is it she, or her steeds, that are to paw
up against the Hght? And why paw? Deeds to be
^ So Wordsworth in his famous sonnet: —
This sea that bares its bosom to the moon.
120 CHALLENGE AND CONGRATULATION
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 civilisation 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 contemp-
tuous 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 con-
venient 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', — how-
ever 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 Hay don 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 quahfied. 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 Poly-
phemuses '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
ENCOURAGEMENTS ACKNOWLEDGED 121
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 pas-
sion. Leigh Hunt, indeed, who ought to have known,
asserts in his review of the volimie that they are aimed
against Hhe morbidity which taints some of the pro-
ductions 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 Mari-
ner or Christahel? 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 Words-
worth's work, could never be called thunders.
But these jarring things, Keats goes on, shall not
disturb him. He will beHeve 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 con-
ception 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
^ In Lord Houghton's and nearly all editions of Keats, including, I am
Borry to say, my own, this phrase has been corrected, quite without cause,
into the trite 'ugly cubs.*
122 ANALYSIS OF 'I STOOD TIP-TOE'
he recurs to the pleasures of sleep, or rather of a night
when sleep failed him for thinking over the intercourse
he had been enjoying and the place where he now rested
— that is on the couch in Hunt's library. Here follow
the lines quoted above (p. 53) about the prints on the
library walls : and the piece concludes: —
The very sense of where I was might well
Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that there came
Thought after thought to nourish up the flame
Within my breast; so that the morning light
Surprised me even from a sleepless night;
And up I rose refreshed, 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 '/ 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 Lyddas, —
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,
INTENDED INDUCTION TO ENDYMION 123
especially the four lines about the sweet peas on
tip-toe for a flight, and the long passage recalling
his boyish deHghts 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 apostrophise that goddess of his
imaginative idolatry, that source at once and symbol,
for such to his instinct she truly was, of poetic inspira-
tion. 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 Hues 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.
124 RELATION TO ELIZABETHANS
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 some-
thing 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 feverM 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 EHzabethan
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 imagina-
tion, on the model of those in Chapman's Hymn to Pan,
increase in nimiber, 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,
infehcitously enough, an adjective 'boundly' for 'boun-
den.' 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
RELATION TO CONTEMPORARIES 125
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
attimed to the harmonies of any special master among
the Elizabethans, it was by tlus 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 emphasis-
ing 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/ — Hhe small | Breath of new
buds unfolding.' The reader will best see my point if he
will compare the movement of the passages in Sleep and
Poetry where these things occur with the Endymion
passage he will find quoted later on from the Faithful
Shepherdess (p. 168).
As to contemporary influences apparent in Keats's
first volume, enough has been said concerning that of
Leigh Hunt. The influence of an incommensurably
greater poet, of Wordsworth, is also to be traced in it.
That Keats was by this time a diligent and critical
admirer of Wordsworth we know: both of the earlier
poems and of the Excursion, which had appeared when
his passion for poetry was already at its height in the
last year of his apprenticeship at Edmonton. There is a
famous passage in the fourth book of The Excursion where
Wordsworth treats of the spirit of Greek religion and
imagines how some of its conceptions first took shape: —
In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched
On the soft grass through half a summer's day.
With music lulled his indolent repose:
And, in some fit of weariness, if he,
When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds
Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched.
Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,
A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute.
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.
126 WORDSWORTH AND GREEK MYTHOLOGY
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 criticising it in conver-
sation 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 '/ 8U)od 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
simset 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 inter-
pretations will no doubt have appealed to him pro-
foundly, 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 Slee'p and Poetry run parallel with some of
<y\ those expressed in a very different way by Wordsworth
\ in Tintern Abbey, a poem which we know from other
1 evidence to have been certainly much in Keats's mind
TINTERN ABBEY AND THE THREE STAGES 127
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 humanised and spiritualised
passion doubly enriched by the ever-present haunting of
Hhe 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 j
passages of Keats's Sleep and Poetry, One passage (
which he quotes, that in which Keats figures human
life imder 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 tempe
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 Words-
worth's final stage: only, as I have asked the reader to
note, the procession of symbolic and enigmatic forms
and actions which Keats simmions up before our
/
128 CONTRASTS OF METHOD
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 nie(^tate^5^id_e^ound^
while the part of Keats was to inmgme_aiid_eyoke.
^Wordsworth, bringing strong powers of abstract lhniEng~
toHbear on his intense and intensely realised personal
experience, expoimds the spiritual relations of man to
nature as he conceives them, sometimes, as in Tintern
Ahhey 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 imapt for abstract
thinking. When he conceives or wishes to express general
ideas, his only way of doing so is by calHng 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 quaHty of association
and suggestion, to stand for and symbolise the abstrac-
tions 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 realises 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 nor attains,
EVOCATION VERSUS EXPOSITION 129
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.
J ■
CHAPTER V
APRIL-DECEMBER 1817: WORK ON ENDYMION
'Poems' fall flat — Reviews by Hunt and others — Change of publishers —
New friends: Bailey and Woodhouse — Begins Endymion at Caris-
brooke — 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. Every one 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 trem-
bling for the crash of thunder that will follow. ' Sonnets
poured in on the occasion, and not from intimates only.
I have already quoted (p. 75) 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 Fhure and the Lefe.
Leigh Hunt, always delighted to repay compliment with
compliment, replied effusively in land to the sonnet in
130
'POEMS' FALL FLAT 131
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 beamed 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 foimd in the handwriting of
Charles OUier, and almost certainly composed by him,
expressing admiration for Keats's work. The brothers
Oilier, it will be remembered, were Shelley's pubHshers,
and for a while also Leigh Hunt's and Lamb's, and
Charles was the poetry-lo\dng and enthusiastic brother
of the two, and himself a writer of some accom-
plishment in prose and verse. But in point of fact,
outside the immediate Leigh Hunt circle, the volume
made extremely Httle 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 successive numbers of the
Examiner for July, the first nimiber 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
132 REVIEWS BY HUNT AND OTHERS
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 calKng 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 re-
viewer recognises in the new poet a not wholly imsuc-
cessful disciple of Spenser, but warns him against Hhe
appalHng 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
CHANGE OF PUBLISHERS 133
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 OlUer, 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 pubHshers ready to
take up his next work, and destined to become his staunch
and generous friends. These were Messrs Taylor and
Hessey of 93 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 earher. He was
already noted as an authority on Junius and was to be
a little later the editor as well as pubhsher 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
134 NEW FRIENDS: BAILEY AND WOODHOUSE
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 Mariane. In the course of the
winter 1816-17 Reynolds had written to him enthusias-
tically 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 3) 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 17 Cheapside, having left their old
BEGINS ENDYMION AT CARISBROOKE 135
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 adap-
tation 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 14th of April Keats took the night mail for
Southampton, whence he writes next day a lively letter
to his brothers. By the 17th, having looked at Shanklin
and decided against it, he was installed in a lodging at
Carisbrooke. Writing to Reynolds he gives the reasons
for his choice, mentioning at the same time that he is
feeling rather nervous from want of sleep, and enclosing
the admirable sonnet On the Sea which he has just
composed —
It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, etc. —
It was the intense haunting of the lines in the scene on
Dover Cliif 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-
136 MOVES TO MARGATE
house passage an engraved head of Shakespeare which
pleased him and hung it up in his room (his landlady
afterwards made him a present of it), he bethinks him
of the approaching anniversary, April 23: —
I'll tell you what — on the 23d 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 corre-
spondent 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
HAZLITT AND SOUTHEY 137
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
Hay don. To Hunt he criticises 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
HazHtt, for one, chose to strike on the liberal side, he
could match Gilford or Lockhart or Wilson or Maginn with
their own weapons. To realise the controversial atmos-
phere 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 insol-
ence, 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 everything 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 !
138 HUNT AND HAYDON
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 travel-
ling 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
1 '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.
AMBITION AND SELF-DOUBT 139
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 Lovers 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 de-
pression 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 foimd 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
* 'Our friend' of course is Leigh Hunt.
140 STAYS AT CANTERBURY
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 famiHar 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 correspon-
dent called it a Hreeless 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 cathe-
dral 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 corre-
spondence is, as I have said, a blank.
Some time in June he returned and the three brothers
JOINS BROTHERS AT HAMPSTEAD 141
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 post-
man, with whom they seem to have got on well except
that Keats occasionally complains of the ^yoimg 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 Hamp-
stead. The only exception is a laughingly apologetic
appeal to his new pubhshers for a further advance of
money, dated June 10th and ending with the words, —
'I am sure you are confident of my responsibihty, 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 Hving
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 Wyhe. The faithful Severn and the faith-
ful 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 Hved 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 pains-
taking literary critic and antiquar}^, had been stimulated
142 DILKE AND BROWN
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 poHtical 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 thorough-
fare 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 faihng, 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, journaHsm, 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 ab-
stemious 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 Scot-
tish blend of glowing warm-heartedness and Hhrawn'
prejudice, of frank joviality and cautious dealing.
It was in these same weeks of June or July 1817, soon
after the beginning of the Oxford vacation, that Ben-
jamin 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,
VISITS BAILEY AT OXFORD 143
proved a happiness alike to host and guest. At this
point our dearth of documents ceases. Bailey's memor-
anda, 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 recol-
lections first, and give them in his own words, seeing
that they paint the writer almost as weU 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 1817. It was during this visit, and in my
room, that he wrote the third book of Endymvm. . . . 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 some-
times 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 50 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
144 WORK ON ENDYMION
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 com-
position: —
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
t/rcm an eie^^rvt-^^fu: vn tJi^J^alwTiai0ortriut^cdL€yrjj-
r,. C/)aU„ l'J,.u^
BAILEY'S TESTIMONY 145
Oxford for London at the end of September or the beginning of
October 1817.
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 char-
acteristic, 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 with-
holden 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
J
146 TALK ON WORDSWORTH
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 Tintem
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.
ending,-
She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
Beside the springs of Dove.
She lived unknown and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh.
The difference to me.
\J 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 vrith 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: —
LETTERS FROM OXFORD 147
Come loitk 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 5th to the Reynolds sisters, then
on holiday at Littlehampton: a piece of mere lively
foolery and rattle meant to amuse, in a taste which is not
that of to-day. Five days later he writes the first of
that series of letters to his young sister Fanny which
acquaints us with perhaps the most loveable and admir-
able parts of his character. She was now just fourteen,
and living under the close guardianship of the Abbej^s,
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.
1 Houghton MSS.
148 TO HIS SISTER FANNY
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 Whip-
ship'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
TO JANE AND J. H. REYNOLDS 149
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 Hke
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 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 Da\ad'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 21st: —
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 * Rey-
nolds'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. WTiat 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 intel-
lectual pretensions of certain sets of ladies, from which
he has felt an agreeable reHef in some verses he has
150 RETURN TO HAMPSTEAD
found on taking down from Bailey^s shelves the poems
of Katherine Phillips, Hhe 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 recognise 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 PoHarchus,
Lucasia and Rosania and Palaemon, 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 Carohne age.
Quite in the last days of his visit Keats, whose mind
and critical power had been growing while he worked
upon Endymion, and whom moreover the long effort of
composition was clearly beginning to fatigue, confides
to Haydon his dissatisfaction with what he has done: —
'You will be glad to hear that within these last three
weeks I have written 1000 lines — which are the third
Book of my Poem. My Ideas with respect to it I assure
you are very low — and I would write the subject
thoroughly again — ^but I am tired of it and think the
time would be better spent in writing a new Romance
which I have in my eye for next summer — Rome was
not built in a day — and all the good I expect from my
employment this summer is the fruit of Experience which
I hope to gather in my next Poem.'
Coming back in the first week of October to Hamp-
stead, whither his brothers had by this time also returned
from a trip to Paris, Keats was presently made imcom-
fortable 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
FRIENDS AT LOGGERHEADS 151
to Bailey. '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 unmerci-
fully/ Both Haydon and Reynolds, he goes on, keep
telling him tales of Hunt: How Himt has been talking
flippantly and patronisingly of Endymiariy 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 autimm weeks spent at
Hampstead after his return from Oxford Keats was
getting on, a Httle flaggingly, with the fourth book of
Endymion, besides writing an occasional lyric or two.
Fresh from the steadying and sympathetic companion-
ship 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 Words-
worth's poem The Gipsies and also of HazHtt's criticism
of it in the Round Table. A fragment of another letter,
dated November the 5th, alludes with annoyance, not
for the first time, to some failure of Haydon's to keep
his word or take trouble about a young man from
Oxford named Cripps whom he had promised to receive
as pupil and in whom Bailey and Keats were interested.
The same fragment records the appearance in Blackwood
152 STAYS AT BURFORD BRIDGE
(the Eiidinhurgh 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 Himt, I must infallibly call him to an
Account if he be a human being, and appears in Squares
and Theatres, where we might possibly meet — I don't
relish his abuse/
Some time about mid-November Keats, his health and
strength being steadier than in the spring, felt himself
in the mood for a few weeks of solitude and went to
spend them at Burford Bridge Inn, in the beautiful vale
of Mickleham between Leatherhead and Dorking. The
outing, he wrote, was intended 'to change the scene —
change the air — and give me a spur to wind up my poem,
of which there are wanting 500 lines.' Keats dearly
loved a valley: he loved even the sound of the names
denoting one. In his marginal notes to a copy of
Paradise Lost he gave a friend we find the following: —
* 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 I
CORRESPONDENCE 153
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 roimd him in his new quarters at Burford
Bridge he says simply, writing to Reynolds on November
the 22nd, 'I like this place very much. There is Hill
and Dale and a little river. I went up Box Hill this
evening after the moon — "you dJ 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 VeniLS and Adonis.
Next, with a sudden change of mind about letting Rey-
nolds see a sample of Endymion, 'By the Whim-King!
I'll give you a stanza, because it is not material in con-
nexion, and when I wrote it I wanted you to give your
vote, pro or con.' — ^The stanza he gives is from the song
of the Constellations in the fourth book, certainly one of
the weakest things in the poem: pity Reynolds had not
been there indeed, to give his vote contra.
On the same day, November 22, Keats writes to Bailey
a letter even richer in contents and more self-revealing
than this to Reynolds. It gives the indispensable key
both to much in his own character and much of the deeper
speculative and symbolic meanings underlying his work,
from Endymion to the Ode on a Grecian Urn. Beginning
with a wise and tolerant reference to the Haydon trouble,
and throwing out a passing hint of the distinction between
154 CONFESSIONS
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 feel-
ings at other times — thinking them a few barren Tragedy Tears.
Readers of Endymion will recognize a symboHc embodi-
ment 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,
recoimting 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
1 Paradise Lost, viii, 288-311.
SPECULATIONS 155
Mean, or in her sum'd up, in her contained
And in her looks, which from that time infused
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
specidations to his friend is quite imstudied and incon-
secutive; 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 piuport will be foimd not difficult to follow,
if only the reader will bear one thing well in mind:
that when Keats in this and similar passages spealcs 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 arpjnt.nitinnfi nf thp TYiinH flT id spirit as
immediate as these, asjbhrijjinglyLconvind^
putable js'urde pe ndent ofall co nsecutive stages a,nd
formal processes of thinking : almost the same things,
indeed7 as m 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. "\Miat 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
»/bid.viii, 452-490.
156 IMAGINATION AND TRUTH
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 repre-
sentation 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 Imagina-
tion and its empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life and
its spiritual repetition. But, as I was saying, the simple imagin-
ative 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 beau-
tiful 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 Hhe Httle 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
COMPOSES VARIOUS LYRICS 157
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 ahnost
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 11, 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 con-
vinced, 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 EHzabethan
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 time of the Merchant's Daughter and printed
* The late precociously ^fted and prematurely lost Mary Suddard, in
Essays and Stvdies (Cambridge, 1912).
158 '0 LOVE ME TRULY'
in Clement Robinson's Handful of Pleasant Delites,
1584:—
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,
1817, when Keats was finishing Endymion at Burford
» 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 earher 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.
^N DREAR-NIGHTED DECEMBER' 159
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 realise how deepl}^
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 feUcity:
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.^
» Crewe MSS.
2 This poem was first printed posthumously in 1829: 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 saine 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
160 DRYDEN AND SWINBURNE
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 con-
taining 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.
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 modem
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 tran-
script made in 1827 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 bUss 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 'Falhngs from us, vanishings' of Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations
of Immmtaliiy, may be responsible for the 'falling' in the seventh Une,
and though 'the thought appalUng' is a common-place phrase Uttle 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. 146).
ENDYMION FINISHED 161
Do readers recall what the greatest of metrical raagi-
cians, 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 finished : 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 retum'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 pressed
His hands against his face, and then did rest
His head upon a mossy hillock green.
And so remained as he a corpse had been
162 AN AUTUMNAL CLOSE
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 reached the river's brim. Then up he rose.
And slowly as that very river flows.
Walked 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 28, 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 Burf ord 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
RETURN TO HAMPSTEAD 163
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.
^
CHAPTER VI
ENDYMION.—l. 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 — En-
counter with Glaucus — Glaucus relates his doom — The predestined
deUverer — The deUverance — 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 1816, he tried a
kind of prelude or induction to the theme, and how,
laying this aside, he determined to start fresh on a
^poetical romance' of Endymion on a great scale.
When in April 1817, six weeks after the publication of
the volume of Poems, he went off to the Isle of Wight
to get firmly to work on his new task, it is clear that he
had its main outlines and dimensions settled in his mind,
but nothing more. He wrote to George soon after his
departure: —
164
INVENTION AND IMAGINATION 165
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 4000 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 inven-
tion 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 Endymiorij 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,
aU 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
166 WHAT THE MOON MEANT TO KEATS
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 coimted, not
her pallor but her splendour, the magic alchemy exer-
cised 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 '/ stood
tip'toe/ what a range of beneficent activities he attributes
1 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 Sel6n6 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, Selen^ 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 modem 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, ApoUonius 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.
ELIZABETHAN PRECEDENTS 167
to her. Now, as he settles down to work on EndymioUy
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 sjniibol of
Beauty itself — what he calls in a letter Hhe principle
of Beauty in all things,' the principle which binds in
a divine community all such otherwise imrelated 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 imder his hand into a parable of the
adventures of the poetic soul striving after full com-
mimion with this spirit of essential Beauty.
As to the Hterary associations which drew Keats to
the Endjnnion story, there is scarce one of our EHza-
bethan 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 foimd 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
moonHght scene in all literature. Scarcely less famihar
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
168 FLETCHER AND DRAYTON
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 EHzabethans, 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, delight-
fully paraphased 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 Zephyriis 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
* 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
Endjonion, Tellus for Mary Queen of Scots, Eumenides for Sidney, and
so forth.
DRAYTON'S TWO VERSIONS 169
couplets called Endimion and Phoebe, This he never
reprinted, but introduced passages from it into a later
piece in the same metre called the Man in the Moone.
The volume containing Drayton^s earlier Endimion
and Phoebe became so rare that when Payne Collier
reprinted it in 1856 only two copies were known to
exist. It is unlikely that Keats should have seen either
of these. But he possessed of his own a copy of Dray-
ton's poems in Smethwick's edition of 1636 (one of the
prettiest of seventeenth-century books). The Man in
the Moone is included in that volume, and that Keats
was familiar with it is evident. In it, as in the earher
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 disqui-
sition 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 mediaeval 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
Mocme 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 inci-
dents 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
170 DEBT OF KEATS TO DRAYTON
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 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 brack.
Sometime with her the sea-horse he both 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 generalised recollection
of a long passage of eighty in which Drajiion 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
1 Endymion, iii. 196-209.
STRAIN OF ALLEGORY 171
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 Endjonion's
lover. ^
Not merely by delight in particular poets and famili-
arity 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 EHzabethans. The spirit of EHzabethan
poetry was bom 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 inci-
dental, irrelevant, and superfluous beauties, its lack,
however much it may revel in classical ideas and
associations, of the classical instinct for clarity, sim-
phcity, 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 w^as at this time most famiHar
— Spenser of course first and foremost, WiUiam Browne
and practically all the Spenserians, — ^were men apt to
conceive alike of Grecian myth and mediaeval romance
as necessarily holding moral and symbolic under-mean-
ings in solution. Again, it was from Ovid's Meta-
morphoses, 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
foho edition of his book which we know Keats used,
must needs conform to a fixed mediaeval and Renaissance
tradition by ^mythologizing' his text, as he calls
it, with a commentary fuU 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 contem-
poraries Shelley had in his first important poem, Alastor,
1 Endymion, ii. 569-572 and 908-916.
172 THE SOUL'S QUEST FOR BEAUTY
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 imder-
lying strain of allegoric or symboHc meaning harder to
detect. Keats's letters referring to his poem contain
only the sHghtest and rarest hmts 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 accoimt 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 lajdng 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 l
and beings upon earth is in its nature identical
with the passion for that transcendental and essential
Beauty: hence the various hxmian love-adventures^
PHANTASMAGORIC ADVENTURES 173
which befall the hero in dreams or in reahty, 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 wea\dng in a thousand
and one irrelevant matters which the activity and
ferment of his young imagination suggest, thus con-
tinually confusing the main current of his narrative
and breaking the coherence of its symbolism. He
draws out Hhe one bare circumstance,' to use his own
phrase, of the story into an endless chain of intricate
and flowery narrative, leading us on phantasmagoric
joumeyings 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 bewilder-
ment — an Arabian Night's jugglery mth space and
time — in the vague suddenness with which its changes
are effected.
Critics so justly esteemed as Mr Robert Bridges and
Professor de Selincourt 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 behef
there existed certain subterranean abodes or focuses
of fire, — the stithy of Vulcan, the roots of Etna where
174 THE FOUR ELEMENTS THEORY
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 recognised 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 exphcit
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
1 Meiam. i. 26-31, Englished thus by Sandys: —
Forthwith upsprung the c[uick 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 sohd Tellus bound.
rv.
ITS ERROR 175
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 foiui^h 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 mediaeval Alexander romances (in which the
hero's crowning exploits are always a flight to heaven
on a griffin 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
1 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,
605-618), and the account of the sudden distaste which afterwards seizes
him for former pleasures and companions. But these may be mere coin-
cidences, and the whole series of the hero's subsequent adventures according
to Gombauld, his dream-flight to the Caspian under the spell of the Thes-
salian enchantress Ismene, and all the weird things that befall him there,
are entirely unlike anything that happens in Keats's poem.
v^
176 BOOK I. THE EXORDIUM
carries us no farther than the exposition by the hero
of the trouble in which he finds himself. For its exordium
Keats uses a line, and probably a whole passage, which
he had written many months before and kept by him.
One day in 1816, while he was still walking the hospitals
and sharing rooms in St Thomas's Street with his
fellow-students Mackereth and Henry Stephens, Keats
called out to Stephens from his window-seat to listen
to a new line he had just written, — ^A thing of beauty
is a constant joy,' — and asked him how he liked it.
Stephens indicating that he was not quite satisfied,
Keats thought again and came out with the amended
line, now familiar and proverbial even to triteness,
'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.' ^ 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
* 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 twiUght, 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 hne: —
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
thou^ it had been more or less dressed up for efifect, 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 SUep 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' 11. 80-84) musk-roses in a woodland
brake (compare Sleep and Poetry 1. 5), the hfe 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 1816. used them the next
spring as a suitable exordium for Endymion, and added the following
Imes, 25-33, as a (somewhat clumsy) transition to the actual beginning
of the poem 'Therefore with full happiness,' etc., as written at Carisbrooke.
THE FOREST SCENE 177
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 Yvyian
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
jroagimng what happy tasks and ministrations it will
Jpe their s jo ply in their ^ homes ethereaP 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 Lempriere as a son of
Endymion in the Elean version of the tale, or by Paeon
the physician of the gods in the Iliadj 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 Httle 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 Sleef and Poetry. Endymion awakens
refreshed, and promises to be of better cheer in future.
178 CONFESSION TO PEONA
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 em-
bracing 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 awaken-
ing to reality, he found himself alone on the bed of
poppies, with the breeze at intervals bringing him
Taint 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 upturned gills
HER EXPOSTULATION 179
Of dying fish; the vermeil rose had blown
In frightful scarlet, and its thorns outgrown
Like spiked 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 .
dehghts lose their savour and turn to ashes. T,he spixit /
of man, so the interpretation would seem to run, haying i
onc ^ caught the vision of transcendental Beauty and
been allowed to embrace it^ must pine after it evermore
and'ThTts 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
imtil 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 I
His reply in his own defence is long and much of it
beautiful: but we follow the chain of thought and argu-
ment with difficulty, so hidden is it in flowers of poetry
v^
180 ENDYMION'S DEFENCE
and so little are its vital links made obvious. A letter of
Keats, containing one of his very few explanatory com-
ments 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 ^ruth. My having written that argument will perhaps
be ofThe 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 difliculty: —
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 prepared —
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 alchemized, 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, t he hop e
to be wedded in fuU 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
THE ASCENDING SCALE 181
as it begins, not with the to)dng of nymphs in shady
places and the Hke, but with thoughts of olden min-
strelsy 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
-^olian 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-destroy-
ing' (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
\1
182 THE HIGHEST HOPE
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 commimion with immortal Beauty. But
Ithat 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 aU to the practically-minded Peona. He can
only try to convince her of its reahty 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 himgered 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, TU 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 wrong-
fully accused by Claudio, Spenser's Pastorella among
the bandits, he declares.
BOOK 11. THE PRAISE OF LOVE 183
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 beHeve
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 caU mawkish if you will (he called them
so himself a Httle 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 tremen-
dous 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, insensibiHty would be the worst of all; the
goddess must, he is assured, know of some form of love
184 UNDERWORLD MARVELS
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 4nto 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,
J5ut mingled up; a gleaming melancholy;
ly^ 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
gHmmering 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 himseK go without a check.
Now we find ourselves in a temple, described as com-
plete and true to sacred custom, with an image of
Diana; and in a trice either we have passed, or the
temple itseK 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
famihar reading.) Endymioii is miserable there, sxid
appeals to Diana to restore him to the pleasant light of
THE AWAKENING OF ADONIS 185
eaxth. 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 intensi-
fies 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 Httle ministering Loves,
with Cupid himself, lute in hand, for their chief.
Here foUows a long and highly wrought episode of
the winter sleep of Adonis and the descent of Venus to
awaken him. The original idea for the scene comes
from Ovid, in part direct, in part through Spenser
{Faerie Queene, iii, 6) and Shakespeare. But the detail
is entirely Keats's own and on the whole is a happy
example of his early luxuriant manner; especially
the description of the entrance of Venus and the looks
and presence of Cupid as bystander and interpreter.
The symbolic meaning of the story is for him evidently
much the same as it was to the ancients, — the awaken-
ing 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 heightened 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
186 EMBRACES IN THE JASMINE BOWER
His diamond path with fretwork, streaming round
AHve, and dazzHng 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 Hons 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 imknown 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
^ 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' Anterior , then
Eopular both in France and in an English translation. Ant^nor is permitted
y 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 Ught seen from within the entrance, the rushing of the water
streams, and the ascent by a path between balustrades. The Voyage
d'Antenor 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 (1827). 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 Antinor, and was probably borrowed
by Moore from Keats.
THE QUEST RENEWED 187
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, w^hose 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 imion 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 foimtain-nymph Arethusa; Arethusa
fleeing, Alpheus pursuing (according to that myth
which is told most fully by Ovid and which Shelley's
188 NEW SYMPATHIES AWAKENED
lyric has made familiar to all English readers); he
entreating, she longing to yield but fearing the wrath of
Diana. Endjmiion, 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 I
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 Mneid. 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 imder-world
and of the dead, and at the same time to s3niibolize the
power of the spirit of Beauty to visit the poet's soul with
joy and illumination even among the Mismal elements'
of that nether sphere. Into the rest of the under-ground
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 S3anpathy with the sorrows of
BOOK III. EXORDIUM 189
others, is a clear stage in the development of the poet's
scheme. The next stage is more decisive and significant
stm.
Book III. Keats begins his third book with a de-
nunciation of kings, conquerors, and worldly 'regalities'
in general, amplifying in his least fortunate style the
ideas contained in the sonnet 'On receiving a laurel
crown from Leigh Hunt' written the previous March
in the copy of his Poems which he gave to Reynolds
(see above, p. 57). When Keats read this passage to
Bailey at Oxford, Bailey very justly found fault with
some forced expressions in it such as 'baaing vanities,'
and also, he tells us, with what seemed to him an over-
done defiance of the traditional way of handling the
rimed couplet. From denunciation the verse passes
into narrative with the question, 'Are then regalities
all gilded masks?' The answer is. No, there are a
thousand mysterious powers throned in the universe
— cosmic powers, as we should now say — ^most of them
far beyond human ken but a few within it; and of
these, swears the poet, the moon is 'the gentlier-
mightiest.' Having once more, in a strain of splendid
nature-poetry, praised her, he resumes his tale, and
tells how Cjnithia, 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 shaU 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.
190 ENCOUNTER WITH 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 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 joy-
fully, seeiAg 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 hiunan 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,
1 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. 144).
GLAUCUS RELATES HIS DOOM 191
familiar with and befriended by all sear-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 foimd 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 seniHty 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 imtil 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
192 THE PREDESTINED DELIVERER
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 recognises 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 Hhe 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/
Whispered 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 —
THE DELIVERANCE 193
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 uptum'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 I
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.
194 MEANING OF THE PARABLE
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 recognised 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 or
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 hun
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 Endjonion
the sage recognises 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
ITS MACHINERY EXPLAINED 195
enabled to work miracles of joy and healing and to
confer immoi-tality on dead lovers.
As to the significance in detail of the rites by which
the transfer of powder 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 \vdth 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 funeraF 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 sugges-
tion 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.
196 THE HAPPY SEQUEL
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 absorp-
tion 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 trans-
lucent 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
1 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. 251), it is scarcely possible that any passages
from The Prelude should have come to Keats's knowledge until after
Endymion was finished.
BOOK IV. ADDRESS TO THE MUSE 197
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 arid
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 fuhiess
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 mom
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 I 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 under-
growth. (Such a damsel lying back on the grass with her
198 THE INDIAN DAMSEL
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.)
Endjmiion 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. Endjmiion is wholly overcome, and in a
speech of somewhat mawkish surrender gives himself
to the new earthly love, not blindly, but realising 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 groimd 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
AN ETHEREAL FLIGHT 199
along the ridges of the clouds in Sleejp 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 realise 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 wdngs 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 ApoUo 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 Kes 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 mahce
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.
200 OLYMPIAN VISIONS
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 never-
theless 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 Spencers 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 pro-
testation renounces his past dreams, condemns his
presimiptuous 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
DESCENT AND RENUNCIATION 201
Will I to children utter, and repent.
There never livM 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 I
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 Theo-
critus, where Polyphemus wooes 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 himian
and earthly contentment is possible); and so she pro-
poses 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
1 Ovid, Metam. xiii, 810-840; Theocr. Idyll, xi, 30 sqq.
202 DISTRESSFUL FAREWELLS
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 down-
cast eyes fail to recognise 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 wiU take
part in it and consecrate herseK 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
THE MYSTERY SOLVED 203
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 sinking, until drown'd
Beyond the reach of music : for the choir
Of Cynthia he heard not, though rough briar
Nor muffling thicket interposed 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 ! ' ^aid 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 1'
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
204 A CHASTENED VICTORY
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 foimd 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 formiag 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
ABOVE ANALYSIS JUSTIFIED 205
recognized, even in gleams, their recognition gives it
a quite new hold upon the attention. And in order to
trace these meaniags and disengage them with any
clearness a fairly close examination and detailed argu-
ment 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 i^ with a vital, subtly involved and passion-
ately 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-bom and intuitively gifted
poets who ever hved. 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 the}^
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.
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 revitaUzed
— 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 — EngUsh scenery and detail — Influence of Wordsworth —
Influence of Shelley — Endymion and Alastor — Correspondences and con-
trasts — 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 Eliza-
bethan 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 HymnSy
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
206
REVIVAL OF ELIZABETHAN USAGES 207
maintaining old and in experimenting with new usages.
Many of the Hberties 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
Hxmt 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 1590-1640. 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
imdertook 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 de-
nounced as 'our inistic 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
208 AVOIDANCE OF CLOSED COUPLETS
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 'slowO; '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 intoxica-
tion;' '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 placed;
Such ranges of white feet, and patient lips
All ruddy, — for here death no blossom nips.
He marked 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
TRUE METRICAL INSTINCTS 209
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 | Remem-
bered or from a comparative particle to the thing
compared ('sleeker than | Night-swollen mushrooms 0;
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 forego
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.^
^Why will my friend Professor Saintsbury, in range of reading and
industry the master of us all, insist on trying to persuade us that m 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 beheve 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 Hne, 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
auxiUaries 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
210 AN EXAMPLE
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 character-
istic 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 exird mortal, sounds its pleasant name I
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 I
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
the average proportion of lines not ending with a comma or other pause
is in Pharonriida 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.
RIME TOO MUCH HIS MASTER 211
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 criticised
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 unpacked
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 in-
appropriate and almost meaningless 'tmge of sanctuary
splendour 'Tower down has been imported for the sake
of the' foxes with fire-brands tied to their tails which
212 LAX USE OF WORDS
'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, thai 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/
FLAWS OF TASTE AND TRAINING 213
a 'quell') and nouns into verbs (to Hhroe/ to ^passion/
to * monitor/ to 'fragment up'); in using at his con-
venience active verbs as passive and passive verbs as
active; and in not only reviving archaic participial
forms ('dight/ ^ fight/ 'raft/ etc.) but in giving cur-
rency to participles of the class Coleridge denounced as
demoralizing to the ear, and as hybrids equivocally
generated of noun-substantives ('emblem'd/ ^gor-
dian'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 w^hich scan-
dalised conservative critics, and caused even De Quincey,
becoming tardily acquainted with Keats's work, to dislike
and utterly imder-rate it. He himseK came before long
to condemn the style of ' the slipshod Endymion.' Never-
theless 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 rash-
ness led him into almost as many felicities as faults, and
the examples of the happier hberties 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 net
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 train-
ing 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
' dehciousness ' 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
214 FAULTS AND BEAUTIES INSEPARABLE
make Glaucus address Scylla as Himid thing!' and
Endymion beg for ^one gentle squeeze' from his Indian
maiden, with many a Hke 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,
compariag 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,
immistakeable, one would have said, to the blindest,
of genius. Did any poet in his twenty-second yeai:
ever write with so prodigal an activity of iavention,
however undisciplined and unbraced, or with an im-
agination so penetrating to divine and so swift to evoke
beauty? Were so many faults and failures ever inter-
spersed 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 I
O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy ?
Could not thy harshest vengeance be content.
But thou must nip this tender innocent
HOMAGE TO THE MOON 215
Because I loved her ? — Cold, cold indeed
Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed
The sea-^well 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 —
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 Selincourt 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
1 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
216 A PARALLEL FROM DRAYTON
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 I ^
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 bum,
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 lus identity in delighted sjnnpathy
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
EXAMPLES OP NATURE-POETRY 217
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, siagle
iQstances first and then in a sudden outburst the sum
and volume of them all: how he avoids word-paintrag -
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, dehghts which the poet
instiactively 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 Faicst, 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 imknown 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.
218 NATURE AND THE GREEK SPIRIT
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, J
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. 210) 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 con-
centration. Do we not feel half the romance of the
Odyssey, with the spell that is in the sound of the
* 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 wer©
ripping apart, the two sides of a valley.
GREEK MYTHOLOGY REVITALISED 219
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 mom,
do not the two figm-es evoked rise before us full-charged
each with the vital significance of his story? Mr de
Selincourt 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 passiag 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, embody-
220 ITS PREVIOUS DEADNESS
ing the instinctive effort of the brightliest gifted human
race to explain its earHest experiences of nature and
civilisation, 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 realise the fidl depth
of the deadness from which in this respect it had to be
awakened : —
He (Waller) borrows too many of his sentiments and illustra-
tions 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 1800
and onwards, and Keats was the poet who has contrib-
uted 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 ^-nd 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 : —
POETRY OF LOVE AND WAR 221
'Twas a lay
More subtle cadenced, 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 xmder-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 journey ings ! 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
222 DRAMATIC PROMISE
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. j
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
detested 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
COMPARISON WITH MODELS 223
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-bom 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.
224 SANDYS^S OVID
These Lions, fear'd by others, Cybel checks
With curbing bits, and yokes their stubborn necks.
This is a tjrpical 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 Ads 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 illus-
trating the relations of Keats to his classic and Eliza-
bethan sources, two of the incidental lyrics in his poem.
There are four such lyrics in Endymion altogether.
HYMN TO PAN: CHAPMAN 225
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 Hennes* love-got joys.
Goat-footed, two-hornM, 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 opf)os'd capricdos) 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 Hesperus 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 sprrug.
Amidst the leaves set, makes the thickets ring
Of her sour sorrows, sweetened with her song,
Runs her divisions varied so and strong.
226 BEN JONSON
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 givej
The warm and finer fleeces that we wear. C
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 Lycseum 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 preserved by thee, and thou observed 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 EHzabethan pastoral spirit,
compounded as it was of native EngHsh 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
THE HYMN IN ENDYMION 227
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 Hues,
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 tnmks, 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 com;
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 siuprise
228 'A PRETTY PIECE OF PAGANISM'
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, J
And gather up all fancifuUest 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 com
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 I
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
^ 'All the strange, mysterious and unaccountable sounds which were
heard in solitary places, were attributed to Pan, the God of rural scenerjr'
(Baldwin's Pantheon, ed. 1806, p. 104). 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.
SONG OF THE INDIAN MAIDEN 229
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 master-
piece. 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; aU
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 in-
voking 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.
230 THE TRIUMPH OF BACCHUS
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 Cole-
ridge's Kuhla KhaUj —
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 I
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 1
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 1
Come hither, lady fair, and joined be
To our mad minstrelsy I '
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A COMPOSITE: ITS SOURCES 231
* 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.'
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 Institu-
tion in 1816. But this will accomit 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 Httle 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 reUefs 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,
1 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 1815 and were set up in his grand new gallery
at Wobum five years later. Where they were housed in the meanwhile
is not recorded, but wherever it was Haydon could easily have obtained
232 ^ENGLISH SCENERY AND DETAIL
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 com, hemlock growing in moist places by
the brookside, field mushrooms with the morning dew
access to them, (the Duke's agent in the purchase having been also
secretary to Lora Elgin) and I cannot resist the conviction, purely conjectural
as it is, that Keats must have seen them in Haydon's companv some time
in the winter of 1816/17, 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.
INFLUENCE OF WORDSWORTH 233
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 chest-
nuts, 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 recognised a special instance
in that deep and brooding sense of mystery, of 'some-
thing 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. 125-6). 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 under-
current 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 Words-
worth's inculcation, both in that poem and many
others, of the doctrine that a poet must learn to go
234 INFLUENCE OF SHELLEY
out of himseK and to live and feel as a man among
J fellow-men, — ^that it is a kind of spiritual suicide for
him to attempt to live apart from himian sympathies,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind !
A large part of Endymion, as we have seen, is devotj^d
to the symbolical setting forth of this conviction. pPor
the rest, that essential contrast between the mental
processes and poetic methods of the elder and the
^ yoimger 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,
i/ Wordsworth^s poetry is intensely personal and 'sub-
jective,' 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 natiu-e's doings and
beings, especially those which make for human refresh-
ment and delightTj
The second contemporary influence to be considered
is that of Shelley. Shelley's AlastoTj it will be remem-
bered, published early in 1816, had been praised by
Hunt in The Examiner for December of that year, and
in the following January Himt 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
ENDYMION AND ALASTOR 235
isolation from human sjTiipathies. 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 simimary of the imagined experi-
ences 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
dehght of such communion. The desire, ever imsatisfied,
turns all his former joys to ashes, and drives him forth
by unheard-of ways through monstrous wildernesses
imtil 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
236 CORRESPONDENCES AND CONTRASTS
mind of Keats. In it the evil fate of those who shut
themselves out from human sympathies is very elo-
quently 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 spon-
taneously 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 pene-
trating 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 Hhat he might have his own un-
HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY 237
fettered 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 acquain-
tance 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
imiverse to account for what he calls the ^wild and
harmonised time' 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
mellffluous 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 anj^hing 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
238 SHELLEY ON ENDYMION
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 symbohc
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 spiritualised 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 1820, 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 hsemorrhage and suffer-
ings 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 begin-
ning of the third book describing the wreckage seen by
KEATS AND CLARENCE'S DREAM 239
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 gnawed 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 ampH-(
fication of it in the fourth act of Proifmtheus Unhouvd,^
which he added as an afterthought to the rest of the J
poem in December 1819. The wreckage described is
not that of the sea, but that which the light flashing
240 SHELLEY A BORROWER
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 scythed 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 winged 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 jagged 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 Epipsychidioriy
proposes to share with his spirit's mate in their imagined
island home in the iEgean. If Shelley indeed owes
anything to Endymion here, he has etherealised and
transcendentalised 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
SHELLEY AND THE RIMED COUPLET 241
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 1820); 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 Hquid lightness of
rhjrthm 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 accom-
plished use of the rimed couplet with varied pause and
free overflow in the Epistle to Maria Gishome (1819)
and Epipsychidion (1820), 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.
J ■
CHAPTER VIII
DECEMBER 1817-JUNE 1818: 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 Hamp-
stead lodging. The exact date is micertain; but it
was in time to see Kean play Richard III at Drury
Lane on the 15th — ^the actor's first performance after
a break of some weeks due to illness. J. H. Reynolds
had gone to Exeter for a Christmas hoHday, and Keats,
acting as his substitute, wrote four dramatic criticisms
for the Champion: the first, printed on December 21,
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 Retri-
bution, 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
242
HAMPSTEAD AGAIN: STAGE CRITICISM 243
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 hack-
work 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 realty kindles. Here his imagination
teaches him phrases beyond the reach of Hazlitt, to
express (there is nothing more difiicult) the specific
quahty 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 Christahel 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' I The sensual life of verse
springs warm from the lips of Kean and to one learned in Shake-
spearian 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
244 HAZLITT'S LECTURES
* 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 per-
sonalities 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
* Gary's Dante, Infemo, iv, 126.
LIFE AT WELL WALK 245
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 inti-
mates 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 stiff est and most domineering
moods of egotism, much ruffled by the moderate strictures
of Coleridge in Biographia Literaria on certain quahties
246 MEETING WITH WORDSWORTH
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 Mimgo 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 simimer before
on his run to Paris, and Kingston a thick-witted, thick-
skinned, intrusive but kindly gentleman of lion-hunting
procHvities, 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 28th 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, MiUon and Virgil. Lamb got exceedingly
merry and exquisitely witty; and his fun in the midst of Words-
worth's solemn intonations of oratory was like the sarcasm and
wit of the fool in the intervals of Lear's passion. He made a
1 Diary of Henry Crdbb Robinson, as quoted by W. Knight, Life of
Wordsworth, ii. 228-9.
« C. C. Clarke, Recollections of Writers, pp. 149-50.
THE 'IMMORTAL DINNER' 247
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 comp-
troller 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 intro-
ducing 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.* *0h,* said Lamb, 'then you
are a silly fellow.* 'Charles! my dear Charles!' said Words-
worth; 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
248 LAMB FORGETS HIMSELF
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 Words-
worth'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 irrec-
oncilable. 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.
MORE OF WORDSWORTH 249
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 recollec-
tions of his looks and ways about the same time.
Certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or super-
natural. 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 yoimg 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 com-
ment 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
250 A HAPPY EVENING
was present at the gathering m 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 proselj^e 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-afiirms
to his brother the view he had formerly expressed to
Haydon that 'If there were three things superior in
the modem world they were The Excursion, Haydon's
Pictures, and HazHtt'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 with-
out which the master cannot truly be more than half
WORDSWORTH ON BACCHUS 251
known and which remained unpublished untU 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 dra^Ti by panthers, and
followed by troops of sat^Ts, 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 Words-
worth in this vein of talk. Had we not known that
Endymion was finished before the elder and the yoimger
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 fom-th
canto not until March, at Teignmouth, and it is conceiv-
able, though imlikely, that the triimiph of Bacchus
might have been an addition made in re-copying.
It was most likely a result of the interest taken by
W^ordsworth 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
iHazlitt, The Spirit of the Age: Collected Works, iv, 276.
252 DISILLUSION AND IMPATIENCE
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 foimd 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 over-
shadowed 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 buUied 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
WINTER LETTERS 253
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. Imper-
fect, 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 dis-
agreeables evaporate from their being in close relation-
ship with Beauty and Truths 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.
254 MAXIMS AND REFLECTIONS
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimili-
tude 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 over-
comes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consid-
eration.
Or this:—
In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am
from their centre.
1st. 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.
2nd. 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 *0 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 Hmit had increased since the autimm, 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
QUARRELS AMONG FRIENDS 255
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 re-
criminating, 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 re-
peatedly insists on Keats's remarkably keen natural
instinct for and understanding of the arts both of
256 HAYDON, HUNT, AND SHELLEY
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 School-
boy 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 Himt'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 16th of February, 1818. 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 Himt 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 tran-
scripts made from them by his friends, it is possible to
retrace the actual order of many of these fugitive
pieces. On the 16th of January was written the sonnet
on Mrs Reynolds's cat, perhaps Keats's best thing in
A PROLIFIC FEBRUARY 257
the humorous vein; on the 21st, 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 Himt'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 I
read like an anticipation in the rough of the first stanza of
Tennyson's masterly set of alcaics already referred to,
beginning '0 mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies/
To the 22nd belongs the sonnet, *0 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 31st
he writes to Reynolds in a rolHcking 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 himseK: —
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
* Woodhouse suggests that the romance which he lays aside is his own
Bndymion, meaning his task of seeing it through the press: but this must
surely be a mistake.
258 RANTS AND SONNETS
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 Shake-
spearean form beginning ^When I have fears that I
may cease to be/ which he calls his last. On the 3rd
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 4th comes
another Shakespearean sonnet, that beginning 'Timers
sea has been five years at its slow ebb,' in which he
recalls the memory of an old, persistent, haimting
love-fancy. The two sonnets of January 31 and
February 4 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 fuU-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 hom-s 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.
A HAUNTING MEMORY 259
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 singul^x
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, 1814) 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 5th,
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 8th, the sonnet in praise of the
colour blue composed by way of protest against one of
Reynolds preferring black, at least in the coloimng of
feminine eyes. About the same time he agreed with
Re3aiolds that they should each write some metrical
1 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
de to Melancholy.
260 SIX WEEKS AT TEIGNMOUTH
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
imder 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, trans-
lating 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 prevent-
ing 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: —
SOFT WEATHER AND SOFT MEN 261
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 f —
Hail thou my native soil: thou blessed plot
Whose equal all the world aff ordeth 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.
262 ISABELLA; OR, THE POT OF BASIL
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
pubHshed 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 in-
sisted 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, particu-
larly 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
RICH CORRESPONDENCE 263
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 \dsit —
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-interpret-
ing 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 — Oilier 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 — danm 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 reflec-
tions 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 else-
where in various strains of verse, e.g. the finished
poem FaTicy 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, —
264 EPISTLE TO REYNOLDS
Some Titian colours touched 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 In-
stitution in 1816 (hung, as it happened, next to Titian's
Europa from Cobham Hall), and which evidently worked
deeply on his mind. To memory of it is probably due
that magic vision of a little town emptied of its folk on
a morning of sacrifice, which he evoked a year later in
the ode on a Grecian Urn. It shows to the right an
altar in front of a temple of Apollo, and about the altar
a group including king and priest and a young man
holding down a victim ox by the horns; people with
baskets and offerings coming up from behind the temple;
and to the left tall trees with a priest leading in another
victim by the horns, and a woman with a jar bringing in
libation; a little back, two herdsmen with their goats;
a river spanned by a bridge and winding towards a
sea-bay partly encircled by mountains which close the
view, and on the edge of the bay the tower and roofs of
a little town indistinctly seen. Recollection of this
Claude leads Keats on quickly to that of another, the
famous 'Enchanted Castle/ which he partly mixes up
with it, and partly transforms by fantasy into something
quite different from what it really is. He forgets the
one human figure in the f oregroimd, describes figures and
features of the landscape which are not there, and
remembering that the architecture combines ancient
Roman with mediaeval castellated and later Palladian
elements, invents for it far-fetched origins and associa-
tions 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
THIRST FOR KNOWLEDGE 265
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.^
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,
IVe 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,
^The 'Enchanted Castle,' which Keats explicitly names, belonged at
this date to Mr Wells of Redleaf , and was not exhibited until 1819, so that
he probably knew it only through the engraving by VivarSs and WooUett.
266 NEED OF EXPERIENCE
to ease the Burden of the Mystery, a thing which I begin to
understand a Httle, 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
deHberate processes of the imderstanding; and that
by 'philosophy' he does not mean metaphysics but
knowledge and the fruits of reading generally.
The same letter, again, contains an interesting medita-
tion 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 ex-
perienced 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.*
J
THE TWO CHAMBERS OF THOUGHT 267
Presently follows the famous chain of images by which
Keats, searching and probing for himself along path-
ways of the spirit parallel to those followed by Words-
worth in the Lines composed a few miles above Tintem
Abbey, renders accomit 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
re^t being as yet shut upon me. The first we step into we call
tne 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 Tintem Abbey y 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 coromunion 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 experi-
ences in the form natural to him, the form, that is, of
268 SUMMER PLANS
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 simimer^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
PREFACE TO ENDYMION 269
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 disin-
terested friend might judge. He is inclined, when not on
the defensive against what he felt to be foolish criticism,
to underrate rather than to overrate his own work,
and in his correspondence of the previous year we
have foxmd 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.
Re3aiolds 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
270 A FAMILY BREAK-UP
liv'd in days of old') and to whom he had also on his
own account addressed the charming sonnet, 'Nymph
of the downward smile and sidelong glance/ With no
other woman or girl friend was he ever on such easy
and cordial terms of intimacy. The wedding took
place 'a week ago/ writes Keats on June 4, and about
the same date, in order that he may not miss seeing as
much of the young couple as possible before their
departure, he declines a warm invitation from Bailey
to visit him again at Oxford. Writing, as usual to this
correspondent, with absolute openness, Keats shows that
he is suffering from one of his moods of overmastering
depression. First it takes the form of apathy. Bailey
had written eagerly and judiciously in praise of Endymion
in the Oxford Herald. Keats replies on June 1 : —
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 my Interest in that, or any-
thing 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 in-
cendiary 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
TO SCOTLAND WITH BROWN 271
human purpose. Perhaps if my affairs were in a different state,
I should not have written the above — ^>^ou 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 22, it was
aiTanged 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 Redboume 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 inter-
\dew, 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 some-
thing original about her, and John seemed to regard her
as a being whom he delighted to honour, and introduced
her with evident satisfaction.'
^
CHAPTER IX
JUNE-AUGUST 1818: 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 BeKast — Contrasts
and reflections — The Duchess of Dunghill — The Ayrshire coast — In
Bums's cottage — Lines on his pilgrimage — Through Glasgow to Loch
Lomond — A confession — Loch Awe to the coast — Hardships — ^Kerrera
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 25th) 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
272
FIRST SIGHT OF WINDERMERE 273
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, faUen from better days,
whom they foimd 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 com-
piled 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 a
glorious hue, when he exclaimed — 'How can I believe in that?
— 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.
*This account was published in The Plymouth and Devonport Weekly
Journal, beginning October 1, 1840, 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.
274 AMBLESIDE, RYDAL, KESWICK
After a bathe and a midday meal at Bowness the
friends walked on with ever increasing delight to Amble-
side. 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
ATTITUDE TOWARDS SCENERY 275
doubt, a certain instinctive reticence, a restraining touch
of the Greek alB<k, 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 Hfetime 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 pom^ out long, set, detailed descriptions,
written as any cultivated and enthusiastic observer
visiting such scenes for the first time might woite, 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 aU, 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 roimd 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 unfor-
tunately 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
276 ASCENT OF SKIDDAW
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.
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 feUow 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 know-
ledge of her ways and doings for his faculties to work on
A COUNTRY DANCING-SCHOOL 277
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 Devon-
shire 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 inex-
perienced 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.i The difference between our country dances and
these Scottish figures is about the same as leisurely stirring a
^ 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'?
278 DUMFRIES
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
CarHsle 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 imagin-
ation almost equally, that of the classic south, har-
monious 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 Steven-
son'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.
THE GALLOWAY COAST 279
From Dumfries they started on July 2 south-westward
for Galloway, a region not overmuch frequented even
now, and then hardly at all, by tourists: even Words-
worth on his several Scottish trips passed it by un-
explored. 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 Kirkcud-
brightshire 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.
280 MEG MERRILIES
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 mom.
No dinner many a noon.
And 'stead of supper she would stare
Full hard against the Moon.
But every mom 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 I
Keats had in this Hrifle/ 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
surroimdings.^ 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 shews that
* It is interesting to note that the present poet laureate has found some-
thing in this piece entitling it to a place in his severely sifted anthology,
The Spirit of Man.
FLYING VISIT TO BELFAST 281
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 wiU write you a song
about myself.' Then follows the set of gay doggerel
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 Httle. 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 5, — 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 coimtry by Glenluce to Stranraer
and Portpatrick. Here they took the packet for Donagh-
adee 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
282 CONTRASTS AND REFLECTIONS
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 suifficient
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 DUCHESS OF DUNGHILL 283
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 consider-
ations 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 1876) to Ayr.
Brown grows especially lyrical, and Keats more enthu-
siastic 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 940 feet high — it was 15 Miles
284 THE AYRSHIRE COAST
distant and seemed close upon us. The effect of Ailsa with the
pecuHar perspective of the Sea in connection with the ground we
stood on, and the misty rain then faUing 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
theor}^ of volcanic upheaval, which Keats was presently
moved to address To Ailsa Rock. Coming down into
BaUantrae 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 Alio way, 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
sHk from Mulberry leaves — I cannot recollect it.' But
his anticipations were deceived, the whole scene dis-
enchanted, 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: —
IN BURNS'S COTTAGE 285
The Man at the Cottage was a great Bore with his Anecdotes
— I hate the rascal — his Hfe 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 birth-
place ! 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 reaHty, 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 nimble-
ness 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 further 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 strag-
gling, careless tissue is threaded with such strands of
genius and fresh hiunan 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 diuing this Scottish
tour. As the two friends tramped among the Highland
mountains some days later Keats composed with con-
siderable 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
* The words are King Lear's (act v, sc. iii).
286 LINES ON HIS PILGRIMAGE
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 him-
self. 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. — *
* 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.
THROUGH GLASGOW TO LOCH LOMOND 287
Keats makes it clear that he did not write these lines
until some days after he had left Bmiis^s comitry 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 appear-
ance 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 coimtry, roimd
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 Httle 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 moimtains' — and here follows a little sketch
of the narrow upper end of the lake from near Tarbet,
288 A CONFESSION
just to show where the blue place was. At Inverary
Keats has a word about the woods which reminds one
of Coleridge^s Kuhla Khan — Hhe 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
Fjne the next morning, he got horribly bitten by gad-
flies, and vented his smart in a set of doggerel rhymes.
Of all these matters he gossips gaily for the entertain-
ment 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, Ho 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 accoimting 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. .1 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 complica-
tion of feelings, which must take time to unravel, and care to
keep unravelled.
LOCH AWE TO THE COAST 289
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 hard-
ships, 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 solenm 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
* Printed in error 'Glenside' in all the editions: but the MS. is quite
clear, and even were it not so topography would require Glencroe.
290 HARDSHIPS
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 begin-
ning 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 20 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 10 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 Loch-
harts, 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
KERRERA AND MULL 291
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 imdertook one journey in especial
which proved too much for Keats's strength. Finding
the regular tourist route by water to Staffa and lona
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 lona: 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 Derryna-
cullen. Having crossed the narrow channel to lona
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
1 See John Campbell of Islay, Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860),
vol. ii, p. 52. 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 ingre-
dients no matter how heterogeneous the quintessence, the elixir, which it
needs.
292 STAFFA
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 lona, 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 FingaFs 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
50 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 hurlM,
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
A SEA CATHEDRAL 293
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 soUtude, 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 triviahty: —
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 torn*, and especially in this Mull expedi-
tion, are to be traced the first distinct and settled
s^Tnptoms 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 ten-
dency 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
WiUiam, 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
294 BEN NEVIS
realise the scene in words for his brother's benefit,
teUing 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 com-
posed 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 Inverness-shire,' he had the energy
to compose also for Tom's amusement a comic dialogue
in verse between the mountain and the lady, much more
in Brown's vein than in his own. By the 6th of August
the travellers had reached Inverness, having tramped,
as Brown calculates, six hundred and forty-two roiles
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 forbade him to continue his tour. Accordingly he
TOUR CUT SHORT 295
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 Cumber-
land, 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 con-
dition 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 with-
out, 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 con-
tributed, 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 docimaent in the history of the
tour, it seems to call for insertion here: but in view of
its length and lack of quaHty (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,
Hhe 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.
296 RETURN TO HAMPSTEAD
On the 18th of August he arrived at Hampstead, and
made his appearance among his friends the next day,
'as brown and as shabby as you can imagine/ writes
Mrs Dilke, 'scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn
at the back, a fur cap, a great plaid, and his knapsack.
I cannot tell what he looked like.' When he found
himself seated, for the first time after his hardships, in
a comfortable stuffed chair, we are told how he expressed
a comic enjoyment of the sensation, quoting at himself
the words in which Quince the carpenter congratulates
his gossip the weaver on his metamorphosis.
CHAPTER X
SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 1818: 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 Endy-
mion — 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 SchooP 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 litera-
ture of Scotland by means of the Edinburgh Review,
pubHshed 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 Scots-
man migrated to London, John Murray. Early in 1817
William Blackwood, an able Tory bookseller in Edin-
burgh, 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
297
298 BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE
in the North, and show a HveHer 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 other-
wise without social or literary experience. Blackwood
was the eager employer and imflinching 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
PARTISAN EXCESSES 299
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 gradu-
ally 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 unscrupu-
lous time, the literary as well as the political atmosphere
thick, as we have seen, with the mud and stones of contro-
versy, 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 impardonable 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 piu-e
wantonness of heart as in the early numbers of Black-
wood. The notorious first number opened with an article
300 WILD INCONSISTENCY
on Coleridge's Biographia Literaria even more furiously
insulting than the aforesaid Edinburgh article on Christ-
ahel attributed to Hazlitt. But for HazHtt 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 beheved that less than
three years later the same Coleridge was being praised
and sohcited — 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 lauda-
tion. 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 Nodes by the
same hand. In regard even to the detested Hazlitt
the magazine blew in some degree hot and cold,
printing through several nimibers a series of respectful
summaries, supplied from London by Patmore, of
his Surrey Institution lectures; in another mmfiber
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 afore-
said emptying of the critical slop-pail on Coleridge.
VIRULENCES OF FIRST NUMBER 301
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
Himt'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 pro-
ductions, 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 indeli-
cately 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.
302 THE 'Z' PAPERS AND LEIGH HUNT
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 remon-
strating 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^ papei-s
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 signa-
ture, are merely rabid and outrageous. Correspondents
having urged in protest that Hunt's domestic life was
BLACKWOOD AND WALTER SCOTT 303
blameless, the assailant says in effect, so much the
greater his offence for writing a profligate and demor-
alizing poem; and to this preposterous charge against
one of the mildest pieces of milk-and-water sentimentahty
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 Edin-
burgh 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 ng,me 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 Black-
wood and the Blackwood group. About 1816-1817 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 Black-
wood 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
304 THE CHALDEE MANUSCRIPT
courted him, thus. (The man in plain apparel is Black-
wood and the Jordan is the Tweed) : —
44. 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.
45. 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.
46. Moreover, thine adversary also is of my familiars.
47. 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.
48. 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 num-
ber 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
SCOTT^S WARNING TO LOCKHART 305
interested him much more than those of London. Lock-
hart he did not yet personally know. They first met
eight months later, in June 1818: the acquaintance
ripened rapidly into firm devotion on Lockhart's part
— ^for this young satirist could love as staunchly as he
could stab immercifuUy — 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 realised —
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 yoiu* 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
306 LOCKHART AND KEATS
done in this department will be very well as a frolic of young
men, but let it suflSce. . . . 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 1818 that he had met Keats and
been favourably impressed by him. In reply Lockhart
writes: 'What you say of Keates (sic) is pleasing, and
if you like to write a little review of him, in admonition to
leave his ways, etc., and in praise of his natural genius,
I shall be greatly obliged to you.' Later Benjamin
Bailey had the opportunity of speaking with Lockhart
in Keats's behalf. Bailey had by this time taken
orders, and after publishing a friendly notice of Endy-
mion in the Oxford Herald for June, had left the Uni-
versity and gone to settle in sl 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
'Z^ ON ENDYMION 307
to Leigh Hunt was personal and not political; pleading
that he should not be made an object of party denuncia-
tion; 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 Cor-
nelius 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. WTien
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 galHpots 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 abihties 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. Li the conceit of academic talent and training,
1 Houghton MSS.
308 A LESSON TO CRITICS
the critic shows himself open-eyed to aU 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
Himt 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
£50 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 cir-
cumstances he might not have himself committed a like
offence, and with no Hyperion or St Agnes' Eve or Odes
yet written and only the 1817 volume and Endymion
before him, have dismissed Keats fastidiously and
scoffingly. Who knows? — and let us all take warning.
But now-a-days the errors of criticism are perhaps
rather of an opposite kind, and any rashness and
rawness of undisciplined novelty is apt to find itself in-
dulged 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
quahty 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
MARKS OF LOCKHART'S HAND 309
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 Lock-
hart had caught from Gil Bias} Others are the allusions
to the Metromanie of Piron and the Endymion of
Wieland; particularly the latter. Wieland^s Oheron, 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 imtranslated 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 imder 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 com-
municated 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
^ The source is the Spanish sangrador, blood-letter; which Le Sage in
Gil Bias converts into a proper name, Sangrado.
310 THE QUARTERLY ON ENDYMION
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 dis-
praise 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 reiterated 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 ad-
mitted, 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 DisraeH'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
INDIGNANT FRIENDS: BAILEY 311
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 Qtcar-
terly. 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 HazHtt 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 treat-
ment of himself. Meantime some of his friends and
more than one stranger were actively sympathetic and
indignant on his behalf. A just and vigorous expostu-
lation 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 Edin-
burgh Review conducted the monthly periodical which
had been kind to Keats's first volume,^ and proposed
^ The old Scots Magazine lately re-started under a new name; see
above, p. 132.
312 REYNOLDS
to publish in it an attack on Blackwood and the ^V
articles: but Constable would not take the risk. Rey-
nolds 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 Himt reprinted with some intro-
ductory 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 appre-
ciate 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 Himt 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 sover-
eignty 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
WOODHOUSE AND TAYLOR 313
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 autimm sought to enlist on behaK of the
victim the private sjnmpathies of one of the most culti-
vated 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 hfe
when he tried to bear down this yoimg 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 atten-
tion 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. Accord-
ingly 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
314 KEATS'S COMPOSURE UNDER ATTACK
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, indifTerent, 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 indepen-
dently without Judgment. I may write independently, and with
Judgment^ hereafter, ^he 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
SUBSEQUENT EFFECTS 315
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. s
Since these firm expressions of indifference to critical
attack have been before the worlds it has been too con-
fidently 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
316 TOM KEATS IN EXTREMIS
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 watch-
ing 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,
THREE MONTHS BY THE SICK-BED 317
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 correspon-
dence 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 out-
ward and inward being fuller and richer than we possess
from any other poet, and except in one single particular
absolutely unreserved. Despatching the packet on his
birthday, that is October 29 or 31, he explains why it
is not longer (it is over 7,000 words): 'Tom is rather
more easy than he has been: but is still so nervous
that I cannot speak to him of these Matters — ^indeed
it is the care I have had to keep his mind aloof from
feelings too acute that has made this letter so short a
one — I did not like to write before him a letter he knew
was to reach your hands — I cannot even now ask him
for any Message — his heart speaks to you. Be as happy
as you can.' Keats had begun by warning George and
his wife, in language of beautiful tender moderation
and sincerity, to prepare their minds for the worst, and
assuring them of the comfort he took in the thoughts of
318 FIRST JOURNAL-LETTER TO AMERICA
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 Inver-
ness 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 Rey-
noldses, ^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 conven-
tionally and politely, with a mysterious lady acquaint-
ance 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 call-
ing 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
DREAD OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE 319
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 any-
thing 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
320 DEATH OF TOM KEATS
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 1 the end
came. * Early the next morning/ writes Brown, ^I was
awakened in bed by a pressure on my hand. It was
Keats, who came to tell me that his brother was no
more. I said nothing, and we both remained silent for
a while, my hand fast locked in his. At length, my
thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said, —
"Have nothing more to do with those lodgings, — and
alone too! Had you not better live with me?^' He
paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied, "I think
it would be better." From that moment he was my
inmate. '
CHAPTER XI
DECEMBER 1818-JUNE 1819: 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-boy
— 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. DOke 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
* 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 1885 by Mr William Dilke,
the then surviving brother of Keats's friend. This gentleman also showea
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, age 93. He and Mrs Proctor, the widow of
321
322 REMOVAL TO WENTWORTH PLACE
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 feel-
ingly of Mrs Bentley's kindness and attention during his
late trouble. As soon, relates Brown, as the consola-
tions 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
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 knQwn »nd spoken to Keats.
WORK ON HYPERION 323
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 Httle
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 Januaiy 4, enables us, like others to the
same correspondents, to lay our finger on almost every
strand in the 'mingled yam' 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 Hay don. 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
324 THE INSATIABLE HAYDON
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 honour-
able 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 Hyjperion, 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 (after-
wards 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 Himt) ; about Mrs Dilke's cats, and about Godwin's
novels and Hazlitt's opinion of them, and the rare
THE MISSES PORTER 325
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 1814, 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 Himt (the
last-named is our witness for the fact).
Keats teUs moreover how an imknown 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 £25 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 thi'ough 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
^ The only set of engravings existing in Keats's time after pictures at
Milan was the Raccol a. etc., of Zanconi (1813), which gives only panels
and canvases by masters of the full Renaissance in private collections.
326 A MINGLED YARN
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 Pen-
serosa' 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 reassuring
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 reheved except
when I am composing — so I will write away.' And
CHARLES LAMB AND PUNNING 327
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 Hke, 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 begun.' 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 1818 (but then certainly
only a little) or else in these Christmas weeks from
mid-December to mid-January 1818-19. 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 de-
vastated and excruciated with bad and repeated pirns —
Brown don't want to go again.' Punning, like snuffing,
was the aU 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
328 HUNT AND HIS SATELLITES
musical parties were frequented by all the Lamb and
Himt 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 super-
fluity 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 com-
plete 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
FANNY BRAWNE 329
planning on the ways and manners of Hunt and his
sateUites.
In the same letter a new personage makes her
momentous entiy 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 fortime, 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
330 A SUDDEN ENSLAVEMENT
love; and the 'new, strange, and threatening sorrow,'
from which he had with reHef 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 secretive-
ness 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 Hkeness 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 border-
ing 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 haK 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 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
SEVERN'S IMPRESSIONS 331
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 reahse 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 con-
fidence, 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 circum-
as a young boy about 1819-20, and seventy years later gave his impressions
as follows {New York Herald, April 12, 1889). '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 Hamp-
stead were a number of foreign gentlemen. Keats could not talk French
as they could, and their conversation with his fiancee 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 Med win,
which seem to show a true, and even tender, understanding of his character
if not of his genius (see below p. 465).
332 VISIT TO HAMPSHIRE
stances 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 depar-
ture 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 reHef 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 con-
sumptives, 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 Hamp-
shire from Christmas until mid-January. He then
^ Upoq 8' aire (jl' i XuoiixiXT)? Jovel
YXux6xcxpov itiLdxavov 6pxsT6v. — Sappho, Fr. 40.
THE EVE OF ST AGNES 333
carried out his promise, going to join Brown at Bed-
hampton, 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 fort-
night 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 Hyjperion, 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 mediaeval romance beginning to occupy his imagina-
tion 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 Rey-
nolds's Garden of Florence and Ladye of Provence"! We
shall see that Boccaccio counts for something in Keats's
334 RETURN AND ENGAGEMENT
treatment of the St Agnes' Eve story, so that the sup-
position is at least plausible. Or may it even have
been of this story and not, as is commonly assumed, of
Hyperion that he was thinking as far back as September
1817 when he wrote to Hay don 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 Words-
worth) is otherwise unknown in connexion with Keats.
Did the same lady also tell him of the tradition con-
cerning St Mark's day (April 25th), and so become
the 'only begetter' of that remarkable fragment The
Eve of St Mark, which he wrote (Woodhouse again is
the authority for the dates) between the 13th and 17th of
February after his return to Hampstead ? In connexion
with Keats few stones have been left unturned for
further personal or critical research, but here is one.
Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of January
and it must have been very soon afterwards that he
became the declared and accepted lover of Fanny
Brawne, savouring intensely thenceforward all the tan-
talising 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 yoimg
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 immedi-
ately 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
ODE TO FANNY 335
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 24th and again the following morning.
I imagine both sonnet and ode to have been written
while the cold spell lasted, the sonnet probably before
dawn on the actual morning of the 25th.'^ 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 humiU-
ating 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,
* There is no autograph of this ode, only transcripts bv friends, and
Mr Buxton Forman was most likely right in suggesting that the true reading
for 'not' should be 'out.'
2 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.
336 LOVE AND JEALOUSY
As when with ravished, aching, vassal eyes.
Lost in soft amaze,
I gaze, I gaze I
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 mused rhyme.'
Fearing the intrusion of what in another sonnet of
the time he calls 'The dragon-world and all its himdred
eyes,' he was intensely jealous in guarding his secret
from friends and acquaintances; and in writing even
to those dearest to him he lets slip no word that might
betray it. To his brother he merely says, ' Miss Brawne
and I have now and then a chat and a tiff,' while to his
young sister he writes on February 27th that he wishes
HAYDON AGAIN 337
he could come to her at Walthamstow for a month or so,
packing off Mrs Abbey to town, and get her to teach him
*a few common dancing steps/ — for what reason, to us
too pathetically evident, he of course gives no hint.
On February 14th, about a fortnight after his return
from Hampshire, and on the very day when according
to Woodhouse he began The Eve of St Mark, Keats had
put pen to a new journal-letter for America. A straw
showing how the wind was blowing with him is his
mention that the Reynolds sisters, whose company
used to be among his chief pleasures, are staying at
the Dilkes next door and that he finds them 'very
dull.' So, we may guess, will they on their, parts
have foimd 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
3^our promised assistance. . . . Before the 20th if you
could help me it would be nectar and manna and all
the blessings of gratified thirst.' Keats had intended
for Haydon's relief some of the money due to him from
his brother Tom's share in their grandmother's gift;
which he expected his guardian to make over to him at
once on his appKcation. 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 repHes 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 gettiag 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 five on for two years.
Incidentally he mentions that he has already lent sums
to various friends amounting in all to near £200, of which
he expects the repayment late if ever. The upshot of
338 LETTERS TO FANNY KEATS
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 Kttle together: but you
have not the less been with me in thought. You have
no one else in the world besides me who would sacrifice
anything for you — I feel myself the only Protector you
have. In all your little troubles think of me with the
thought that there is at least one person in England who
if he could would help you out of them — I live in hopes
of being able to make you happy.' Another day he is
all playfulness, thinking of various little presents to
please her, a selection of Tassie's gems, flowers from the
Tottenham nursery garden, drawing materials — and
here follows the passage above quoted (p. 10) against
keeping live birds or fishes: —
They are better in the trees and the water, — though I must con-
fess even now a partiaHty for a handsome globe of gold-ifish —
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
TWO MONTHS' IDLENESS 339
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 pro-
misingly begun. For fully two months after breaking
off the latter fragment (February 17th or 18th) he
was quite out of cue for writing, and produced nothing
except the ode To Fanny (if I am right as to its date)
and a few personal sonnets. Many causes, we can feel,
were working together to check for the time being the
creative impulse within him: the mere disturbing influ-
ence of the spring season for one thing; discouragement
at the public reception of his work for another, though
this was a motive external and relatively secondary;
the results of a deliberate mental stock-taking of his
own powers and performances for a third; and more
deep-seated and compulsive, though unexpressed, than
any of these, the love-passion by which three-fourths
of his soul and consciousness had come to be absorbed.
Here, from a letter to Haydon of March 8, is an example
of what I mean by his mental stock-taking. The resolu-
tion 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 imagin-
ation 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
340 PRAISE OF CLARET
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 dis-
appointment; 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 wholesome-
ness of that beverage and adds Hhis 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 passimJ Turning to his
own affairs, he says, —
I am in no despair about them — my poem has not at all suc-
ceeded ; 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
BAILEY'S LOVE-AFFAIRS 341
-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 Rey-
nolds, begging that she would take time to consider her
answer, and that while her decision was still imcertain
Bailey, to the great indignation of aU the Reynolds
family and a httle 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 fuH, that incom-
parable 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 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. 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
WTiting 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
342 FIT OF LANGUOR
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 13th 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.
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 recol-
lections 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
Pl. IX
Figures on a Greek vase : a man and two women
FROM AN ETCHING IN PIRANESl's VASI E CANDELABRI
FIGHT WITH A BUTCHER-BOY 343
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, smd 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 14th and 19th, that he has not
seen Clarke 'for God knows how long,' further fixes it
as after mid-February; while the latest hmit is set by
the fact that by Easter Clarke had gone away to five
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, grate-
fully welcomed as a relief from the strain of feelings
habitually more acute than nature could well bear.
Ambition he was schoohng, 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 Hving; 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
1 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 Uke 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.'
344 SONNET-CONFESSIONS
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 1 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 I
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 Night-
ingale written a few weeks later, and in its phrase 'on
this very midnight cease' anticipates one of the great
lines of the ode itself.
No letter of Keats— or of any one — ^is richer than this
of February to May 1819 in variety of mood and theme
and interest. It contains two of the freshest and most
luminous of his discursive passages of meditation on life
and on the nature of the soul and the meaning of things:
passages showing a native power of thought untrained
indeed, but also unhampered, by academic knowledge and
study, and hardly to be suipassed for their union of
REFLECTIONS ETHICAL AND COSMIC 345
steady human common-sense with airy ease and play of
imaginative speculation. In one, starting from reflec-
tions 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 dis-
interestedness 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
346 MEETING WITH COLERIDGE
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 conver-
sation, 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 agree-
able — 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 encyclopaedic 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.
* 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.
THE SAME ACCORDING TO THE SAGE 347
He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so.
After he had left us a Httle 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
beHeve, before the consumption showed itself distinctly/
The story of Coleridge's observation after the hand-
shake is no doubt exact: the 'not well-dressed' in his
description of Keats may very well be so too: but
the 4oose' and 'slack' appHed to his appearance must
have been drawn from the sage's inward eye, as all
accoimts 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 earher 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 con-
348 A TACTFUL REVIEW
ceive 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 himible life such as The Idiot Boy and Alice Fell. The
annoimcement 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 inten-
tion: 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 caU it a little pohtic,' 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
^Comhill Magazine, April 1917: 'A Talk with Coleridge,* edited by
Miss E. M. Green.
SONNETS ON FAME 349
March 13 to his brother and sister-in-law: — 'I know not
why poetry and I have been so distant lately; I must
make some advances or she will cut me entirely': and
again to the same on April 15, 'I am still at a standstill
in versifying, I cannot do it yet with any pleasure/ To
his young sister Fanny he had written two days earlier
that his idleness had been growing upon him of late, 'so
that it will require a great shake to get rid of it. I
have written nothing and almost read nothing — but I
must turn over a new leaf.' Within the next two weeks
the dormant impulse began to re-awake in him with
power. As we have seen, he had never quite stopped
writing personal sonnets. Towards the end of the
month we find him trying, not very successfully, to
invent a new sonnet form, but soon reverting to his
accustomed Shakespearean type of three quatrains
closed by a couplet. Here is the better of two sonnets
which he wrote on April 30 to express the present
abatement of his former hot desire for fame: —
Fame, like a wayward Girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
' But makes surrender to some thoughtless Boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gipsy, will not speak to those
Who have not learnt to be content without her;
A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close.
Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;
A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born,
Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;
Ye love-sick Bards, repay her scorn for scorn.
Ye Artists lovelorn, madmen that ye are !
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.
The thought here is curiously anticipated in a passage of
Browne's Britannia^s Pastorals, itself reminiscent of a
well known line in Theocritus. Is the coincidence a
coincidence merely, or had the Hues 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
350 LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
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 common-
place operatic chorus of the Fairies of the Four Elements,
and as though it were of no greater value, that master-
piece 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
1 Kal 4>e0yei ^iKhvra Kal ad <f>i\4ovTa Su&Kei. Theocr. Idyll, vi. 27.
*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.
THE RIGHT VERSION QUOTED 351
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 !
what can ail thee, knight-at-arms
So haggard and so woe-begone ?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.
1 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 lulled me asleep.
And there I dreamed, ah woe betide.
The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hill side.
352 THE FIVE ODES
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 withered from the lake.
And no birds sing.
Keats of course gives his brother no hint of what to
us seems so manifest, the appHcation of these verses to
his own predicament, and only adds a hght and laughing
comment on one of the rime-words. Closing his packet
a few days later (May 3) he adds, as the last poem he
has written, the Od^ to Psyche. He wrote, as is well
known, four other odes this spring, those On Indolencej
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, — Hhe idle fever of two months without
any fruit,' — blasting 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 excep-
tion in regard to the ode On Indolence, although, seeing
that it embodies just such a relaxed mood of mind and
body as we have found recorded by Keats in his letter
to his brother under date March 19, and embodies it
THEIR DATE AND ORDER 353
with the self-same imager}^, 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 per-
fectly 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
Jime 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, foimd him folding away carelessly
behind some books in his room. This discovery, says
354 A FRUITFUL MAY
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 imcle 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 suppHes 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,'
1 Brown, writing many years after the events, must be a little out
here, seeing that already on April 30th Keats tells his brother that Brown
is busv 'rummaging out his Keats's old sins, that is to say sonnets.' (Note
that iCeats mentions no odes.) Brown is in like manner wrong in remem-
bering 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 1903). It
is now in the collection of Lord Crewe.
INDECISION AND ANXIETY 355
says Keats, 'seem to care much about it, but let me go
without my money ahnost with nonchalance/ This was
too much even for Keats's patience, and he declares that
he shall never count Hay don a friend again. Neverthe-
less he by and by let old affection resimie its sway, and
entered into the other's interests and endured his exhor-
tations 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 doubt-
ful if the veiy existence of these and other fxmds 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 Jeffreys 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
^When in 1823-4 their existence was disclosed and they were divided
on the order of the Court of Chancery between George Keats and his
sister, they amounts with accumulations of interest to a little over £4500.
356 A CONFIDENTIAL LETTER
trampled aside into the bye paths of life and seen the festerings
of Society. They have not been treated Hke 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 Jonson
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, conse-
quently a little less of a versifying Pet-lamb. I have put no more
in Print or you should have had it. You will judge of my 1819
temper when I tell you that the thing I have most enjoyed this
year has been writing an ode to Indolence.
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
DEPARTURE FOR SHANKLIN 357
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 doggerel 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 behef 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 9;
'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.'
CHAPTER XII
JUNE 1819-JANUARY 1820: 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 Went-
worth 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 bitter-
ness — 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 en-
chantress 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
1 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 bis sojourn.
358
WORK ON OTHO AND LAMIA 359
sore, his nerves unstrung, his heart, in despite of dis-
tance, knowing Httle 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 simi variously
stated at £300 or £500, was supposed to possess the
requisite stage experience. To him were assigned the
plot and construction of the play, for which he was to
receive half profits in the event of success, while Keats
undertook to compose the dialogue. The subject was
one taken from the history of the Emperor Otho the
Great. The two friends sat opposite each other at
the same table, and Keats wrote scene after scene as
Brown sketched it out to him, in each case without
enquiring what was to come next. The collaboration
of genius and mediocrity rarely succeeds, and it seems
hard to conceive a more unpromising mode of it than
this. Besides the work by means of which Keats thus
hoped, at least in sanguine hours, to find an escape
from material difficulties, he was busily engaged work-
ing by himseK 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
360 LETTERS TO FANNY BRAWNE
mind to move with Brown to the more bracing air of
Winchester.
From these weeks at Shanklin date the earhest 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 reason-
able, 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 in-
creasingly as time went on, at least as much of bitter-
ness 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 ^f 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
KEATS AS LOVER .%1
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 Happi-
ness 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 know you 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 disinterested-
ness 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
362 AN IMAGINED FUTURE
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 imder 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
CKffs, 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 —
CHANGE TO WINCHESTER 363
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 Win-
chester 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 passed
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
if 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 noticed 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 a 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 hiurying limpid chalk-
streams and beautiful elm-shadowed meadow walks,
and the tonic climate of its siu-rounding 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
364 WORK AND FINE WEATHER
good days of his life. Working with a steady intensity
of appHcation, he managed, as the last extract shows,
to steel himself for the time being against the impor-
timity of his passion, although never without a certain
feverishness in the effort, and to keep the thought of
money troubles at bay by buoying himself up with the
firm hope of a stage success. His work continued to
be chiefly on Lamia, with the concluding part of Otho,
and the beginning of a new tragedy on the story of
King Stephen. In the last act of Otho and the opening
scenes (which are all he did) of King Stephen he laboured
alone, without accepting help from Brown. On the
25th of August he writes to Reynolds, as usual more
gravely and openly than to any other correspondent,
of his present feelings in regard to life and literature.
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
* — and now his heart
Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength
Glories — . Milton, Par. Lost, i. 581.
ILL NEWS FROM GEORGE 365
shivering — but fair atmosphere to think in — a clean towel
marked 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 bath-
ing — 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 5) he discourses pleasantly
to Taylor on the virtues and drawbacks of different
kinds of country air and on the effects of field labour
on the character; and by way of a specimen of his
work sends a passage of thirty lines from Lamia. By
this time Brown had gone off to visit friends at Bed-
hampton and elsewhere, and Keats was left alone at
Winchester. Presently came a disturbing letter from
George, established by this time at the then remote
trading settlement of Louisville, Ohio, and in difficulties
from a heavy loss incurred through a venture into which
he had been led, dishonestly as he believed, by the
naturalist Audubon. He asks in consequence that
Abbey should be pressed to send him the share due to
him from their brother Tom's estate. This could only
be done if their aunt Jennings could be persuaded to
free Abbey's hands by dropping her threatened Chancery
suit. Hurrying to London to try and put this business
through, Keats stayed there three days (Septr. 10-13),
but dared not break his serenity by sight or touch of
his enchantress. In a note to her he writes, ^I love
you too much to venture to Hampstead, I feel it is not
paying a visit, but venturing into a fire. ... I am a
Coward, I cannot bear the pain of being happy, 'tis out
of the question; I must admit no thought of it.' He
366 A RUN TO TOWN
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 Waltham-
stow, 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 pubhsh 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. Where-
upon Woodhouse makes the judicious comment: Hhis
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 sim-
plicity 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
1 Morgan MSS.
A TALK WITH WOODHOUSE 367
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 dis-
figuring note of cynical realism or 'pettish disgust'
into the concluding lines telhng 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 ^ delightful
time together. He was leaving London the same after-
noon for Weymouth, and Keats came to the coach-
ofiice 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 t^te
a me.'
Such touches of over-sensitive prudery set aside, the
more light we get on this friend of Keats, Richard
368 WOODHOUSE AS CRITIC
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
Shakespeare 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, diu'ing 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 God-
dess 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.
ALONE AT WINCHESTER 369
By September 14 Keats was back at Winchester,
where during the next three weeks he had a chance of
testing his capacity for soHtude. 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 Para-
dise Lost was becoming every day a greater wonder
to him. Now, in the third week of September he had
come to regard it, Hhough so fine itself,' as a 'corruption
of our language,' a case of 'a northern dialect accom-
modating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and
intonations;' and had convinced himself, paradoxi-
cally, that the purest English was Chatterton's, — ^which
is in truth no right English at all, but the attempt of
a brilhant 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 S3nitax. 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 imjust 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 imposi-
tions 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 himseK when he speaks of his 'imsteady
and vagarish disposition'; let us rather say his sensi-
tive 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, —
370 SPIRITED LETTERS: TO HIS BROTHER
Lamia he had finished, and for the present he did no
more to King Stephen. ReaHzing 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 success-
ful, create a more favourable atmosphere for its re-
ception; 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 whole-
some 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 epis-
tolary mood came upon him, and between September
17th and 27th he poured himself out to his brother and
sister-in-law in a new long journal-letter, fuU of confi-
dences 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 mis-
cellaneous themes, discussing his own and his brother's
situation and future; telling of Haydon and his incon-
siderate 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 k
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
TO REYNOLDS, BROWN, AND DILKE 371
me, where does it leave off?"' With an unexpressed
shaft of inward mockery at his own pHght, 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 pohtics, 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 autimin quietude so com-
forting. 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 comer 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 Re}Tiolds, 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 footiag 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 unagiriings he will. In reference to George's
money troubles, ^Rest in the confidence,' he says,
Hhat 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 brother's and his own immediate prospect he
372 HOPES AND RESOLUTIONS
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 manu-
script 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
WILL WORK FOR THE PRESS 373
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 deter-
mined 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 litera-
ture 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 super-
sede 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 ac-
cordingly: —
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. AVhen 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
374 ATTEMPT AND BREAKDOWN
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. 25), and thither he betook himself, it would seem
on the 7th or 8th 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 pur-
poseful 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 10th 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 foj* 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 absorbed me.
He seems to have spent the next week going back-
wards and forwards between Hampstead and London,
RETURN TO WENTWORTH PLACE 375
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 20th 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 corre-
spondence 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
376 MORNING AND EVENING TASKS
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 mider the
pseudonym of 'Lucy Vaughan Lloyd ^ the other,
carried on each evening in the seclusion of his own
room, that of remodelling Hype rion into the _fonnof
aJDreain_orVision^^ 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 occupa-
tions 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, in-
creasing 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'
CRIES OF PASSION 377
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; —
378 SIGNS OF DESPONDENCY
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 starved 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 direfuUy the obsession
that now seems to make him think of even his friend-
ships 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 earHer, '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
TESTIMONY OF BROWN 379
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, in-
directly, 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 penny-
less. 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
380 HAYDON'S EXAGGERATIONS
enemies, he began to despond, and flew to dissipation ac 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 scandalise 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 17th he was
still, or had quite lately been, going on with The Cap
and Bells. He writes on that date to Taylor depreci-
ating 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 aind the surest guarantee
of harmonious numbers I have been endeavouring to persuade
SCHEMES AND DOINGS 381
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 hom^ 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 greatcoat 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 BrowTi 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, Hurned on fairy tales —
Brown's forte — Dilke not liking them. Brown said
382 VISIT OF GEORGE KEATS
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 (1820). 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
realised 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 wi'ites, '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 Win-
chester 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 13th, a week after George's arrival,
PLEASANTRY AND BITTERNESS 383
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 Ainerica 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
playfuUest, 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.
384 BEGINNING OF THE END
This was written on January 17th. 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 3rd, came
the crash towards which, as we can now see, Keats's
physical constitution had been hastening ever since the
overexertion 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 Feb-
ruary 3rd., 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, 1818 and 1819, on which his fame as
a great English poet is chiefly founded.
CHAPTER XIII
WORK OF 1818, 1819.— 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 — QuaUties: A questionable claim —
On Indolence — On a Grecian Urn — Sources: A composite — Spheres
of art and Ufe 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 execu-
tion 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.
385
386 MINOR ACHIEVEMENTS
One finished thing only, the play of OtJw the Greats 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 seK.
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 Merri-
lies, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci. There remains
chiefly the batch of pieces in the seven-syllable couplet
metre printed in the Lamia volume between the odes
To Psyche and To Autumn. Two of these. Lines on
the Mermaid Tavern and Robin Hood, were written, as
we have seen, at the beginning of 1818, in the months
when Keats was living alone in Well Walk and resting
after his labour on Endymion. Both are easy, spirited,
and intensely English in feeling; both, for all their
gay lightness of touch, are marked with that vivid
imaginative life in single phrases which almost from
the first, amidst all the rawnesses of his youth, stamps
Keats for a poet of the great lineage. Already two
years earlier, in the valentine 'Hadst thou liv'd in days
of old,' he had shown a fair command of this metre,
and now we can feel that he has an ear well trained in
its cadences by familiarity with the finest early models,
from Fletcher (in the Faithful Shepherdess) and Ben
Jonson (in the masque of The Satyr, the songs To
Celia, and the Charts lyrics) down to U Allegro and
II Penseroso.
The other two pieces in the same form. Bards of Passion
and of Mirth and Fancy, date from nearly a year later,
BARDS OF PASSION AND OF MIRTH 387
when Keats had settled under Brown's roof after Tom's
death, and were copied by him for his brother in a
letter dated January 2nd, 1819. In the Mermaid Tavern
Knes 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 teUs 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, tranced 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-livM in regions new ! —
in this affirmation it seems, as Mr Buxton Forman has
pointed out, as though Keats were gaily coimtering 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 strict-
ness 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
1 Thoughts siiggested on the hanks of Nith, near the poet^s residence: the
third poem in Memorials of a Tour in Scotland.
388 FANCY
rather at random; but he had already called the Bacchus
lyric in Endymion sl roundelay, and seems to have thought
that the name might apply to any set of verses return-
ing 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 con-
densed 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
comer 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^ : —
* First printed in Hunt's Reflector and reprinted in the two-volume
edition of Lamb's works published in 1818.
THE TALES— ISABELLA 389
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 haimted him, as witness his
verse-epistle to Reynolds from Teignmouth, the frag-
ment 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 EHzabethan 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 symboHc theme of the dethrone-
ment 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 De-
cameron), made a sudden beginning at it before he
390 STORY AND METRE
left Hampstead at the end of February (1819), and
finished it at Teignmouth in the course of April. As
an appropriate vehicle for an Italian story he took the
Italian ottava rima or stanza of eight. Several of the
earlier English poets had used this metre: Keats's
main model for it was doubtless Edward Fairfax, who,
following other Elizabethan translators, had in his fine
version from Tasso, Godfrey of Bulloigne, done much
more than any of his predecessors towards suppling
and perfecting its treatment in English. Since then it
had been little employed in our serious poetry, but had
lately been brilliantly revived for flippant and satiric
uses, after later Italian models, by Hookham Frere
and Byron. Keats goes over the heads of these direct
to Fairfax, and in certain points at least, in variety of
pause and cadence and subtle adaptation of verbal
music to emotional effect, by a good deal outdoes even
that excellent master.^ 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), hving
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 imtil her brothers
take it from her, whereupon she pines away and dies.
Boccaccio tells this story with that admirable com-
bination of straightforward conciseness and finished
grace which characterizes his mature prose. Keats in
his poem romantically amplifies and embroiders it. In
* A copy of Fairfax's Tasso appears in the list of books left by Keats at
his death.
INFLUENCE OF CHAUCER 391
his way of doing so we can trace the influence of Chaucer,
with whose Trailus 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, en-
tirely 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 aU idea
of improving the tale and defining the poet's attempt
as maxie but to honom* 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 EngHsh. ^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 murdered 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.
392 APOSTROPHES AND INVOCATIONS
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 suf-
ferings 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 himianly
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 admir-
able beauties: I mean the invocation beginning 'O
Melancholy, linger here awhile,' repeated with lovely
modulations in stanzas Iv, Ivi, and Ixi; 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 Endymiony 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
* This point has been made by Mr Buxton Forman, Complete Works of
J, K., ii. p. 41, footnote.
HORROR TURNED TO BEAUTY 393
tissue of the poem we shall rather find it in a stanza
like this: —
Parting they seemed 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
jocimd and uplifting as some radiant symboHc 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 dis-
394 THE DIGGING SCENE
covery and digging up of the body, Boccaccio turns
the difficulty which must inhere in any reahstic treat-
ment of the theme by simply saying that it was un-
corrupted; as though some kind of miracle had kept
it fresh. Keats on the other hand confronts the diffi-
culty 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 turned 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 stayed her care.
But to throw back at times her veiling hair.
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 simOe in the third and
Plate X
2/
1
^^ c-LC^^jjjLs. did Htloj oM^ lU JCCULU ttcl.
mt' i a /UaMat. iM cj Hl cUk : |
^d ^Ui/r vlt.x, ii^r rj^£rii>, onluj J- Maxj \
n , ■''' li -^ I n ,<i I
PAGE FROM ISABELLA; OR, THE POT OF BASIL
FROM AN AUTOGRAPH BY KEATS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM
ITS QUALITY 395
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 com-
mentary 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 resimiption
and continuance of her labours, with gestiu-es 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 com-
bined 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 illimainating
power of true imaginative poetry, the closest rhetorical
condensations of that school seem thin, their most glit-
tering 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
^ 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
Hght (see below, p. 471), as the pick of the whole Lamia volume.
396 THE EVE OF ST AGNES
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, j
And divine liquids come with odorous ooze
Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfuUy, —
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 himaan
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 fault-
less 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 Manner, Christahel, The Lay of
the Last Minstrel, and Isabella itself. The tale hinges
on the popular belief that on St Agnes's Eve (January
the 20th) a maiden might win sight of her future
husband in a dream by going to bed supperless,
silent and without looking behind her, and sleeping on
her back with her hands on the pillow above her head.
This belief is mentioned by two writers at least with
whom Keats was very familiar: by Ben Jonson in his
masque The Satyr and Robert Burton in the Anatomy
VARIETY OF SOURCES 397
0/ Melancholy, An eighteenth-century book of refer-
ence 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, mention-
ing other and alternative rites. But one feature of
the promised vision which in Keats's mind was evi-
dently 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 recognised.
It was an obvious and easy idea for Keats to weave
into the St Agnes's 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 momen-
tary disenchantment and alarm on awakening, her
re-assurance and surrender and their ensuing happy
imion and flight. All these circumstances, it has been
shown, except the immediate flight of the lovers, are
closely paralleled in Boccaccio's early novel II Fihcolo,
and look as though they must have been derived from
it. The Filocolo is an excessively tedious and occasion-
ally 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
1 That published by Allan Awnmarsh, 5th ed. 1684, notes Woodhouse;
and a copy of the same is noted in the hst of Keats's books.
398 BOCCACCIO'S FILOCOLO
Ariosto at the rate of ten or a dozen stanzas a day. A
French seventeenth-century version of the Filocolo in-
deed existed, but none in EngHsh. 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 corre-
sponding chapter in Boccaccio's tale.^
But the question of sources is one for the special
student, and its discussion may easily tire the lay
*See article by H. Noble M'Cracken in Philological Journal of the Chicago
University, Vol. 1908. The romance of Flaire 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
rin^ 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 mediaeval 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 (1806). But unluckily neither this nor, appar-
ently, 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 inven-
tion and to have been known to Keats, directly or indirectly, from the
Filocolo itself.
POETIC SCOPE AND METHOD 399
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 Alexan-
drine 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 sugges-
tion 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 himian
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 circum-
stances, 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 open-
ing 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 ^seemM 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
400 EXAMPLES
our sjonpathy with the shivering fancy of the
beadsman : —
Knights, ladies, praying in dumb oratories.
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 partic-
ular 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
1 In both the chapel monuments and the banquet-hall corbels there
may be a memory of the following passage from Gary's Dante (quoted
by Mr Buxton Forman and Prof, de S^lincourt) : —
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 FUocolo a single
special colour effect is got by describmg the room as lit up by two great
pendent self-luminous carbuncles.
THE UNROBING SCENE 401
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 EUzabethan romantic poetry re-awoke in Keats, and
how much enriched and enhanced, after two himdred
years, let him compare aU this scene of Madeline's
unrobing with the passage from Brown's Britannia^s
Pastorals which was probably in his memory when he
wrote it (see above, p. 98).
When Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet
would have dwelt on their lustre or other visible quali-
ties: 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.
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 partic-
ularity, 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
1 Paradise Lost, v. 341-347. 2 Ed. 1860, pp. 269, 270.
402 THE FEAST OF FRUIT
the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles in
Shakespeare's Hne 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 Shake-
speare'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 begin-
ning 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 Por-
phyrons 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 admir-
able in particular is the debate held by Angela with
Porphyro in her
little moonlight room
Pale, latticed, chill, and silent as a tomb.
Madeline, a figure necessarily in the main passive, is
none the less exquisite, whether in her gentle dealing
A ROUNDED CLOSE 403
with the nurse on the staircase; or when closing her
chamber door she pants with quenched taper in the
moonHght, 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 V^
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 ancj felicity of imagina-
tion 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 roimd
the tale, after all its glow of passionate colour and music,
of trembling anticipation and love-worship enraptured
* 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 Teign-
mouth, had at first turned this line otherwise, — 'For o'er the bleak
Dartmoor I have a home for thee.'
404 LAMIA
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, Lamiay
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
* 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 palsv: and with face deform
The beadsman stiffened, '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 Wood-
house, reverted to the earlier and better version.
SOURCES: AND A COMPARISON 405
led him, during those spring months of 1819 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 Httle
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 Biuiion from Philo-
stratus, 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 deHghts built by her
magic, untn their happiness was shattered by the scrutiny
of intrusive and coldblooded wisdom.
In June 1819, soon after the inspiration which pro-
duced the Odes had passed away, and before he left
Hampstead for the Isle of Wight, Keats made a be-
ginning on this new task; continued it at intervals,
concurrently with his attempts in drama, at ShankHn
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 ThessaMan en-
chantress 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 teU an old Greek tale of
magic in the form of narrative verse then most fashion-
able, the mixed four-stressed couplet and ballad measure
of Scott and Bjo-on, 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
406 METRE AND QUALITY
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 Dr^gn and not
of the Elizabethans, though retaining pleasant traces
i of the Elizabethan usages of the over-run or enjambe-
I ment 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 I Look back ! Ah ! goddess, see
Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee I
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:
BEAUTIES AND FAULTS 407
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 Endymiorij
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 whatever they please/
and worse stni, 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
408 PERPLEXING MORAL
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 fimdamental flaw in Lamia concerns its
moral. The word is crude: what I mean is the bewilder-
ment 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. ApoUonius 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 ApoUonius ?
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
THE SAGE DENOUNCED: WHY? 409
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 question-
ings 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 immask 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 intellec-
tual grasp? And especially as to the last lines, do
we not feel that they are but a cheap and imiQumi-
nating 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 twenty years earlier written more
wisely, * Poetry is the impassioned expression in the
eyes of all science.' The latter-day Wordsworth, and
Keats after him, should have realised that the dis-
coveries of 'philosophy,' meaning science, create new
410 COMMENTS OF LEIGH HUNT
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
volimie, 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 ApoUonius 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
THE ODES: TO PSYCHE 411
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 up-
lif tings 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 medita-
tions he had perfected during the same interval a new
and beautiful vehicle in the ode. He had been accus-
tomed 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 Endy-
mion, the choral hymn to Pan and the song of the
Indian maiden to Sorrow. But those which he com-
posed in quick succession, as we have seen, in the late
spring of 1819 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
412 SOURCES: BURTON AND APULEIUS
the poet's delight in that late, exquisitely and spirit-
ually symbolic product of the mythologic spirit of ex-
piring 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 read-
ing 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 Musee Napoleon (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 treat-
ment 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 compoimd epithets is by this
* May the following be counted evidence to the same effect ? The old
woman in AvuLeius, 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.
QUALITIES: A QUESTIONABLE CLAIM 413
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 ^ sof t-conched
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 fehcity in
style and a singular freshness and fire of music in the
verse, both his sense of the meaning of Greek nature-
rehgion 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 expres-
sion whereby the poet offers himself and the homage
of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in Heu 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 mm-mur in the wind.
But in a moment we are carried beyond criticism by
that incomparable distiQation 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
414 ON INDOLENCE
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 rosey 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. 342), — ^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
ON A GRECIAN URN 415
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 steeped in honey'd indolence.
They come by once more, and again, barely aroused
from the sweets of outdoor slumber and the spring after-
noon, 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 com-
posed, 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 ail-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 'inter-
coronation' 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 /arce.'
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
416 SOURCES: A COMPOSITE
is no single oi^ actually existing specimen of Attic handi-
craft 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-loiig 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. Criticism
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 Musee Napoleon there actually
exists a tracing by his hand.^ But this is a serene and
ceremonial composition: for the timiult 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,
* The Musee Napoleon 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, 1906.
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 m a paper by
Paul Wolters, in Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen, Band xx,
Heft 1/2: Braunschweig; though I think he is too positive in ruhng 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 repro-
duced in The Odes of Keats, by A. C. Downer, M.A. (Oxford, 1897).
THE SOSIBIOS VASE
PROFILE AND FRIEZE'. FROM ENGRAVINGS IN THE MUSEE NAPOLEON
SPHERES OF ART AND LIFE CONTRASTED 417
as well as for the thought of the pious morn and the
Httle 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.
In the ode we read how the sculptiu-ed forms of such
an imaginaiy antique, visualized in full intensity before
his mind's eye, have set his thoughts to work, on the
one hand asking himseK what Hving, 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 V^/fil
&y a strmg ol questions which flash their own answei^* IM^ T
upon us — ^interrogatories which are at the same time
pictures, — -^Vhat men or gods are these, what maidens
loth?' etc.t^The second and third stanzas express with .
fuQ feHcity and insight the differences between life, which jl
pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety and 1 1
decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in ex- I \
change permanence of beauty, and the power to charm I \
by imagined experiences even richer than the real. The 1
thought thi'own by Leonardo da Vinci into a single line \
— 'Cosa bella mortal passa e non d'arte' — and expanded I
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 I more happy, happy love I
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 cloyM,
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 ?
418 PLAY BETWEEN THE TWO SPHERES
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^ia
the sphere of reality, and not merely, like the instances
of such arrest given farther back, a necessary conditie»
in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own com-
pensations. 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, ^Wliat-the imagina-
tion seizes as beauty mu^ be truth'; a doctrine which
amidst^^the^popings" 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.
Let us turn now to the second pair — ^for as such I
regard them — of odes written in May-tune, those To a
Nightingale and On Melancholy. Like the Ode on Indo-
lence, 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 in-
voking 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 0, but to excess of happiness in
it. Just as his Grecian urn was no single specimen of
* 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.
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THE NIGHTINGALE ODE 419
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 man-
kind'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 nightin-
gale 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 indi-
vidual 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
or phrase and cadence camiot be more absolute, than
^-
420 ODE ON MELANCHOLY
in the several contrasted stanzas calling for the draft
of southern vintage, picturing the frailty and wretched-
ness 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, Ho 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 himdred associations
derived from the early seventeenth-century poetry in
which his soul was steeped — ^foremost among them no
doubt Milton's U Allegro and II Penseroso, with the
beautiful song from Fletcher's Nice Valour which in-
spired 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 31 and June 9, and on the other
to the tragic third stanza of the nightingale ode. Its
main purport is to proclaim the spiritual nearness, the
A GRAND CLOSE 421
all but inseparablenesS; of joy and pain in human experi-
ence 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 imperplex 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 full-
ness 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 piHng up gruesome images of such things,
and discarded on reflection the former and more grue-
some 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 himg.
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 coimtry, 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
422 THE LAST OF THE ODES
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. Iiij he first stan za the
boimty, in th e last the pens ivene ss, of the tmie are
expressed m words so transparent "and direct^jhatwe'
almost forget t hey are words at all, and natiu-e herseli
f^TiTt TFm spason seem speaking to us: while in the middle
stanza the touches of hterary art and Greek personifi-
cation 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 tinies 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 so ind asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
TO AUTUMN 423
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 ?
CHAPTER XIV
WORK OF 1818, 1819 CONTINUED: 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
Re5aiolds of February 1818, 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
424
SNATCHES EXPRESSIVE OF MOODS 425
one of his letters where he tells how his own can enter
into that of a sparrow picking about the gravel : —
WTiere'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 expresses
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 fiU'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,
"VMien 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 !
426 ODE TO MAIA
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 1818 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 reHef from tendance on his d3dng 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
HYPERION: ITS SCHEME AND SCALE 427
mastery by the poet both over himself and over his
art: — 'It has an air of cahn 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 teU what he knew of the scheme of the work
as Keats had first conceived it: —
The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethrone-
ment 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 1820, that
Hyperion was intended to be as long as Endymiorij 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 Selincourt 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 plimges,
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 Hjrperion,
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 favoiu*
of Apollo. Hyperion, it is true, has not yet spoken
when we are called away from the coimcil, and Keats
428 SOURCES: HOMER AND HESIOD
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 modem writer
free to invent most of his incidents for himseK. 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 Renais-
sance poet Ronsard to his friend Michel de FHdpital.
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
1 Carm. iii. 4, which probably Keats knew also at first hand.
PIERRE RONSARD 429
own invention, relates the birth of the Muses, their
training by their mother M^moire ( = 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: —
Apres sur la plus grosse corde
D'un bruit qui tonnait jusqu'aux cieux,
Le pouce des Muses accorde
L'assaut des Geants et des Dieux.
Keats, although he wi-ites of the battle of the Gods not
against the Giants but against the earlier Titans, yet
when he rolls out rebel names like this, —
Cceus, and Gyges, and Briareus;
Typhon and Doloi, 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 a la fourche estofee
De trois crampons vint se mesler
Par la troupe contre Typhee
Qui rouoit une fonde en Tair:
Ici Phoebus d'un trait qu'il jette
Fit Encelade trebucher,
La Porphyre lui fit broncher
Hors des poings Tare et la sagette.
For such an epic theme Keats felt instinctively, when
he set to work, that an epic and not a romance treat-
ment was necessary ; and for that English poet the obvious
epic model is Milton. Ever since his visit to Bailey at
Oxford, and especially during his stay at Teignmouth
^ The daughter of Styx is Victory, and 'halecret' is a corslet.
430 MILTONISMS
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 straight-
forward, 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. TheMiltonisms 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 reminis-
cence. 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
1 The passage ending, ' the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the
pleasure of pleasure itself.'
VOICES OF THE TITANS 431
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 mur-
muring 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 Mil-
tonic Hum' 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 reminis-
cence 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 shuddered; for the overwhelming voice
Of huge Enceladus swallowed it in wrath:
The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves
In the half -glutted hollows of reef-rocks.
Came booming thus.
' With duller steel than the Persian sword
They cut away no formless monster's head.
432 A MATCH AND NO MATCH FOR MILTON
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 4arge 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 gtars.
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
A GREAT BEGINNING 433
metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the
most fugitive, which a forest scene by starHght can
have upon the mind: the preeminence of the oaks
among the other trees — ^their quasi-hiunan venerable-
ness — 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, dazz-
ling 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 con-
trasted 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
fuU powers of his godhead. But it has a rightness and
controlled power of its own which place it, to my mind,
fuUy 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: — ^.^o
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
>--\
)
434 QUESTION AS TO SEQUEL
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 chief dom 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 sur-
mising 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.
DIFFICULTIES AND A SUGGESTION 435
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
— smothered 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 weU 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 lus 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
436 THE SCHEME ABANDONED
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 remem-
bered 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 judg-
ment 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 myseK 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 in-
stinctively: 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
THE EVE OF ST MARK 437
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
24th) 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 1817 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 14th-17th, 1819), and it remains
a mere fragment, tantalizing and singular, of a hundred
and twenty lines' length. Why? Perhaps merely
because it was begun ahnost 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
438 CHAUCER AND MORRIS
Keats's own time. That he was writing with Chaucer
in his mind is proved by some Hnes 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 colde Deathe hath in parle
And wol some day that very year
Touchen with foule 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 com-
posing 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 horn to he 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.
JUDGMENT OF ROSSETTI 439
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 fiird 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 centuiy and their work is altogether
ciirious 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 Merd 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 mediaevalism 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
mediaeval 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
440 DISSENT OF W. B. SCOTT
source at all. Keats evidently took some interest in
mediaeval 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 imagmed 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 accom-
plished 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 1885. ^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 Simday 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 modem. But alas! what
shall we say to the ancient illimiinated MS. she has in
hand, with the pictures of early martyrs dying by fire,
the Inquisition pimishment of heretics, and the writing
annotated, the notes referred to modern printers' signs?
As he describes a mediaeval MS. book so badly, it may
be said he intended the scene of the poem to be mediaeval,
but did the description also so badly. But no, the
description of the dreariness of Sunday evening, utterly
THE SOLUTION 441
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
was 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 mediaeval
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 mediaevahsm 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 speU 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 Shake-
442 KEATS AS DRAMATIST
speare) the impression of any character he might come
in contact with, has led many students to beheve 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 rebelHon 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 im-
provise poetry to order. The speeches in Otho are much
more than passably poetical, they are often quite
brilliant and touched with Keats's imique 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
OTHO AND KING STEPHEN 443
the traitress Auranthe, and insanely stabbing empty
air while he imagines he is stabbing his victim, mitil
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 corusca-
tions of fine poetry, feeling that these do not spring
from the poet's own inner seK 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 taimts
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 Isa-
bella or Eve of St Agnes, or a finished Eve of St Mark, or
even another Lamia? Brown's next piece of suggestion
444 THE CAP AND BELLS
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 morn-
ings 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 Jeal-
ousies. 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
scandalised 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 oiu* 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 Bella-
naine on an aerial journey from her home in Imaus,
his consultation with his magician Hum as to the means
WHY A FAILURE 445
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 reckless-
ness caused him to drop writing altogether, which
apparently happened early in December, he was evi-
dently out of conceit with The Cap and Bells} One of
the most imfortunate 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
Oheron by Sotheby. Sotheby had invented a modified
form of the Spenserian stanza riming abhaccddc instead
of abcbhdhdd 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 Oheron. 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
1 See the letter to Taylor quoted above, pp. 380, 381.
446 FLASHES OF BEAUTY
Ijdng 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 mom 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.
RECAST OF HYPERION 447
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 scattered, — 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 himseK of an
evening, to utter the new thoughts on life and poetry
which he foimd 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 moni-
tress acting to him somewhat the same part as Virgil
acts to Dante. In altering the form and structiu-e 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 earher version. It is not in these, it is in the tw^o
hundred and seventy lines of its wholly new preamble
or introduction that the value of the altered poem lies.
The reader remembers how Keats had broken off his
w^ork 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
* Auctorp4i Mythoffraphi Latini, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742. Keats's
copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, 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. 4, in the notes to Hyginus.
448 ITS LEADING IDEAS
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 S3anbols 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 unre-
flectingly 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 re-
dundance 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
THEIR HISTORY IN KEATS'S MIND 449
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 Hhe 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 si^iificant 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 soHtary hours that such
450 PREAMBLE: ANOTHER FEAST OF FRUITS
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-renuncia-
tion 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.
THE SANCTUARY 451
More yearning than on earth I ever felt.
Growing within, I ate deUciously, —
And, after not long, thirsted; for thereby
Stood a cool vessel of transparent juice
Sipp'd by the wandered 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 de-
scribed architectural vision in all Keats^s writings: —
I lookM 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, approach-
able 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
452 THE ADMONITION
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'
Rejoined 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 aU 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 MONITRESS 453
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 any-
thing he could have been likely to achieve by deHberate
effort in defiance of his natural genius or in premature
anticipation of its matiuity?
At this point there follows a fretful passage, ill-written
or rather only roughly drafted, and therefore not in-
cluded in the transcripts of the fragments by his friends,
in which his monitress affirms contemptuously the guK
that separates the romantic dreamer froni 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 herseK. He had
probably long before been impressed by engravings of
the well-known ancient statue of the seated Mnemo-
syne 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 inde-
pendent, 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 immortars 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 curtained 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.
454 THE ATTEMPT BREAKS OFF
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 J
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 beamM, 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 circum-
stances, 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.
CHAPTER XV
FEBRUARY-AUGUST 1820: 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 Himt — Misery and jealousy — Severn and Mrs Gisbome —
Invitation from Shelley — Keats on The Cenci — La Belle Dame pub-
lished — 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
Bjnron — 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 poetty 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 3rd 1820, which
was three months after his twenty-fourth birthday, he
never wrote verse again: unless indeed the lines foimd 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 Brawue: 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
455
456 LETTERS FROM THE SICK-BED
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 — J
I hold it towards you.
For several days after the haemorrhage 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 com-
pared 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 trjdng
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
TO FANNY BRAWNE 457
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 some-
times. 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 sur\'ive, and at that moment thought of
nothing but you. \Mien 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 con-
tented, and his jealousies are for the moment at rest.
But he has to stmggle 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 sus-
picion 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 im-
possibilities 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
458 TO JAMES RICE
the often quoted letter written to James Rice a fort-
night 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 astonish-
ingly (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 Comwair) in sending him
BARRY CORNWALL 459
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 Corn-
wall's work, its prevailing strain of fluent imitative com-
mon-place, its affectations and exaggerations of Hunt's
and his own leanings towards over-lusciousness, which
Shelley, as we shall see, found so exasperating. 'How-
ever,' he adds, Hhat 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 Febru-
aries, 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 lovM your
Beauty. Have I nothing else then to love in you but that?
Do not I see a heart naturally fumishM 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
1 A letter of Procter's to Keats shows that he had been among Keats's
visitors during the weeks that followed his attack of haemorrhage (see
Buxton Forman, Complete Works, v. 163). Whether they had been much
or at all acquainted before then seems uncertain, but Procter's impres-
sions of Keats recorded almost half a century later read as though he had
known him while stiU in health: —
' I saw him only two or three times before his departure for Italy. I was
introduced to him by Leigh Hunt, and foimd 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.'
460 HOPES OF RETURNING HEALTH
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 enjoy-
ment — 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 remembered. Take
care of yourself dear that we may both be well in the
summer.'
He began to get about again, and by the 25th 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 triimiph. 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 boimty of friends,
some of them rich, others, as we know, the reverse,
whom his ardoiu* 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 assist-
ants; 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.
HAYDON'S PRIVATE VIEW 461
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 eveiybody of
any note, were invited and came. . . . The room was
full. Keats and HazHtt were up in a corner, really
rejoicing.' Hazlitt expressed in the Edinburgh Review
for the following August a tempered, far from undis-
criminating 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 unconvention-
ally, 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 deUcate 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 Savioiu" 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,
462 IMPROVEMENT NOT MAINTAINED
Newtoii; Voltaire, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Keats, intro-
duced among the crowd in the foreground.^
In the course of April the improvement in Keats's
health failed to maintain itself. We find him com-
plaining much of nervous irritability and general weak-
ness. 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 yoimg 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 con-
siderate or solicitous friend, but he was probably mis-
led 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
1 As against this judgment, formed from photographs of the wrecked
picture and from the general character of Haydon's work, let it be remem-
bered that Hazhtt, 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 tabvlam eximii
pictoris, with its Enghsh 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. 1913, pp. 608 sqq.
SUMMER AT KENTISH TOWN 463
be my fate.' For the present he moved as he had
proposed to Kentish Town (2 Wesleyan Place). Here
he stayed for six or seven weeks (approximately May 6
-Jime 23), and then, having suffered a set-back in
the shape of two sHght returns of haemorrhage 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 13
Mortimer Terrace. With them he remained for another
period of about seven weeks, ending on August 12th.
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. 446) 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 9th 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 drop-
ping Hyperion had been the ill reception of Endymion
by the critics.
His only outing, so far as we hear, was to an exhibition
464 KINDNESS OF LEIGH HUNT
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 Words-
worth, Southey, Lamb, Haydon, and some others at
supper. Leigh Hunt, despite his engrossing Kterary
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
pestered 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 again, 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 con-
tentedly, 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.
MISERY AND JEALOUSY 465
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 OpheHa, "Go to a Nunnery, go,
go!"' That these were but the half -delirious prompt-
ings 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.i
1 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 SfieUey 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.
466 SEVERN AND MRS GISBORNE
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 lo^^al
understanding of his character.
While Keats was staying in Kentish Town Severn
went often to see him, and in the second week of Julj^
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 Gisbomes twice met him
at Leigh Hunt's. The first time was on June 23. 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 12th, 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.'
INVITATION FROM SHELLEY 467
Doubtless it was under the impression of this last
meeting that Mr Gisbome sent Shelley the account of
Keats's state of health which moved Shelley to write
in his own and his wife's name urgiag 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 OUiers;
saying he has lately read it again, 'and ever with a new
sense of the treasiu-es 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 Cend. 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 imwrite it
did he care so much as once about reputation, and as
to The Cend, and The Prometheus announced as forth-
coming, 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 quaHties of his work. These, Keats goes on,
are 'by many spirits nowadays considered the Mammon.
A modem 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 remem-
bering views of Shelley's such as are expressed in
468 KEATS ON THE CENCI
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 AlastoVj on
the doom that awaits poets who play their art in selfish-
ness 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 manu-
script, 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 state-
ment 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 27th of
July and received by Keats on the 13th 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 dis-
charged 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 20, La Belle Dame sans
Merdj signed, obviously in bitterness^ 'Caviare' (Ham-
LA BELLE DAME PUBLISHED 469
let'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
sHpshod 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 per-
petuate 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 'night-
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
1 1 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 earUer text
re-estabUshed.
470 A DISFIGURED VERSION
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 laurelled spirits' in the Epistle to George
Felton Matthew): and again, that the loose broken
construction — 'So kissed to sleep' is quite uncharacter-
istic 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 pick-
nickers, 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 1894 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 4 and 5 trans-
posed, and several changes in verse 7. 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, Lsahella, 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 Rohin Hood lines, with the three finished
THE LAMIA VOLUME PUBLISHED 471
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 BasiU Noting how the
anticipation of the assassination is wonderfully con-
ceived in the one epithet of Hhe murdered man,' he goes
on to quote the stanzas telling the discovery of and
digging for the corpse, Hhan which,' he says, Hhere
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 Hy~
perion, 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
1 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. 200, 470).
472 CHARLES LAMB^S APPRECIATION
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 inhabi-
tants, 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 ApoUonius, — 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 Hxint, 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 philo-
sophical 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, Hhis is the very quintessence of
the romantic/ 'When Mr Keats errs in his poetry,'
THE NEW MONTHLY 473
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 volimie 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, Ho 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, Hhere 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 Hhe picture of the vast abode of Cybele and
the Titans is 'in the sublimest style of ^schylus':
and in conclusion the critic takes leave of Mr Keats
'with wonder at the gigantic stride which he has taken,
474 OTHER FAVOURABLE REVIEWS
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 yoimg 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 Quar-
terly in its handling of Endymion, this time prints a
kind of palinode, admitting that ^Mr Keats is a person
of no ordinary genius,' and prophes3dng 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
beheve 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 con-
TAYLOR AND BLACKWOOD 475
tinually 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 argu-
ment 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
1 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 himseK 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.
476 A SKIRMISH
say they will take care he shall never get £50 again for a vol. of
his Poems — what had he done to deserve such attacks as these?'
*0h, 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 dcme 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 Quar-
terly — and then you begm.'
*I beg your pardon,' says B., 'we were the jBrst.'
'I think not, but if you were the first, you continued it after,
for that truly diabolical thrust about the £50 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 con-
versation to another subject by asking B. if he read the Abbot,
and in about 10 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
IMPENITENCE 477
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 aU, 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, foUowing 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 Cock-
neyism, 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;
* Morgan MSS. Some words at the end have baflfled the transcriber.
478 AND IMPERTINENCE
— 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 Cock-
neys 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 judg-
ments on so puzzling a question. If on my next publi-
cation 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
JEFFREY IN THE EDINBURGH 479
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 lilce 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 immixed 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 w€{ 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 under-
stand, 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 im-
possible 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.
480 APPEECIATION FULL THOUGH TARDY
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, un-
natural, 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 de-
spicable, must either have no notion of poetry, or no regard to
truth. It is, in truth, at least as 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 Shake-
speare. 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 any one 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 rev-
olutionary, 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 depredator,
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
FURY OF BYRON 481
gratuitous contempt and aversion. When Murray sent
him the Lamia volimae 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;
— ^fiay 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 Httle 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 pro-
ceeded 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 gene-
rous; 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
482 SHELLEY ON HYPERION
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 over-
drawn picture which had reached him of Keats's suffer-
ings under the stings of the reviewers, apparently
determined him to sit down and draft that indignant
letter to Gifford, never completed or dehvered, 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 con-
ception 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 corre-
spondents 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 pubhc attitude of
disbelief in modern poetry altogether. We must also
remember that Shelley had himself been wrought into
a mood of imwonted intolerance of certain fashions in
poetiy by some of Barry Cornwall's recent performances,
which he held to be an out-Himting 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.
* Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Ingpen, vol. ii, p. 839.
AND ON KEATS IN GENERAL 483
'He perceived/ says Medwin, 'in every one of these
productions a marked and continually progressing im-
provement, 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 fault-
less, 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
pubHc 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
484 IMPRESSIONS OF CRABB ROBINSON
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.
CHAPTER XVI
AUGUST 1820-FEBRUARY 1821: 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 — Neapohtan 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 pleasant-
ness — 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: — Hhere 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 14th: — ^This journey to Italy wakes me at
dayhght every morning, and haimts me horribly. I
485
486 RESOLVE TO WINTER IN ITALY
shall endeavour to go, though it will be with the sensa-
tion 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 copy-
right of Endymion for £100, a sum probably beyond
any value that it can then have seemed likely to possess,
and procured promises of help to the extent of £100
more by subscription among persons interested in the
poet's fate; James Rice and the painters Hilton and
De Wint being among guarantors of £10 each and Lord
Fitzwilliam closing the list with a promise of £50.
The vessel chosen for the voyage was a merchant
brigantine, the ^ Maria Crowther,' having berth accom-
modation for a few passengers and due to sail from
London about the middle of September. The four inter-
vening 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,
SEVERN AS COMPANION 487
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 destruc-
tion 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 im-
proving 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 ha\dng
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
488 THE ^ MARIA CROWTHER'
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 uncon-
trollable 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 Hamp-
stead — 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 13th to be at hand for the day and hour
when the 'Maria Crowther^ might be ready to sail. On
the evening of Sunday the 17th 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 con-
veyance 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 con-
sumption 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, un-
FELLOW PASSENGERS 489
successfully, to find a goat for the supply of goat's millc
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: —
19th Sept. Tuesday, off Dover Castle, etc.
I arose at day break to see the glorious eastern gate —
Keats slept till 7 — Miss C. was rather ill this morning I prevailed
on her to walk the deck with me at half past 6 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.
20th Sept. Wednesday off Brighton. Beautiful morning —
we all breakfasted on deck and recovered as we were could enjoy
it — about 10 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 2 storm came on furiously — ^we retired
to our beds. The rolling of the ship was death to us — towards 4
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
490 STORM IN THE CHANNEL
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 Hke 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 suc-
ceeded 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.
20th Sept.
I caught a sight of the moon about 3 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 2 o'clock yesterday until 6 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 20 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.
* A long-popular song from Ame's opera Artaxerxes.
HELD UP IN THE SOLENT 491
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 Dmige-
ness, where they excited the suspicions of the coast
guard, and to get the above letter posted from Romne)^
After this calms and contrary airs kept them beating
about the channel for many more days yet. At Ports-
mouth 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 himseff 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
492 LANDING NEAR LULWORTH
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 28) 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 Dorset-
shire 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 remark-
able, but scarcely splendid, rock tunnels and fissures of
Stair Hole and Durdle Door. When Severn says that
Keats knew the groimd, one haK 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 1818, 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 birth-
right, 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
THE 'BRIGHT STAR' SONNETS 493
Complaint, the beautifiil sonnet which every lover of
EngHsh 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 con-
solatory 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 tender-
ness, 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 I
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 priestHke 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;
494 THE VOYAGE RESUMED
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 1819, 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. 334) for holding the sonnet to have been written in
the last week of February 1819, and the j&rst days of
Keats^s engagement to Fanny Brawne. All that Keats
can actually have done during that evening of tran-
quillity 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 substi-
tuting '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 tem-
perature of the longing expressed, ^calling for death not
as the sequel to his desire's longing's fulfilment, but as
the alternative for it./ In Severn's first mention of the
subject, which is in'^ 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 Hamp-
stead. ' 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 improve-
1 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.
A MEDITATED POEM 495
ment in Keats's health alternated with alarming returns
of haemorrhage, 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 layers 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 haimted 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 un-
luckily 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
496 INCIDENTS AT SEA
to reaxl the shipwreck canto of Don Juan, but presently
found its reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and
flung the volume from him in disgust. Perhaps some-
thing 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 Hke 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
Byron'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 inter-
ested 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 Portu-
guese 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 21, 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
nimiber 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 CotterelFs brother, a banker in Naples, who kept
them supplied with all manner of dainties and luxuries.
QUARANTINE AT NAPLES 497
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 aU 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 accommoda-
tions 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
bom without the faculty of hoping I am he. Severn is writing
498 LETTERS FROM KEATS AND HASLAM
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. 1 1820.
My dear Haslam,
We are just released from the loathsome misery of quaran-
tine — foul weather and foul air for the whole 10 days kept us to
the small cabin — surrounded by about 2,000 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 passen-
gers) 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. 2.
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.
LADY PASSENGERS DESCRIBED 499
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 5 or 6 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 4 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 bkck hole — 5 sleeping in one cabin — the one you
saw — the only one — during the voyage I have been frequently
sea-sick — sometimes severely — 2 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
500 A CRY OF AGONY
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, 1 November 1820.
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 prcsscs 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 Uke 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 con-
cerned 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 bom for this end? God bless her, and
NEAPOLITAN IMPRESSIONS 501
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 winter-
ing at Rome, where a credit has been opened for him
at Torlonia's and whither he was bringing 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 ia the friendly company of Mr Charles
CottereU, 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
502 ON THE ROAD TO ROME
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 I 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 misinterpret-
ing at the theatre the sight of a couple of armed
sentries posted (as was the custom of the time and
coimtry) on the stage, he broke into a fit of anger and
determined suddenly to leave the place. Accordingly
on the 4th or 5th 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 stoppiag-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 Hterally 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 settle at once in lodgings
which Dr Clark, to whom Keats had written from
^ Reminiscences of a Literary Life, by Charles Macfarlane: London, John
Murray, 1917, pp. 12-15. — 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 1816, when he was in his seventeenth year, to 1827, yoimg
Macfarlane seems to have lived entirely at Naples, except for some
excursions to the Levant and a short visit to England in 1820, when
Keats was a consumptive patient already starting or started for Italy.
LIFE AT ROME 503
Naples, had already secured for them, in the first house
on the right going up the steps from the Piazza di
Spagna to Sta Trinita dei Monti. Here, according to
the manner of those days in Italy, they were left pretty
much to shift for themselves. Neither could speak
ItaHan, and at first they were iU served by the trattoria
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 con-
tented himself with quiet stroUs, chiefly on the Pincian
close by.
The season was fine, and the freshness and bright-
ness 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 Hked in
an invahd 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
504 APPARENT IMPROVEMENT
deep-seated dejection in his friend which found ex-
pression now and again in word or act, as when he began
reading a volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at the lines,
too sacQy applicable to himself: — ^
Misera me ! sollievo a me non resta
Altro che '1 pianto, ed il pianto e 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 pro-
posed poem on the subject of Sabrina. Severn began
to beheve he would get well, and on November 30 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 un-
fortunate — 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
RELAPSE AND DESPAIR 505
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. 10,
'when he was going on in good spirits, quite merrily/
says Severn, came a relapse which left no doubt of the
issue. Haemorrhage followed haemorrhage on success-
sive 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 S3nnpathetic sense of the trials which the sequel
would bring upon his friend. 'He explained to me the
exact procediu-e of his gradual dissolution, enumerated
my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon the danger
to my Hfe and certainly to my fortune of my contiaued
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 imtil 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,
506 SEVERN^S MINISTRATIONS
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 treat-
ment 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, tiU Severn actually began
to dream that he might even yet recover, though he
himself would admit no such hope. 'He says the con-
tinued 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
HIS LETTERS FROM THE SICKROOM 507
on Christmas Eve and never finished. On the 11th
January", in one convejdng 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 bed-
room to our sitting-room — to put clean things on him — and to
talk about my painting to him. This is my good hews — 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 Went-
worth 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
508 THE SAME CONTINUED
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
retiu'ns of haemorrhage and utter prostration, with
renewed feverish agitations of the tortured spirit.
Writing to Haslam on January the 15th, 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 £100
or £150 — 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
TRANQUIL LAST DAYS 509
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 with-
out 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 be-
havioiu- of the believer Severn with his own, he acknow-
ledged 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
510 CHOICE OF EPITAPH
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 especi-
ally 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 honoiu- 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 locaHty
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 Philastei^^ —
'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
* Act V, Sc. iii. See Harrison S. Morris in Bulletin and Review of the
Keats-Shelley Memorial, 1913, p. 30.
SPIRIT OF CHARM AND PLEASANTNESS 511
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 un-
earthly 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 con-
siderate ,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 kind-
ness 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 con-
ducted, all which I did without teUing 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 solitarj^ 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
512 THE END
which all readers are familiar. Between the 14th and
22nd 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 23rd of that
month, writes Severn, * about four, the approaches of
death came on. 'Severn — I — ^lift me up — I am d3dng
— 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
imtil 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.
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 sUps 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 hun, — 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
513
514 HOPES AND FEARS AT HOME
this reaches yoU; I trust Doctor Clark will have con-
firmed the most sanguine hopes of his friends in Eng-
land; and to you, my friend, I hope he will have given
what you stand much in need of — a confidence amount-
ing 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 himaan 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 I'
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 corre-
FANNY BRAWNE: LEIGH HUNT 515
spondence 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 yoiu* 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 Httle expected
from one so yoimg, and under such a load of grief .^
Leigh Hunt had written in these days a letter to
Severn which did not reach Rome imtil 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 iudulge in hope to the very last. If he
still cannot bear this, tell hun — 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 jour-
neying to one and the same place, and shall meet somehow
or other again, face to face, mutually conscious, mutually de-
lighted. 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
516 SUPPOSED EFFECT OF EEVIEWS
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 untn 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 imsatisfied, 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 con-
ceived 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,
— Shaving never thought of him as a possible consumptive
subject, — and being themselves white-hot with anger
against Blackwood and the Quarterlyj — ^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 Gisbomes. In that letter of remonstrance
to Gifford, as editor of the Quarterly , which he drafted in
the autumn of 1820 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 contri-
buted, of embittering his existence, and inducing a disease from
which there are now but faint hopes of his recovery. The first
SHELLEY MISLED AND INSPIRED 517
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 pro-
duced 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, — ^pro-
bably 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 passion-
ate 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 con-
ventional 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 reahties of life, are not touched or thought
618 ADONAIS
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 haimt 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 yoimgest of her sons,
— ^that pageant of the dead poet's own dreams and
imaginations conceived as gathering 4ike 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-bom their prey — the
approach and homage of the other 'mountain shep-
herds,' Byron, Shelley himself, Moore, Leigh Himt, all
figured, especially Shelley, in a guise purely abstract
and mythologic and yet after its own fashion passion-
ately 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 I
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 changg and pass, — the final vision by the rapt
A BLACKWOOD PARODY 519
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 un-
sanguine 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 remem-
bered — 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 de-
nounced 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 intro-
mission of third parties had only the effect of sub-
stituting Lockhart's friend Christie in the broil for
Lockhart himself. The duel was fought on January 16,
1821, 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 com-
paratively new recruit, the learned and drunken young
Dublin scholar Wilham Maginn. Professing absurdly to
regard the cockney school as a continuation of the
'Delia 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
520 FALSE IMPRESSIONS CONFIRMED
public'; and proceeds to give a comic analysis of
AdonaiSj with some specimens of parody upon it, which
were afterwards re-pubHshed without shame under
Maginn's name.
Eight years later, as we shall see, it was on the en-
thusiasm 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, imtil 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 coimteract 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 simk in that way
because a few quizzers told him he was an apothecary's
apprentice? . . . Fiery, impetuous, ungovernable and im-
decided, 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 imdoubted
proof he gave of strength.' In his private journal
Haydon treats the events in the same spirit, not for-
getting 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
DEATH OF SHELLEY 521
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 voliune 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 I
Later in the same summer, 1822, 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 circimi-
stances, — ^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 fimeral 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 weU 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 himseK 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
522 HAZLITT AND SEVERN
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 conmiended 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 con-
tinued 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
1823 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
BROWN AT FLORENCE 523
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 1829, he and Brown being
at the time housemates. Brown helped him in preparing
for the press his autobiographical romance. The Adven-
tures of a Younger Son, and especially by suppl3dng
mottoes in verse for its chapter-headings, chiefly from
the unpubHshed 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 whence-
forward, adding to his own Christian name one that had
been borne by a deceased brother, he took to styling
himself, not always in famihar but regularly in formal
signatures, Charles Armitage Brown. It is both ana-
chronism and pedantry to give him these names, as is
often done, in writing of him in connexion with Keats,
to whom he was never smjihing 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 commimication 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 ex-
plaining 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
524 INSCRIPTION FOR KEATS^S GRAVE
many proposals of change, stiU stands, having been
carefully re-cut and put in order more than haK a cen-
tury after the poet's death: — ^namely a design of a lyre
with only two of its strings stnmg, 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 ms tomb stone
"here lies one
whose name was writ in water."
February 24th, 1821.
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 con-
nexion 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 1832,
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'
SEVERN AND WALTER SCOTT 525
colossal effort to clear himself of debt after the Constable
crash, had come abroad with his daughter Aime 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 earHer of
his beloved Lady Northampton, whose beauty and
charm and gift for verse and song (her singing portrait
by Raebum 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 pictiu-e or sketch to amuse him.
One morning Severn having innocently shown him the
portrait of Keats reproduced at page 338 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 impKes 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
1 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 imfortunately 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, geniaUty 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 foUies would have
saved it from sorrow and sheltered it from pain.' {Life of B, R. Haydon,
ed. Taylor, ii, 321.)
626 SLOW GROWTH OF KEATS'S FAME
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 1832, 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 unpubhshed Otto the Great j 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 pubHc
in general was of extraordinarily slow growth. Iq the
interval of some score of years between the death of
Byron and the establishment — ^itseK 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 1825, when a gift of
the original volimies 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 1828 in the Athenccuniy
of which his friend and senior Frederick Denison Maurice
was for the time being editor, showed which way the
ITS BEGINNINGS AT CAMBRIDGE 527
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 oiu* day. ' ^
But no reprint of Keats's poems was pubHshed until
1829, and then only by the Paris house of Galignani,
who printed for the continental market, in a single tall
volume with double colimans, 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 Mihies, and Sunderland, to uphold
in debate at Oxford the opinion that Shelley was a greater
poet than Byron. Their enthusiasm for Adonais impHed
enthusiasm for its subject, Keats, as a matter of com^e.
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 coloiu* 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 siu^ving 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 Chris-
topher 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 im-
penitent, and in a review of Tennyson's second volume
of 1832 writes of him with viciously laboured irony as
'a new prodigy of genius — another and brighter star of
* John Sterling, Essays and Tales, ii, 53.
2 Carefully edited, it is believed by Cyrus Redding, formerly an employ^
of the house.
^ Nodes Ambrosianae, ii, 146: from Blackwood for December, 1828.
528 OPINION IN THE EARLY TORTIES
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 at-
tained.^ So far as popularity was concerned, the
Quarterly gibe remained justified. It was not imtil
1840 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 1841, 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 1844, 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 pubHc memory, and that
the poets of their age destined to enduring fame were
Campbell and Rogers. De Quincey in 1845 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
1 Quarterly Review, April 1833, page 81. 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 1834.
' Essays and Totes, p. clxviii.
WOULD-BE BIOGRAPHERS AT ODDS 529
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 manu-
script. 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
siu^ving 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 corre-
spondence, 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 1824, the
duty devolved on Dilke of going into the family accounts
and putting pressure on Abbey, who had proved a
mudciier both of his wards' affairs and of his own, to
make over the residue of the estate which he held in trust.
^ Notes on Gilfillan^s Literary Portraits: Collected Works, xi, 393. It
is fair to add that twelve years later De Quincey went a good way in
recantation of this outburst.
530 TAYLOR AND BROWN: BROWN AND DILKE
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 friend-
ship and mutual regard. Brown, criticizing Dilke in his
influential position as editor of the Athenceum after 1830
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 Hterary 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 suflicient 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 1830, Richard Monckton
Milnes, being in Italy with his family not long after his
degree, visited Rome and Florence in 1833 and 1834,
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
himseK 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
A SOLUTION: MONCKTON MILNES 531
cr3rptic 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 pub-
lication of his memoir in the Monthly Chronicle^ when
one day near the end of 1840, 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 aU, —
poet, politician, orator, wit, entertainer, athirst and full
of rehsh 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 1842, 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 simniest of dispositions,
and a sustained success in the congenial occupation of a
pubHc reader in and lecturer on Shakespeare and other
poets, — ^from Cowden Clarke and from Keats's younger
school friend Edward Holmes, Milnes drew the infor-
mation about Keats's school days which I have quoted
532 THE OLD CIRCLE: HUNT AND HAYDON
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 (1828), as
well as in many incidental notes and observations
through thirty years, and especially in that master-
piece in his own vein of criticism. Imagination and
Fancy (1844). 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 tem-
perament 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
EHzabeth Barrett in 1834, 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,
Plate XIII
^^
....^^
PAGE FROM A LETTER OF BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON
TO ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1834
JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS 533
with an answer to his correspondent's conjecture that the
poet's expression had been Hoo subtle for the brush/
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 1834. Reynolds heard by accident of the
intended biography, and never having quite abandoned
his own purpose in the matter, wrote at first com-
plainingly, resenting that use should be made of those
letters of Keats to himself which he had allowed Wood-
house 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 melan-
choly failure. He had never quite given up Hterature
in accordance with the purpose he had declared on
marriage. Indeed it was not until six years after that
declaration, in 1825, 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 Athenceum 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 Hhat 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
* See Byron's Collected Works, Prose, iii, 46, note.
634 HASLAM, SEVERN, BAILEY
— 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 inter-
vened, 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, — Hhey probably were
so well or intended to be so well taken care of, that
every endeavour to lay my hands on them has proved
imavailing.' One wonders whether they may not be
lurking yet, a forgotten bundle, in the dust of some
unexplored comer of a safe in that same office. Severn
was at this time living in London, and some correspon-
dence passed between him and MHnes about the bio-
graphy, Severn's chief point being to insist that not the
malice of the critics, but the Meath-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 aJive and well as archdeacon of Colombo in Ceylon.
Thence on the appearance of Milnes's book he wrote to
FLAWS AND SLIPS IN MILNES^S WORK 535
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 fiancee of Keats's
tragic passion was identical with the rich-complexioned
Charmian described in his autumn letters of 1819, 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, biu-ned 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 1851.
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 hterary
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, Senor 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
536 ITS MERIT AND TIMELINESS
/ of Keats y Llanos. Keats had written to his sister once
as a child gaily prophesying that they all, her brothers
and herself, would Hve to have 'tripple chins and stubby
thumbs/ She in fact fully attained the predicted
length of days, and having Hved 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 genera-
tion. 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 himiorist, 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 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 1848.
But it served its piupose 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 Hhe
Marcellus of the Empire of EngHsh 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
ITS RECEPTION 537
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 posthimaous
poems printed for the first time, the two longest, Otho
and the Cap and Bells were not of his best, but master-
pieces 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, immixed, 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 de-
serves 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 CUve and
of CHve'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
538 THE PRE-RAPHAELITES
this young Mr Tennyson of Cambridge, the chief of modern
poetic literature! What were these new dicta, which Mr War-
rington deHvered 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 begim to
burn at its whitest heat. I refer of course to the pre-
RaphaeHte 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 sprawl-
ing 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 1800
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,
1 See particularly Chaps, iv and v of Holman Hunt's Pre-Raphaelitism
and the t^re^Raphaelite Brotherhood.
ROSSETTI AND MORRIS 539
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 pubUc 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 WiUiam
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
fertihty and brooding delight in the telling of Greek and
mediaeval stories in verse, the most profuse and for the
present perhaps the last expression to the pure romantic
spirit in Enghsh 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 pubHcation of the first volume of
the Earthly Paradise j 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
470) 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 (1857) her weU-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
540 THE BATTLE WON: LATER CRITICS
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 bum
For ever;) by that strong accepted soul,
I count it strange and hard to understand J
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 imcontested 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 1850 by
Monckton Mihies, who continued nearly imtil the end,
imder 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 laiu-eate, have been in various tones public com-
mentators on Keats. All such comments have shed
Hght 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 appre-
ciation 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 him-
self in youth to a set of ready-made beHefs 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
KEATS AND SHELLEY 541
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 Hving 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 Kved. 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 develop-
ment 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
lus poetry.' FitzGerald was much stronger on the same
side, counting Shelley, to use his own words, as not
worth Keats's Httle finger. Matthew Arnold, who has
said some memorably fme and just things about Keats,
behttles 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 Httle for Keats's memory by the torrent of hyper-
bolical 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 in-
tuitions 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,
542 PITFALLS AND PREJUDICES
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 Jbhe
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 seK-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 poHtical
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
ARNOLD AND PALGRAVE 543
been a conception that his mind was incapable of
entertaining. He supposed that Keats was indifferent
to history or pohtics. But of history he was in fact
an assiduous reader, apd the secret of his indifference
to pohtics, 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.
Tinning to the chief real contributions to our appre-
ciation and knowledge of Keats, I should give the first
place to Matthew Arnold's well-known essay ^ of 1880.
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 per-
ception 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 loveh-
ness,' 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
* First published in T. H. Ward's Selections from the English Poets, and
re-printed in the second series of Essays in Criticism (1892). 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
shghting. 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/
544 MR BUXTON FORMAN AND OTHERS
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 1883 and 1884 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 mytho-
logy: 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 imremitting 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 dehghtful series addressed to his young sister, and
the series, in great part distressing and deplorable, to
Fanny Brawne. About 1887, 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
LATEST EULOGISTS 545
early poetry to Wordsworth, Mr Bridges has thrown a
light too clear and convincing to be questioned.
When in 1892 the late Mr William Sharp compiled his
lAfe 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 Selincourt, as good, I think, as
has been bestowed on any English poet, carrjdng 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 EngHsh Hterature. Nor can I leave immentioned
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 himdred
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 com-
panion on his Scottish tour, and how in Hyperion,
written in the next months after his retiim, 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,
546 RISKS TO PERMANENCE OF FAME
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, be-
thinking 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 sub-
ordinate, — ^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 wiU find himself living in the
familiarity of a great and lovable spirit, dowered at
birth with capacities for joy and misery more intense
ahnost than any of which we have record, and retain-
ing its lovableness to the last in spite of circxmistances
that gave misery too cruelly the upper hand.
But, again the objector may ask, is it so certain that
HIS WILL CONQUER 547
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 unpre-
cedented, 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 adventiu"e, 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 reahties 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 nour-
ished themselves on it. The new poetry may not be
able fully to share Keats's inspiring conviction of the
sovereign, the transcendental truth of whatsoev^er 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
548 YOUTH AND ITS STORMS
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 Hke 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
Hhey 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 man-
hood 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
THE MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN 549
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 reahzed 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 en-
raptured and desperately resentful, to the jealous crav-
ings 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 dis-
illusionment 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 prematm-e
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 irrepres-
sible sense of the miseries of the world which we find
breaking through from time to time amid the beauty
* See the bitter comment on a passage in Burton's Anatomy quoted in
Mr Buxton Forman's Complete Works of J. K. iii, 268, where Keats runs
his head against the problem with which Plato had tried to deal in his
myth of the two Aphrodites, Pand^mos and Urania. ' The word-of-all-work,
love,' is a phrase of George Eliot's.
550 GUESSES AND A CERTAINTY
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 Hyperioriy — 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.
APPENDIX
I. The Alexander fragment (page 33). Here is the text: —
Whenne Alexandre the Conqueroure was wayfayringe in y"
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«
fayrest carvynge of Quene Cythere, onlie thatte y* was swellyd
and blushyd wyth warmthe and lyffe wythalle.
Her forhed was as whytte as ys the snowe whyche y« talle hed
of a Norwegian pyne stelythe from y« northerne wynde. One
of her fayre hondes was yplaced thereonne, and thus whytte
wyth whytte was ymyngld as y® 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® moone fyndeth a banke of violettes and
droppethe thereonne y® silverie dewe.
The authoure was goynge onne withouthen descrybynge y«
ladye's breste, whenne lo, a genyus appearyd — 'Cuthberte/
sayeth he, 'an thou canst not descrybe y« ladye's breste, and
fynde a simile thereimto, I forbyde thee to proceede yn thy
romaunt.' Thys, I kennd fulle welle, far smT)assyd 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 GoUancz 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
551
552 APPENDIX
great mediseval 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, 1810,
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 mediaeval 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 6, 21-29; 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 e dipinta
Con gran richezza e bella a riguardare.
Poscia che fu la terra da lui vinta,
A due grifon nel ciel si fe 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 h dalP amore,
Perch^ 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
APPENDIX 553
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, —
' Cy therea,
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 Beauty
Abbey (p. 295). — ^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.
1
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.
554 APPENDIX
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.
3
Your Chronicles no more exist
Since Knox, the Revolutionist
Destroyed the work of every fist
That scrawlM 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.
5
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.
6
This crawPd 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.
7
Here's a true Churchman ! he'd aflfect
Much charity and ne'r neglect
To pray for Mercy on th' elect
APPENDIX 555
But thought no evil
In sending Heathen, Turk and Scot
All to the Devil !
8
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,
9
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 I
10
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.
11
Ha ! here is *undivulged crime I'
Despair forbad his soul to climb
Beyond this world, this mortal time
Of fevered badness
Until this Monkish Pantomime
Dazzled his madness !
12
A younger brother this ! a man
Aspiring as a Tartar Khan
But, curbed and baffl'd he began
The trade of frightening
It smack'd of power ! and how he ran
To deal Heaven's lightning I
556 APPENDIX
13
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.
14
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 I
15
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.
16
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 I
III. List of Books in Keats^s Library compiled by Richard Wood-
house. — 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 biblio-
graphical exercise) to identify particular editions.
Wordsworth's Poems
Fairfax's Tasso 5 „ 1 „ bound
Petrarch's Sonnets and Odes
Hazlitt's Principles of Human action
Drayton's Poems (Edn. Jno. Smethwick)
Chaucer's Poems
8vo
2 Vol
if
1 „
ii
1 tt
it
1 „
ft
1 „
12mo 7 „
APPENDIX
557
Hunt's Descent of Liberty
8vo IVoI.
Dante's Inferno by Carey
„ 2 ,
, bound
Herrick's Poems
„ 1 ,
Burton's Anat. of Melancholy
„ 2 ,
, bound
Aikin's History of the year
12mo 1 ,
, bound
Potter's Grecian Antiqs
8vo 2 ,
Adam's Roman L
„ 1 ,
Davies' Celtic Researches
„ 1 ,
Spelman's Xenophon
„ 1 ,
, bound
Vertot's Roman Revolutions (F)
„ 3 ,
, bound
Lady Russell's Letters
12mo 2 ,
Bacon's Essays
„ 1 ,
Boyle's Reflections
„ 1 ,
Cowley's Essays
„ 1 ,
Locke's Conduct
„ 1 ,
Clarendon's Essays
„ 1 ,
Bacon's Essays
8vo 1 ,
, bound
French Prayer Book
18mo 1 ,
, bound
Erasmus' Moriae Encomium
36mo 1 ,
, bound
French Rabelais
12mo 1 ,
, bound
Ovid's Metamorphoses
18mo 1 ,
Ariosto da Boschino
„ 6 ,
J
Coleridge, Lamb and Lloyd
8vo 1 ,
, bound
Prayer Book
folio 1 ,
, bound
Southwell's Bible
„ 1 ,
, bound
Chaucer (black Letter)
„ 1 ,
Levy's Roman History (1686)
» 1 ,
, bound
Auctores Mythographi Latini
4to 1 ,
, bound
Siecle de Louis XIV (Voltaire)
12mo 5 ,
Raleigh's Hist, of the World
folio 1 ,
, bound
Guzman d'Alfarache
„ 1 ,
, bound
Les Oeuvres d'Amboise
„ 1 ,
, bound
Ciceronis Oationes
8vo 1 ,
, bound
Lempriere's Class. Diet.
„ 1 ,
An Atlas
„ 1 ,
, bound
Ben Johnson & Beaumont & Fletcher
„ 4 ,
Rime di Petrarcha
12mo 1 ,
, bound
Ainsworth's Diet.
8vo 1 ,
, bound
Z. Jackson's lUus. of Shakespeare
„ 1 ,
Carew, Suckling, Prior, Congreve, Black-
more, Fenton, Granville and Maiden
,, 1 ,
, bound
Ovidii Met^morphoseon
„ 1 ,
, bound
Bailey's Dictionary
„ 1 ,
, bound
Hunt's Juvenilia
„ 1 ,
, bound
Fencing familiarized
„ 1 ,
, bound
558
APPENDIX
Aminta di Tasso
Burton (abridged)
Poetae minores Graeci
Greek Grammar
Terentii Comedia
Bishop Beveridge^s Works
Old Plays (5th Vol. with Reynolds)
Bible
Conducteur a Paris
Horatii Opera
Burns's Poems
Mickle's Lusiad
Palmerin of England
Vocabulaire Italien Franc
Baldwin's Pantheon
Oeuvres de Moliere
Diet. Phil, de Voltaire
Essai sur les Moeurs de do.
Nouv. Heloise (Rousseau)
Emile (Rousseau)
Description des Antiques
Spectator (1st lost)
Shakespeare (6th lost)
Marmontel's Incas (3rd lost)
Hist, of K. Arthur (2nd lost)
Odd Vol. of Spencer — damaged
12mo 1 Vol. bound
8vo 1 ,
„ 1 ,
, bound
„ 1 ,
, bound
,, 1 ,
, bound
,, 1 ,
, bound
„ 6 ,
12mo 1 ,
, bound
„ 1 ,
,, 1 ,
, bound
18mo 1 ,
, bound
„ 1 ,
, bound
8vo 4 ,
, bound
„ 1 ,
, bound
,, 1 ,
, bound
12mo 6 ,
„ 14 ,
„ 8 ,
„ 4 ,
„ 3 ,
8vo 1 ,
„ 7 ,
, bound
12mo 7 ,
„ 2 ,
, bound
ISmo 1 ,
Names of friends to whom Keats had either given or lent
certain works.
1 Mr B. Bailey
10 Miss Keats
2 Mrs Brawne
11 Mrs Jones
3 Mr S. Brawne
12 „ Mancur
4 „ Browne
13 „ Reynolds
5 „ Clark
14 „ Rice
6 „ Dilke
15 „ Richards
7 „ Haslam
16 „ Severn
8 „ Hessey
17 „ Taylor
9 „ Hunt
18 „ Woodhouse
INDEX
Abbey, Mrs Richard, in charge of
Fanny Keats, 147, 337,
338
Abbey, Richard, trustee for the
Keats family, 16, 83, 147,
338, 340, 354, 365, 529
on Mrs T. Keats, 6-7
Abbot, The (Scott), 476
Achilles, Homeric character of, Keats's
admiration for, 147.
Acts and Galatea (Handel's libretto).
Song in, compared with
passage in Endymion, 225
Adam's Dreams {Paradise Lost),
Keats's debt to, 154-5
Aders family, 483.
Address to Hope (Keats), style and
form of, 86
Adlington's translation of the Golden
Ass of Apuleius, Keats's
possible reading of, 412 & n.
Admonition, the, in Hyperion, 452.
Adonais (Shelley), Blackwood parody
on, 519.
Enthusiasm for at Cambridge
(1829), 520, 527
Poetic form of, 517.
Preface to, on the effect of hostile
reviews on Keats, 517
Reprmt of (1829), 527
Tribute of to Keats, 483, 517-19
Adonis, Awakening of, in Endymion,
185
Adventures of a Younger Son (Tre-
lawny). Brown's aid in,
623
Aeneid, Keats's prose version of, 18
After Dark Vapours, sonnet (Keats),
91
Ailsa Craig, Keats on, 283-4
Alastor (Shelley), Allegoric theme of,
171-2, 234-6, 468
Date of publication, 234
Hunt's praise of, 69, 234
Influence of on Keats, 73, 234-6
Alexander fragment (Keats) in prose,
33, 551-2
Alexander's Feast (Dryden), Words-
worth on, 251
Alfieri, lines by, applicable to Keats, 504
Alfred, The, Reynolds's article in, on
Keats's work, 312
Alice Fell (Wordsworth), 348
Allegory, in
Alastor, 171-2, 234-6, 468
Endymion, 171-2 et alibi
Allegro, L' (Milton), metre of, 386
Alps, the, impression made by on
Shelley, 237
Alsager, T. M., lender of Chapman's
Homer to Clarke, 39
Ambleside, Keats at, 274, 277
America, tribute from, to the value of
Keats's poems, 545
American edition of Keats's poems,
date of the first, 528 n. 2
Aminta (Tasso), Hunt's translation
dedicated to Keats, 472
Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton),
Keats's inspirations from,
354, 358, 371, 396-7, 404-5,
412, 549 n. ^
Ancient Mariner (Coleridge), 121, 396
Angela, in the Eve of St Agnes,
402-4 & n.
Annals of the Fine Arts, Ode to a
Nightingale published in,
354
Annus Mirabilis (Dryden), echoed by
Keats, 392 & n.
Antiquary (Scott), Keats's attitude to,
279
Apollo in Delos, 428
Hymn to, see Hymn
Apollo's speech in Hyperion, 435, 437
Apuleius, The Golden Ass of, Keats's
possible reading of, 412 & n.
Arabian Nights, influence of, seen in
Endymion, 175, 184, 190,
191. 195
559
560
INDEX
Archiv fiir das Stvdium der neueren
Sprachen (Wolters) cited,
416 n.
Arethusa myth, in Ovid, and Keats's
and Shelley's poems, 187
Arethusa (Shelley), 187-8, 241
Ariosto, Keats's studies in, 370, 398
Arne's opera Artaxerxes, a song in,
quoted by Keats, 490 & n.
Arnold, Matthew, on the works of
Keats and of Shelley, 640,
541, 543 & n.
Arnold, W. T., researches of, on Keats'
Style, &c., and edition of
his poems issued by, 544,
545
Artaxerxes, opera (Ame), Keats's quo-
tation from, 490 & n.
Arts, the, excellence of, Keats on,
253
Asclepiad, The, cited on Keats as
medical student, 30 & n.
As from the darkening gloom a silver
dove, sonnet (Keats, 1816),
91
As late I rambled in the hapjpy fields,
sonnet (Keats), 90
Astronomy (Bonny castle), Keats's
prize-book (1811), 16 n.
Athenaeum, Dilke's editorship of, 530,
533; Maurice's editorship,
526
Reynolds's Contributions to, 533
Sterling's praise of Keats in (1828),
326-7
A Thing of beauty is a joy for Ever
(Keats), composition of,
176 &n.
Audores Mythographi Latini, ed. Van
Staveren; owned and used
by Keats, 447 & n.
Audubon, and George Keats, 365
* Augustan' poets, Keats's dislike of,
18
Aurora Leigh, Mrs Browning's tribute
in, to Keats, 539-40
Autobiographical Fragment, An (Proc-
ter), 47 n.
Autobiography (Hunt), 401
Autumnal Scenes in Keats's poems,
159, 161-2
Awnmarsh, Allan, translation of the
Decameron published by,
397 A n.
Bacchic lyric in Endymion: inspira-
tion of, 230 et sqq., possible
influence on, of Words-
worth, 251.
Keats's term for, 388
Bacchus, in Alexander's Feast, Words-
worth on, 251
Triimaph of, figured on sarco-
phaguses, 231 & n.
'Bacchus and Ariadne,' Titian's
picture of, as inspiration
for Keats, 231
Bailey, Archdeacon Benjamin, friend
of Keats, 133-4, 151, 262,
295
Criticism of Endymion by, 189,
211, 270
Impression made on, by Poems,
134
Keats's visit to, at Oxford, 142, in
his own words, 143 et sqq.
Letters to, from Keats, 150-2, et
sqq., 245, 255, 257, 262.
270-1, 288-9
and Lockhart and the Reviews,
306-7, 309, 474
Memoranda of, on Keats, 534-5
Milton enthusiasm of, 25/
Suitor to Mariane Reynolds, 134;
the withdrawal, 341
Support of, to Keats in the battle
of the critics, 306-7, 309,
311-12, 474
on Keats's Theory of Vowel Sounds,
147, 402
on Keats when Reading Aloud, 144,
190 w.
Baldwin's Pantheon, Keats's debt to,
228, 231
Bards of Passion, Ode (Keats), form,
metre, hints of belief in
Immortality in, 386-7
* Barry Cornwall,' see Procter
Beaconsfield, Earl of, 536
Beadsman, the, in Eve of St Agnes,
399, 400, 402-4 & n.
Beattie, James, poems of, 19
Beauly Abbey, Skulls in. Verses on
by Brown and Keats, 295,
440, 553-6
Beaumont and Fletcher, references
by to the Endymion
myth, 168
Beaumont, Sir George, and Haydon, 62
and Mrs Siddons, 461
Beaumont, Sir John, on the rime-beat
in the heroic measure, 101,
102
Beauty, in Art and in Poetry, Keats's
views on, 253, 254, 418
Essential, Striving for communion
with, the true subject of
Endymion, 167 et passim.
Over-comment on, and the loss of
bloom, Keats on, 263
INDEX
661
Bebr Salim, Arabian tale of, 195
Beckford's Vathek familiar to Keats,
184
Bedford, Duke of, carved sarco-
phaguses owned by, 231 n.
Bedhampton, Keats's visits to, 333,
491
Eve of St Agnes written at, 333
Belfast, Keats's flying visit to, 281
Bells and Pomegranates (Browning),
528
Ben Nevis, Keats on his climb up,
293-4
Ben NeviSf Sonnet written upon the
Top of (Keats), 294
Bentham, Jeremy, and Himt, 43
Bentley, Keats's postman landlord,
141, 322
Mrs, kindness of, 322
Beppo (Byron), 309
Bertha in Eve of St Mark, 437, 439, and
in Cap and Bells, 444-6
Bertram, a play (Maturin), Coleridge
and, 303
Bideford, a Keats as rector of, 4
Biographia Liter aria (Coleridge), criti-
cism of, in BlackvxHxTs, 300
on the Poetic Revolution, 119
on Wordsworth's poems, 245-6
Bion's Dirge on Adonis, SheUey's use
of, 517
Blackwood, William, and the Edin-
burgh Magazine, 297 et
sqq.'y Scott's countenance
sought by, 303-4; Taylor's
encounter with, over the
criticism on Keats, 475-7
BlackuxHyd's (Edinburgh) Magazine
Critical savagery of, and attitude
to Coleridge, Hunt, Keats
and others, 45, 76, 137.
151-2, 299-300; first
article of the 'Cockney
School Series' in, attacking
Hunt, 152; attacks in,
on Keats, 297; details
of the policy of the maga-
zine, its editors, &c.. 297
et sqq.; "Z" articles in,
301-3, 307-8, 474, 527;
fatal duel due to, 519;
indignation of Keats's
friends, 309 et sqq., 516 et
sqq., 522; Scott's attitude,
305-6, 525-6
Hazlitt's quarrel with, 521, and
accusation of, as to the
death of Keats, 522
Impenitence, and further berating
of Keats by, 477-8
Blake, William, drawings of, 393
Poems of, new note in, 107-8
Blank verse, corruption of, 17th
century, 100
Blundell's School, Tiverton, 4
Boccaccio, influence of, on Keats,
259-60, 333-4, 389, 397
& n. I, 400 n. 2
Boiardo, 552
Keats's reference to, 356
Bolton-le-Sands, Keats at, 271
Bookman, The, of New York, Hay-
don's 'Christ's entry into
Jerusalem' reproduced
and discussed in, 462 n.
Books in Keats's Library, 228 n.,
390 n., 397 n., 447 n. i
List of, compiled by Woodhouse,
556-8
Borghese, Princess (Pauline Bona-
parte), and Severn, 503
Borghese Vase, the, 416
Borghese 2Jodiac, picture of, as inspi-
ration to Keats, 200
Borrowers, Keats's diflBculties due to,
323-4, 327-8, 516, 517
Bowles, William Lisle, editor of Pope,
480; Byron's controversy
with, 120
Bowness, view of Windermere from,
273
Bradley, A. C, lectures by, on Keats's
letters, 545
on the Influence of Alastor on
Endymion, 234
Bradley, Henry, 551
Brawne, Fanny, appearance and
character of, 329, 330 A n.
Keats's love-affair with, and its
effects on him, 329 et sqq.,
437, 455, 488, 491-2. 494.
497, 516, 535
Keats's love-letters to, 360 et sqq.,
365. 374, 375, 457-8,
459-60, 464-5, 544
Letters of, to Keats at Rome, effect
of on him, 508, 511, 514
Marriage of, 535
Milnes's error as to, 535
on Keats's memory, 535
on her love and fears for Keats, 514
on the strength and expression of
Keats's passions, 465-6
Brawne, Mrs, 329, 330, 331, 514
Keats's stay with, 375, 376-7, 485
Letters to, from
Keats, in quarantine, 497-8
Severn, on Keats's state, in Rome,
505-6, 507-8
Tragic fate of, 535
562
INDEX
Bridal night lines, in Sleep and
Poetry, tenderness of, 124
Bridges, Robert, on
Keats's poetry, 540
and its relation to Wordsworth,
126-9, 544-5
on Endymion
Parallel between and Moore's
Epicurean, 186 n.
Structure of the poem, 173
Bright Star, sonnet (Keats), a cry of
the heart, 334-5, two forms
of, 493-4
Britannia^ 8 Pastorals (Browne), as
model to Keats, 21, 93, 98,
109-10, 124
Double-endings in, 98, 109-10, 207
Echoes of, in Keats's poems, 93,
109-10, 349, 350, 401. 418
Lines in, on
Devon, 261
Endymion, 167-8 & n.
British Critic, on Endymion, and on
the Lamia volume, 474
British Institution, pictures seen by
Keats at, 78, 231, 464
British Museum, art treasiu-es in,
Keats's knowledge of, and
inspiration from, 66, 78,
231-2, 416
Broadmayne, Dorset, the Keatses of, 4
Brougham, Lord, challenge of, to the
Lowthers, 272
Support given by, to Hunt, 43
Brown, Charles, attitude of, to George
Keats, 529. 530
and Dilke, relations between, 381-2,
530
Fairy tales, satiric, by, 381-2,
444
Friendship of with Keats. 141, 142,
159, 535
Biographical designs of, 529, 530
Scottish walking tour with Keats,
268, ^ 271, 272 et sqq.;
Diaries of, cited, 273 dt n.
Keats*s life with, 320 et sqq.
Collaboration in writing, 295,
357, 359, 364, 376, 440 et
sqq., 553-6
Keats*s (temporary) indignation
against, 465
Loan by, to Keats, 357, 373
Second tour of in Scotland, 462;
leading to absence at
Keats's departure for
Italy. 487, 488, 491
Letters to, from Keats, 371 et sqq.,
464, 491-2, 600, 504-5
Satiric verses on, by Keats, 345
Brown, Charles — continued
Keats's poems transcribed by,494 n.,
496 & n.
Later life in Italy, and death in
New Zealand, 522-31
on Fanny Brawne and her love for
Keats, 514; and on her
grief at his death, 515
on the cause of Keats's illness, 516,
517. 522
on the influence of the Faerie
Queene on Keats, 20
on the Ireby dancing-school, 277
on Keats's first sight of Windermere,
273-4
on Keats's state of mind and health
(Oct. 1819), 375 et sqq.;
on the fatal chill, 284; on
Keats as invalid, 456
on the writing of the Ode to a
Nightingale, 353-4 «fe n.
Browne, William, of Tavistock, works
of {see also Britannia's
Pastoral). Keats's familia-
rity with, 21, as affecting
his style, 93, 109, 124
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, tribute
of to Keats, 539-40
Browning, Robert, inspiration derived
by from gift of poems of
Keats and Shelley, 526
Rossetti's enthusiasm for, 538
Slow sale of his Bells and Pome-
granates series, 528
Bulletin and Review of the Keats-
Shelley Memorial (Morris),
510 n.
Burford Bridge Inn. Keats's stay at,
152-3. 158, 162, 242
Endymion finished at, 158, 161-3
Burnet's History of his Ovm Time,
influence of, on Keats,
14
Bumey, Fanny, 159 n.
Bums, Robert, an English, see Clare
Keats on, 282, 283-4
Burton, Robert {see Anatomy of Melan-
choly), and the legend of
St Agnes' Eve, 396-7
Burton-in-Kendal, Keats at, 272
Byron, Lord
Allusion to, in Hyperion, 453
Attitude of, to
Keats, 432, 480-1. 517, 520
Hunt, 43, 47 n., 49
and the Elgin marbles, 60
Poems of {see also under names), 49,
518
Early Influences on, and sources
of inspiration, 2, 268
INDEX
563
Byron, Lord — continued
Poems of — continued
Keats's appreciation of, 31, and
sonnet on, 91
Monetary gains of, 82
Verse forms used by, 108, 390
Reynolds's poem dedicated to, 74
Sovereignty of, as poet, 526, 537
at Shelley's cremation, 521
on the effect of the Reviews on
Keats, 517, 520 <b see 315
on Hyperion, 432
on Leigh Himt, 47 n., and on his
Story of Rimini, 49
Departure for Italy, 522
Death of, 521
Byron's Collected Works, Prose, on
Reynolds in later life,
533 & n.
CALIDORE (Keats), and its Induction,
34, sentiments, form and
metre of. 111, 122, 470
Callington, the Keatses of, 5
Cambridge Students, enthusiasm of
for Adonais, and for Keats,
520, 527, 530
Camelford, the Keatses around, 5
Campbell, John, of Islay, on the
Goylen story, 291 n.
Campbell, Thomas, poet, as editor,
473
Poems of
Heroic couplet used in, 108
Jeffrey on, 528
Hunt on, 44
Camperdown, sea fight of, Keats's
uncle in, 5
Canterbury, effect of on Keats, 140
Canova, Severn's introduction to, 501
Cap and Bells, The ; or. The Jealousies
(Keats), written with
Brown, 140, 380, 470
Copymg of, 376, 379
Echoes in, 87 & n.
First printed, 537
Idea inspiring, story, metre, tone,
&c., 367, 444, 447, 549
Keats's discontent with, 380, 381,
445 & n.
Lines on margin of, 455
Stanzas in, suggestive of Queen
Caroline's arrival, 463
Carisbrooke, Endymion begun at, 135,
161, 176 n.
Carlyle, Thomas, on Hunt, Lamb and
Keats, 532
Caroline, Queen, at Dover, 463
Caroline poetry, an instance of Keats's
interest in, 150
Cary*s Dante, echoes of, by Keats,
400 n. I
CaMle Builder, The (Keats), a frag-
ment, 389
Ca^e of Indolence, The (Thomson),
28,342
'Cave of Despair,' Severn's competi-
tion picture, 380
Cave of Quietude, in Endymion, 154
Cenci, The (Shelley), gift of by
Shelley to Keats, 467,
485
ChaMee MS., The, 301-3; Scott on,
304
Chamberlayne, William, misuse of
the Heroic Couplet by,
100-1, 209 n.
Champion, The, 519; Stage criticisms
m, by Keats, 242-4
Chapman, George, see also Homer,
Hynm to Apollo, Hynm to
Pan, Iliad, Odyssey
Heroic couplet used by, 98; lines
illustrating, 99
Metre used by, fault in, 209
Strained rimes of, 211
Translation of Homer by, as in-
fluencing Keats, 38 et sqq.,
124, 206, 428
Character in men of Power, and its
absence in men of Genius,
Keats on, 154
Charioteer theme, in Sleep and
Poetry, 117-18, 119, 198-9
Charts lyrics (Jonson), metre of, 386
Charles IL, Scott's handling of, 45
'Charmian,' an East-Indian, 318-19,
330; Milnes's error on,
535
Chartier, Alain, and La Belle Dame
sans Merci, 350, 469
Chatterton, and the Rowley forgeries,
106-7; English of, and
verse-flow, 369; Keats's
admiration for, 146-7, and
sonnet on, 23, 91
Chaucer, Geoffrey, poems of, 186
Echoes of, in Eve of St Mark,
437-8, 539
Heroic couplet as used in, lines
illustrating, 93-4
Influence on Keats, 391
Keats's studies in, 341, <fe see 75 & n.
I^ndor on, 537
Morris's exemplar, 539
Verse of, as 'translated' by Dryden,
103-4
Cheapside, No. 76, lodging of the
Keats brothers, 28, 134
Chichester, Keats at, 333
564
INDEX
Chief of organic numbers (Keats),
origin of, 257
Childe Harold (Byron), 21
Christabel (Coleridge), 121; criticism
of, in the Edinburgh Re-
view, 299, 300; tags from,
used by Keats, 243
Christie, J. H., 310, 311; duel of, with
Scott, over the *Z' papers,
519, 526
* Christopher North,' see Wilson
* Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,'
Haydon's picture, 60, 248,
250; Keats on, 256;
private view of, Keats at,
various comments; Keats' s
head painted in, 460-2
Christ's Hospital, Reynolds's father's
post at, 74
Church Street, Edmonton, Keats's
home at, 9
Circe, in Endymion, 191 et sqq.
Clare, John, 475 & n.
Clarendon Press edition of Keats's
poems 1906, frontispiece of,
416 n.
Claret, and Game, Keats on his liking
for, 340
Clark, Sir James, Keats's doctor in
Rome, 501, 502, 503, 504,
514; kindness of, with his
wife, to Keats, 506
Clarke, Charles Cowden, 252, 539;
Keats's sonnet on when
asleep over Chaucer, 75 & n.
Ejristle to (Keats), 37-8, 113
and Hunt, in prison, 43-4
Relations with Keats, 8, 12, 18, 19,
20 et sqq., 34-5, 36. 64;
introduction by, to Hunt,
36, and to Homer's poems,
38 et sqq.
Keats's letter to, in Dean St. days,
34
Recollections, on Keats at a bear-
baiting, 81-2; on Keats's
fight with a butcher boy,
343; on Keats at school,
13, 531-2, and his successes,
14; on Keats's introduc-
tion to Leigh Hunt, 34-5;
on Keats's power of Self-
expression, 81; on Keats's
reading Poetry, 225-6;
on Keats as surgeon's
apprentice, 17 et sqq., and
medical student, 28; on
Keats's verse-writing to
a given subject, 55; on
last sight of Keats, 342;
Clarke, Charles Cowden — continued
Recollections — continued
on the publication of
Poems, 130, 131
on T. Keats senior, 6
Clarke, John, Keats's schoolmaster,
7, 8, 17, 343
Clarke, Mrs. Charles Cowden, on
Keats at her father's
house, 328
Claude, pictures by, inspiring Keats,
264, 291 n., 417
Clive Newcome and his friends on
the Victorian poets, 536-7
Closed or Stopped Couplet system,
the, 95 et sqq.
Avoidance of, by Keats, 207,
209 n.
Croker's attitude to, 311
Clowes, Messrs., and Webb, 76-7
Cockerell, Sydney, on Morris and the
changes in La Belle Dams
sans Merci, 470
'Cockney School,' articles on, in
Blackwood's, 45, 76, 137,
152, 299-300 et sqq., 477-8;
effect of, 313, 370. 516 et
Shelley included in, by Maginn, 519
Cockneyism, verses by Keats charged
with, 109 n.
Colbum's New Monthly Magazine, see
New Monthly
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Anatomical
studies of, 29
Critical style of, 46
Friend of Haydon, 62
Lack of negative capability in,
Keats on, 254
Lectures by, on Shakespeare, 244
Poems of, 21, 121
Disuse by, of the older verse
form, 108, 118, 119, 207
Echo of, in Endymion, 230
Galignani's edition of, 150 n., 527
Hazlitt's criticism on, 299, 300
Hunt's verdict on, 44
Rossetti's enthusiasm for, 538
Political change of view of, 45
Relations with Wordsworth, 45,
108, 207; strained, 245-6
on the Poetic revolution, 119; on
the Reviews and Keats's
death, 347; on his walk
with Keats ('There is
Death in that hand'),
346-8; on Wordsworth's
poems. 245-6
College St., Westminster, Keats'i
stay in, 374-6
INDEX
565
Collins, William, poems of, 19
*Come hither y all sweet maidens,' see
On a Picture of Leander
Commonwealth and Restoration
Poets, use of the heroic
couplet by, with illus-
trations, 102 et sqq.
Complete Works of John Keats, edited
by H. Buxton Forman,
referred to, 262, 335 n. i,
392 n., 400 n. i, 459 n.,
549 n.
Compound Epithets, Keats's felicity
in, 412-13
Comus (Milton), 19, 432; Echoes of,
in Endymion, 195; Keats's
recitations from, 495
Concordance to Keats's Poems, pub-
lished by Cornell Uni-
versity, 545
Constable, Archibald, owner of the
Edinburgh Review, 297,
311-12
Relations with Scott, 303, 524-5
Cooke, Thomas, translator of Hesiod,
428
Coolness and Refreshment in Nature,
preferred in Keats's ima-
gery, 217-18
Cooper, George, 30
Cooper, Sir Astley, and Keats, 30, 31
Copthall Court, possible treasures in,
534
Cornell, see Concordance
ComhiU Magazine for April, 1917,
cited on Coleridge's talk
with Keats, 347-8 & n.
Cornish origin of Keats's father, Fanny
Keats on, 3
Corsair, The (Byron), form used in,
108
Cotterell, Charles, kindness of, to
Keats, 496, 498, 501
Cotterell, Miss, 488, 489, 490, 495.
496, 498
Country Ballads, Wordsworth's,
Strained simplicity of, 121,
348
Couplet, Closed, versus Free System,
95 et sqq.
Courthope, W. J., judgment of, on
Keats, 542-3
Cowley, Abraham, use of the heroic
couplet by, 103
Crabbe, George, use of the heroic
couplet by, 108
Craven St., City Road, Keats's home
at, 3
Crewe, Earl of, owner of MS. of the
Ode to a Nightingale, 354 n.
Cripps, — , Haydon, and Keats, 151
Criticism, early 19th century
Amenities of, 137-8
Destructive, Jeffrey on, 480
Personalities in, Scott on, 305-6
Croker, John Wilson, criticisms by,
on
Endymion, 310-11
Tennyson's and Keats's Poems,
528 n. I
* Crown, A, of Ivy,' sonnet (Hunt),
occasion of, 56
Cupid and Psyche myth, sources of,
open to Keats, 412
Curse, The, of Kehama (Southey),
121
Curse, The, of Minerva (Byron), 60
Cybele, passage on, in Sandys's Ovid's
Metamorphoses, compared
with that in Endymion,
223-4
Cynthia and Endymion story, Keats's
love for, 164, 166
Dancing, country school of, at Ireby,
described by Brown, and
by Keats, 277-8
Dante, 244
Poems of
Eagle in, 186
Influence of, on Keats, 400 n. i,
544,545
Keats's travelling book, 272, 545
Rossetti's love for, 538
Sonnet-beginnings used by, 92
Davideis, The (Cowley), metre of,
103
Dean St., No. 8, Borough, Keats's first
independent abode, 28
'Death of Alcibiades,' Severn's
picture for competition,
503
Death and Dying, Keats's allusions
to, in his poems, 112, 203,
336,344
Deathbed feelings of a Poet, Keats
on, in the Epistle to George
Keats, 112
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, 430 <t n.
Delight, the spirit animating Keats's
poetry, 83-4
'Delia Cruscan' school, 519
'Dentatus,' picture by Haydon, 60
566
INDEX
De Quincey, Thomas, as critic, 46, 430
on Keats, and his poetry, 213, 528
and Shelley's poetry, 477
Descent, The, of Liberty, A Masque
(Hunt), 44
de Selincourt, Professor E., Editorial
work of, on Keats's poems,
545
on Endymion
'Four Elements' theory, 173
*Moon' passage in, 215
on Eve of St Agnes
* Corbels ' passage in, 400 n. i
on Hyperion, the scale of, 427
Destnictiveness of Nature, Keats's
lines on, 265
de Vere, Aubrey, 540
Devonshire, Keats's Visit to, 260 et
sqq.; second visit planned,
357
the Keats of, 4, 5
De Wint, P., 380
Dilke, Charles Wentworth, friendship
of, with Keats and Brown,
141-2, 308, 321, 332-3,
346, 370, 458, 465, 491,
530
George Keats exonerated by, 530
House of, 321
Letters to, from Keats, 371
on supporting himself by his pen,
373
on Tom Keats's illness, 316
Literary tastes and work of, 141-2,
167
Editorship of the Athenaeum,
530, 533
Relations of, with the Brawnes, 535
on James Rice, 76
Views of, on Keats's attachment^to
Fanny Brawne, 330 n., 331
Dilke, Mrs C. W., 321; on the Fairy
tales competition, 381;
on Keats, on his return
from Scotland, 296
Dilke, Sir Charles, Keats collection
given by, to Hampstead
Public Library, 16 w.,
33 n. 2
Owner of Keats's Sosibio Vase
tracing, 416 n.
Dilke, William, 321 n.
Divine Comedy (Dante), influence of,
on Keats, 545
Dodsley, James, 'Old Plays' by,
Dilke's continuation of,
142
Don Esteban (Llanos), 536
Don Giovanni, pantomime on, Keats's
criticism on, 242
Don Juan (Byron), 444 ^
Keats on, 366, 496
Metre of, 445
Reference in, to Keats, 481, as
killed by the Reviews, 520
Donne, Dr. John, Methods of, with the
Heroic Couplet, 100
Downer, A. C, The Odes of Keats by.
Urn illustrated in, 416 n.
Dragon-world and its hundred eyes,
Keats on, 336
Dramatic Specimens (Lamb), 142
Fuller's words on Fancy, quoted in,
388-9
'Draught, A, of Sunshine* ('Hence
Burgundy,* &c.) (Keats),
lines in, on the Madness of
Song, 257
Drayton, Michael, influence of, on
Keats, seen in
Endymion, 206, 216
Epistle to Reynolds, 21
Hyperion, 175
Sprightly lines by, 109 n.
Two poetic versions by, of the
Endymion theme, echoes
of, in Keats's poem, 168
et sqq.
Use by, of Heroic Couplet, 97-8
Dream, A, after reading Dante's
Episode of Paolo and
Francesca, Sonnet (Keats),
343
Drununond of Hawthornden, William,
references of, to Endymion
in his sonnets, 168
Dryden, John
Influence of, on Keats, seen in
Drear-Nighted December, 160
Isabella, 392
Use by, of Heroic Couplet, 103
'Duchess of Dunghill,' Keats on,
283
Duncan, Admiral, 5
Durdle Door, 492
Duverger's French Grammar owned
by Keats, 16 n.
Eagle, the, in Endymion and other
poems, 186
Earthly Paradise, The (Morris), 539
Eclectic Review, The, Reviews by, of
Keats's poems
Lamia, 474
Poems, 132
Eden, The, of Imagination (Reynolds),
74
Edgeworth, Maria, and Hunt, 43
Edinburgh Magazine on the Lamia
volume, 474-5
INDEX
567
Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, see
Blackwood's
Edinburgh Review, politics, publisher
and rival of, 297
Critical ferocity in, 299
Hazlitt in, on Keats as killed by the
Reviews, 521-2
Influence of, 316
Jeffrey's article in, on Endymion,
and on the Lamia volume,
479-80
Reynolds's contributions to, 533
Edmonton, third home at, of Keats,
9, 39, 113 '
Eglantine Villa, Shanklin, 358 n.
Election of a Poet Laureate (Duke of
Buckingham), 44
Election contest, Keats's contact with,
277,274
Elgm, Earl of, 231 w.; and the
Parthenon Marbles, 59-60
Elgin Marbles, the, Haydon's defence
of the removal of, 69-60,
460
Hunt's sonnet on, 63
Keats's reveries among, 416
Keats's sonnets on, 66-7
Eliot, George, phrase of, on the word
Love, 549 n.
Elizabethan Poets and Poetry, Keats's
introduction to, 19
Influence of, on Keats's poems, 124,
168 et sqq., 171, 206, 207,
209, 223 et sqq., 389, 442,
479
Keats's studies of, 430
Spirit of, reborn in Keats, 171
Use in, of the Couplet, Closed and
Free Systems, 95, illustra-
tions, 96 et sqq., 207
Elizabethan versions of the Endymion
story, 167 et sqq.
Ellis, George, and the Legend of St.
Agnes' Eve, 398 n.
Elmes, James, and the Ode to a
Nightingale, 354
** Enchanted Castle," by Claude, in-
spiration of, to Keats, 264,
291 & n.; owner of 265 n.
Endimion (Gombauld), parallels to, in
Keats's poem, 175 & n.
Endimion (Lyly), edited by Dilke,
167; allegory in, 168 n.
Endimion and Phoebe (Drayton), 169;
echoed by Keats, 216
Endings of Lines
Closed, Keats's avoidance of, 207
Double, Keats's relinquishment of,
207
End Moor, the toper at, 273, 277
End rime-syllables
Chaucerian, 94-5
Elizabethan, 95 et sqq.
Endymion, the Greek myth of,
166 & n.
Browne's reference to, 167-8 <fe n.
in Elizabethan poetry, 167 et sqq.
in Sleep and Poetry, 123
Endymion (Keats), 257 n., 386, 389,
467, 470
Affinities of lines in, with those in
other poems, 176 n., 207
et sqq., 236
Allegorical strain in, 171 et sqq.
Analysis of, 164 et sqq.
Reason for undertaking, 204-5
Ascending scale in, 181-2
Autumnal scene in, 161
Bailey's praise, and Keats's apathy,
270
Beauties in, mixed with the faults,
214 et sqq.
Begun at Carisbrooke, 135, 161,
176 & n. ; opening lines of,
161, partly written at
Oxford, 142-3, 147; pro-
gress of, 140, 141, Keats's
depression during, 150,
and letters on to friend
whilst writing, 150, 151,
153, study of, helpful to
understanding the poem,
154
Brought to a close at Burford
Bridge, 158-9, 161; last
lines of, 161-2; copying
of, by Keats, 244, 251;
revision and correction of,
for press, 244; Keats's
letters on to Taylor, 260;
seen through the press,
262.
Book I., 175
Book II., 182
Book III., 189
Book IV., 197
Characters in, 166, 177 et alibi
Contemporary influences seen in,
233 et sqq.
Date of publication, 163
Deeper speculative and symbolic
meanings of, and of Keats's
other poems, key to, 153-4
Dramatic promise of, 222
Elizabethan influence seen in, 124,
168 et sqq., 206-7, 223 et
sqq.
English spirit in, 391
Exordium of, famous line in,
176 «fe n.
568
INDEX
Endymion (Keats) — continued
Faults and flaws in, 207 et sqq.,
392, 407, 411
Spiritual, 213 et sqq., 392
Technical, 211 et sqq.
Inseparable from its Beauties,
214
First title of, 73
Germs of, 67-8, 259 n.
Hunt's views on, 150-1, 252-3. 312
Ideas in, 448
in Embryo, 259 n.
Ironic power, promise of, in, 222
as Keats's test of his own poet-hood,
165; his own judgment
on the poem, 269
Long meditated, 135
Love as treated in, 181, 183, 213,
222, 549
Lyrics in, compared with their
sources, 224 et sqq.
Models for, Jeffrey on, 479
Moods and aims governing the
writing of, 254
New sympathies awakened, 188
Pioneer work, Keats on, 254
Poetic melody of, 147
Poetry of, qualities, affinities and
defects of, 207 et sqq.
Preface to, 269, modesty of, 308
Reference in, to the Pymmes brook,
10
Reviews on, 307 et sqq., 463, 474,
477-8, 479-80, 528 * n. i,
529, 543 n.
Keats on, 314-15
Source of the Indian Maiden in
Book IV., 33
Sources of Inspiration, 165 et sqq.
Study on, by Mrs F. M. Owen,
544
Subject: Analysis of, 164, Keats
on, 148
Symbolism of, 172 et sqq., 312, 411;
the Four Elements theory,
173-4, error of, 175
Taylor's purchase of copyright of,
486
True meaning of, 544
Endymion sarcophagus, from Italy,
at Woburn, 231 n.
Enfield, Clarke's school at, 7 ef sqq.;
Keats's attachment to, 17
et sqq., and lines on, 37,
113
Enfield Chase, beauties of, 22
Englefield, Sir Henry, and the Story
of Rimini, 49
English character of Keats's poems,
Jeffrey on, 480
English Heroic Metre, Leigh Hunt's
effort to revive, 47-9
English Historical Portraits, Show of,
Keats at, 464
English Literature, Hunt's predilec-
tions in, 47
English Poetry, History of, lines on,
in Sleep and Poetry, 118-19
English Poets, Keats's attendance at
Hazlitt's lectures on, 244,
300
English Romance poetry, Rossetti's
love for, 538
English Spring flowers, Keats's delight
m, 497
English Writers, Why so fine ? Keats
on, 355-6
Enid (Tennyson), a Keats remini-
scence in, 123
Epic poetry, the obvious model for,
429
Epicurean, The (Moore), model for,
186 n.
Epipsychidion (Shelley), possibleechoes
in, of Endymion, 240, 241
Epistle to Charles Cowden Clarke
(Keats), 37-8. 113
Epistle to George Felton Maihew
(Keats), 93, 109 & n., 110,
470
Epistle to Henry Reynolds (Drayton),
sprightly lines from, 109
Epistle to Maria Gisborne (Shelley),
versification in, 241
Epistle to my brother George (Keats),
37, 111-13
Epistles (Keats) group of {see the
foregoing), in Poems, metre
and form of, 93
Epithalamion (Spenser), lines in, on
Endymion, 167; lyric
effect in, 122
Epping Forest, 22; reminiscences of
in Keats's poems, 90
Essays in Criticism, Arnold's Essay
on Keats reprinted in,
543 n.
Essays and Studies (Suddard), 157 n.
Essays and Tales (Sterling), praise
in, of Keats, 527 di n. i,
528 n. 3
Ethereal Musings, Keats on, 155
Eton, famous headmaster of, 4 n.
Woodhouse at, 134
Eve of St Agnes, legend of, Jonson
on, 396
Eve, The, of St Agnes (Keats), 308.
350, 406, 443; an achieve-
ment, 386, 396; written
at Bedhampton. 333-4;
INDEX
569
Eve, The, of St Agnes (Keats) — contd.
read to Cowden Clarke,
342, 343
Feast of Fruits in, Miltonie parallel
to, 401
Hunt's picture from, 538
Lines in, reminiscent of Wieland's
Oberon, 87 n.
Poetic scope and method of, 399 et
sqq.
Place of, in English poetry, 386,
396
Publication plans, 366
Shelley's delight in, 483
Some changes made in, 367
Sources, story, form, beauties, and
metre of, 396 et sqq., 436
Eve, The, of St Mark (Keats), 140,
444, 445, 470
Bridge between Chaucer and
Morris, 539
Date of, 334, 337, 437
Included in Milnes's Book, 537
Incomplete, 339
Sent to George Keats, 371
Subject, metre, form; echoes in,
relation of, to the P.R.B.,
and Keats's own words on,
437-41
Evocation, and Exposition, the genius
of Keats and of Words-
worth seen in, 128-9, 234.
267-8
Ewing, Mr, kindness of, to Keats,
506
Examiner, The, founded by John
Hunt, 42, 46
Edited from prison by Leigh Hunt,
44
Influence of, on Keats, 14
Keats's critique in, on Reynolds's
skit on Peter Bell, 348
Poems published in, by
Keats, 35 & n., 36, 38, 54, 66-7,
73
Reynolds. 73-4
Shelley. 73
Reynolds' Endymion article re-
issued in, 312
Shelley's Alastor praised in, 234
on the New Movement in Poetry
as shown in 'Poems,'
131-2
Excursion, The (Wordsworth), 21, 128
Effect of, on Shelley, and on Keats,
233-4
Passage in, on Greek Mythology,
Keats on, 125, 146, 250
Exordium to Book III. of Endymion,
189
Fabliaux ou Contes, by Le Grand;
Way's translation of, 33
& n. I
* Faded the flower,' lines on Fanny
Brawne, date and self-
expression in, 377-8
Faerie Queene (Spenser, q.v.), influence
of, on Keats, 19-21, 31,
177, 185, 428
Fairfax, Edward, Italian stanza form
used by, 390
Fairies of the Four Elements (Keats),
words for operatic chorus,
350, 441
Faithful Shepherdess (Fletcher), the
Endymion passage in, 168
Influence of, on Keats, 168, 206,
386, 479
Metre of, 386
Falmouth district, the name Jennings
common in, 5
'Fame like a Wayward Girl,' sonnet
(Keats), echoes in, 349-50
Fancy (Keats), 263, date, 386-7
Metre, form, subject and Inspiration
of, 327, 387-9
Published in the Lamia volume,
470
Fancy, The, a medley (Reynolds),
475 n.
Faust (Goethe), opening chorus of,
217
Feast of Fruits, in
Eve of St Agnes, Miltonie parallel
to, 401
Hyperion, 450-1, 542
Feast of the Poets (Himt), earlier skits
on which modelled, 44
Keats's allusion to, 113
Treatment in, of Scott, 45, 303
'Feel,' as used in '7n drear-nighted
December,' 159 n.
Fetter Lane, Coleridge's lectures on
Shakespeare in, 244
Filocolo, II (Boccaccio), compared
with The Eve of St Agnes,
397-8 &n.2
Finch, Colonel, 517
Fingal's Cave, Keats on, in prose and
verse, 292
Finsbury, earliest home of Keats
in, 3
FitzGerald, Edward, admiration of, for
Keats, 527
on the poetry of Keats and Shelley,
541
Fitzwilliam, Earl, help from, to Keats,
486
Fladgate firm of solicitors, Reynolds
with, 533
570
INDEX
Fletcher, John, Endymion passage by,
168
Influence seen in Keats's Poems, 386
in Endymion, 206
in Sleep and Poetry, 125
Metre used by, 386
Faults in, 209
Floire et Blanchejlor, metrical romance
on. in relation to Isabella,
397-8
Florence, Artists and Literati at,
522-3, 630
Milnes's meeting at, with Brown,
530
Floure, The, and the Lefe (Pseudo-
Chaucer),
Echoes of, in Keats's poems, 115,
177
Keats's sonnet on, 75 & n.
Flowers, English Spring, Keats's lines
on, 446-7
Foliage, *Laureation* Sonnets pub-
lished in, 307
Foot measure of Stanzas, 350 & n.
Forest Scene and Festival, in Endy-
mion, 177 et sqq.
Forman, H. Buxton, Complete Works
of John Keats edited by,
references to, 544, 549 n.
& see footnotes
Help of, to Sefiora Llanos (nee
Keats), 536
on the * Bright Star' sonnet, 335 n. i
on the Corbels, in Eve of St Agnes,
400 n. I
on an Echo of Dryden by Keats,
392 n.
on Mrs Lindon's letter on Keats,
465 n.
on a reading in the Ode to Fanny,
335 n.
on a tendresse felt for Keats, 262
French literature, the less well-known,
Keats's reading in, 175 n.
Frere, Hookham, 49; use by, of the
ottava rima, 390
Frere, John, and Coleridge's meeting
with Keats in 1819, 347-8
Fuller, on Fancy. 388-9
Gaugnani's edition of the Poems
of Shelley. Coleridge, and
Keats (1829), 527
*/n drear-nighted December,' printed
in, 159 n.
'Gallipots' article, in Blackwood's,
307-8
Galloway, Keats in, 279 et sqq.
Garden of Proserpine (Swinburne),
metre of, 161
Garden of Florence (Reynolds), 333
Garnett, Richard, on Shelley's letters
and those of Keats, 541
Gem, The, *In a Drearnighted December*
printed in, 159 n.
George, Prince-Regent, "baited" in
The Twopenny Post, 43
George III., poetry of his period,
207
Gibson, John, the Sculptor, and
Severn, 503
Gifford, William, editor of the Quarterly
Review, 299
Critical ferocity of, 137
Hazlitt's Letter to, 341
Shelley's letter of remonstrance to
(unsent) on the hostile
criticism on Keats, 482,
516-17
Gil Bias (Le Sage), and the word
'Sangrado,* 309 <fe n.
Gipsies, The (Wordsworth), Keats on,
151
Gisbome, Mr. & Mrs., and Keats,
466-7, 516
* Give me a golden pen,' sonnet (Keats),
in Poems, 90
*Give me women, vnne and snuff,*
couplets (Keats), 32
Gladstone, Rt Hon. W. E., and
Severn, 526
Glaucus, in Endymion, 140; magic
robe of, possible source of,
170, 190 et sqq.
Gleig, Bishop, 306
Gleig, Chaplain-general, 306, 310, 341
Glencroe and Loch Awe, Keats on,
289 & n., 290
* Glory and Loveliness have pass'd
away,' sonnet to Leigh
Hunt (Keats), 83, 90
*God of the golden bow,' in Hymn to
Apollo (Keats), 58
Godfrey of Bulloigne (Tasso, trs.
Fairfax), metre of, 390
Godwin, Mary (Mrs Shelley), 70
Godwin, William, influence of, on
Shelley, 540
Primer of Mythology by, 228 n., 231
on Keats's poems, 41
Goethe Circle, at Weimar, Lockhart's
intimacy with, 298, 309
Golden Ass of Apuleius, as possible
inspiration to Keats, 412
<fen.
Golden Treasury Series edition of
Keats's poems, 544
Goldsmith's Greek History, Haydon's
gift of, to Keats, 65
Gollancz, Prof. Israel, 651, 553
INDEX
671
Goylen, ruins and legend of, 291
Gray, Thomas, poems of, 19; in-
fluence of, on Keats, 23
Verse-forms used by, 108
Great Smith St., the Dilkes m, 374
* Great Spirits now on Earth are
Sojourning,' sonnet to
Haydon (Keats), 65, 120;
echoes of, in Endymion,
120; included in Poems,
91
Greek History (Goldsmith), given by
Haydon to Keats, 65
Greek Liberation, Byron, and Tre-
lawny, 521, 522
Mythology, the Endymion legend
in, 166 n.
Keats's delight in 2, 81, 114, and
poetical use of, 218-19,
224 et sqq., 264-5, 414,
418, 426; Sources of his
knowledge of, 14, 126, 171;
his Talk on, 78; its
Vitality to him, 110
Revitalization of, in Europe,
219-20
Religion, and its evolution, Words-
worth on, 125-6, 220
Sculpture, see Elgin Marbles
Influence of, on Keats, 231 n.,
414 et sqq.
Style in poetry, Keats on, 426
Green, Joseph Henry, 346 & n., 347
Green, Miss E. M., A Talk with
Coleridge, edited by Corn-
hill Magazine, April 1917,
died, 347-8 A n.
Guy Mannering (Scott), 279
Guy's Hospital, Keats's student days
at, 16 & n.
*HAD I a Man's fair form,' sonnet
(Keats), included in Poems,
89
Hadrian, age of, Parthenon sculptures
assigned to by the dilet-
tanti, 60
* Hadst thou lived in days of old ' (Keats) ,
Valentine for Miss Wylie,
metre of, 34, 269, 386
Halecret, meaning of, 429 <fe n.
Hallam, Arthur, and the poems of
Shelley and Keats, 527
Hammond, Thomas, surgeon, Keats's
apprenticeship to, 16 <St n. 2,
26 n., 30
Hampstead, Himt's home at, Keats's
pleasure at, 35-7
Keats's life at, 141, 244, 245 et sqq.,
322
Hampstead Public Library, the Dilke
Keats collection at, 16 w.,
33 n.
Handful of Pleasant Delites (Robin-
son) , Keats ' s possible know-
ledge of, 158 & n.
Happiness, Keats on, 154
Happy is England, sonnet (Keats),
34; included in Poems, 89
Happy Warrior, The (Wordsworth),
form of, 108
Hare, Julius, Sterling's letter to, on
the Poems of Tennyson
& Keats, 528
Haslam, William, the "oak friend"
of Keats, 77, 141, 345,
487
in love, Keats's mockery on, 371
Letters to, from Severn, on Keats's
health in 1820, 466; on
the voyage to Italy, 489
et sqq., and Keats's life
there, 498 et sqq.; on
money troubles in Rome,
508-9
and the Milnes Biography, 534
on his love for Keats, 513-14
Haydon, Benjamin, 135, 347
Appearance, 62
as Artist, Controversialist, Writer,
59-62, 67
Characteristics, 59, 60 et sqq., 532
and the Elgin marbles, 59-61, 63
Friends of, and his quarrels with
them, 62, 71, 153, 254
Friendship with Keats, beginning
and course of, 64 et sqq.,
135. 136, 141, 255, 347
Keats's Sunday Evenings with,
and meeting with Words-
worth diuing, 245 et sqq.
in Great Marlborough St., 150, 151
Letters from, to Keats, on their
friendship, 67-8; on Prayer,
62, 138-9
Letters to, from Keats, on dis-
satisfaction with Endy-
mion, 150; on Haydon's
painting, 256; on a new
Romance in his mind, 334
Letters to and from Keats, on a
Loan, 323-4, 337-8, 339-40,
354-5; see also 370
and the Ode to a Nightingale, 354
Pictures by, 60
'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,'
heads of his friends in, 60,
250 462
Exhibition of, Keats at, 460
Keats's estimation of, 256
572
INDEX
Hajdon, Benjamin — continued
Pseudo- vegetarianism of, 250
and Shelley, a heated dessert-talk
between, 71
Sonnets addressed to, by
Keats, 65, 66, 67, 91, 120
Reynolds, 65
Wordsworth, 65
Sources of his acounts of Keats
used in present volume,
532
on the dinner when Keats met
Wordsworth, Lamb and
Kingston, &c., 246 et sqq.;
on Keats as a child, 7
on Keats's eyes, 79
on Keats, as killed by the Reviews,
520
on Keats's lack of decision, 369
on Keats's plunge into dissipation,
379-80
on his last sight of Keats, 486-7
on reading Shakespeare with Keats,
66
on Sleep and Poetry, 130
on Scott's beautifiil smile, 525 n.
Suicide of, 532
*B.aydon! forgive me that I cannot
speak,' sonnet (Keats), on
the Elgin Marbles, 67
Hazlitt, William, 133
Appearance and conversation of,
69
Attitude to, of Blackwood, 300
as Critic, 119, 151, 263; ferocity
of, 137, 299, 300; style
of, 243, 244
Friendship of, with
Haydon, 62
Keats, 68, 77
Invective of, against Gifford, 341
Lectures by, on English Poets, 244,
300; Keats at, 244
Taste of, Keats on, 68, 250
Wrath of, on the BlacktDOod Re-
views, 311, 314
on Haydon's 'Christ's Entry into
Jerusalem,' 461, 462 n.
on Keats, as killed by the Reviews,
521-2
on Keats's verses, 41
on Shelley, 70
on Wordsworth, aet. 48, 249
on Wordsworth's conversation on
poetic subjects, 251
Heine, Heinrich, 229
Heliconia (ed. Park), 158 n.
Hemans, Felicia, verse of, 526
'Hence Burgundy, Claret and Port,'
see Draught of Sunshine
Henry VI. (Shakespeare), as played
by Kean, Keats's criticism
on, 242, 243
Hercules, triumphs of, figured on
sarcophaguses, 231 & n.
Hero and Leander (Marlowe), Heroic
Couplet as used in, 169
Metre of, 96
'Heroic' Couplet, the, history of,
93 et sqq.
Keats's use of, 93, 207 et sqq., 406
Hesiod's Theogony, the Titans in, 428
Hessey, — , see also Taylor and Hessey
Indignation of, at the Blackwood
Reviews, 311
Letters to, from
Keats, on the criticisms on Endy-
mion, and the defence by
his friends, 311
Taylor, on his joust with W.
Blackwood, over Keats's
poems, 475-7
Hilton, — , 380; help from, for Keats,
486
Holman, Louis A., and Haydon's
'Christ's Entry into Jeru-
salem,' 462 n.
on the source of the P.R.B., 325
Holmes, Edward, on Keats as a boy,
11-12
Holy Living and Dying (Jeremy
Taylor), Keats soothed by,
in Rome, 509
Holy State (Fuller), on Fancy, 388-9
Homer, Chapman's Translation of,
Keats's ddrght in, and
sonnet oM^^d^et sqq.; in-
fluence seen in Endymion,
206
on the Hyperion story, 428
Homeric Hymn to Pan in Chapman's
Translation, lines from,
225-6
Hood, Mrs. Thomas {nSe Reynolds),
55
Hood, Thomas, 159 n., 255; Parodies
written by, with Reynolds,
533
Hope, lines on, in Endymion, 182
Horace, influence of, on Keats,
428<fcn.
Home, Richard Hengist, schoolfellow
of Keats, 77; on Keats
while with Mr Hammond,
18
Houghton, Lord (see also Milnes), 342
Poems by Keats, posthumously
published by, 334-5 d nn.
La Belle Dame gWenhom Brown's
transcript, 469
INDEX
573
Houghton MSS., referred to, 12 n.,
30 n., 56 n., 92 n., 147 n.,
307 n., e< oZzW
House of Fame (Chaucer), the Eagle
in, 186; mfluence seen m
The Eve of St Mark, 437-8
*How many bards gild the lapses of
timey sonnet (Keats), 88
Date and Text of, 88
Echoes in, 89
Technique of, 88
Human Lijfe, Keats's reflections on, 267
Human Nature, Keats's increasing
interest in, 276 el sqq.
Humour and Wit, Keats on, 245
Humphrey Clinker (Smollett), pre-
ferred by Keats to The
Antiquary (Scott), 279
Hungarian Brothers, The (Porter),
325
Hunt, James Henry Leigh, 139 <fe n.,
347
Appearance and charm of, 45-6
Attacks on, in Blackwood^ s, 45,
151-2, 300-3, 477
Attitude of, to
Blackwood's, 45, 314
Scott's poems, 21, 45, 303
Wordsworth's 'Simple life'
poems, 348
Champion of poetic revolution, 47,
49, 119, 207
Classical translations by, 52
Contrasts in his Diction and
Breeding, 46, 47 «fe n. i
as Critic, 44-5, 46, 48, 299
Criticisms on, by Keats, 263, 324,
328-9
Faults of Style, 46, 47 & n., 459,
477
Financial ineptitude of, 46 et alibi
Friendship of, with
Cowden Clarke, 35 et sqq.
Hay don, 63; quarrels of, 254
Keats, and influence on him, 14,
18, 35 et sqq., 41, 51 et sqq.,
109, 111, 125, 141, 214,
509,532
Haydon's caution on, and
Keats's reply, 138-40
Intercoronation episode, and
his verses thereon, 54-6, 307
Keats's changed attitude to,
252-3
Kindness to Keats in his illness
(1820), 462, 464, 466; and
renewed friendliness, 472
Shelley, 69 et sqq., and influence
on him, 241; present at
his cremation, 521
Hunt, James Henry Leigh — continued
Imprisonment of, 23, 42, 43
Keats's sonnet on his release, 23
Keats's first published work dedi-
cated to, 83. 90, 130-1
in Later life, 532
Letter from, to Severn at Rome,
on the love of Keats's
friends for him, 515-16
Letter to, from Keats, of criticism,
137
Life at Hampstead, 35 et sqq., 50 et
sqq.
Lines from Cap and Bells pubHshed
by, 445
Literary industry of, and writings,
34, 46
Memories of Keats in his writings,
532
at Novello's, 327, 328
Papers edited by, see Examiner,
Indicator, Reflector
as Poet, 518
Poems by (see under their Titles),
44, 63, 130-1. 138
Anapaestic verses by, to friends,
50,51
Praise by, of Alastor, in The Exor
miner, 234
Religious views of, 51
Review by, of
Lamia volume, 410-11, 472-3
Poems, 131-2
Sketch of his origin, life and career,
41 et sqq.
and The Eve of St Agnes, 398
Tributes of, to Keats, 41, 526
Views of, on Endymion, and vexa-
tion caused thereby, 150-1,
252-3, 312
Young Poets, promise of, noted in
article of that title, 54, 69
on the Feast in St Agnes' Eve, 401-2
on Hyperion, 73
on Isabella ; or, the Pot of Basil,
473
on Keats's attitude to Shelley, 70-1,
72
on Keats's eyes, 79
on Keats and his poetry, 36
on La Belle Dame sans Merci, 469
on Sleep and Poetry, 130 et sqq.
on Wordsworth at 48, 249
Hunt, John, and the Examiner, 42
Hunt, Mrs Leigh {nSe Kent), 43, 254
Himt, W. Holman, a Keats worship-
per, 538
Htum of Bordeaux, source of Shake-
speare's Oberon and Ti-
tania, 87 n.
574
INDEX
Hyginus, notes to, in Audores Mytho-
graphi, on Moneta, 447 & n.
Hymn, A, to Apollo (Keats), 56 n., 58
Hymn to IntelleduaJ Beauty (Shelley),
influence of, on Keats, 73
Inspirations of, 237
Publication of, 234
Hymn to Pan (Chapman), 124, 225-6
Hymn to Pan {Endymion), quality and
afSnities of, 225 et sqq.
Ode-form of, 411
Wordsworth on, 237. 249
Hymn to Pan (Shelley), 241
Hymns of Homer (Chapman's ver-
sion), influence seen in En-
dymion, 206
Hyperion (Keats), 308, 517; attitude
to, of the critics, 471
Blank verse of, 317
Dante's influence seen in, 545
De Quincey's criticism on (1845),
528-9 A n.
Designed as a romance, its scheme
and scale, subject, sources,
model, lines from, fine
start, difficulties, and aban-r
donment, 426 et sqq.
Epic quality of, 333
Feast of Fruits in, 450-1, 642
Fire referred to, in. 175
First intimations of, 202, 262, 334;
first draft work on, 322,
323, 327. 333
Germ of lines in, 276
Keats's change of mind on, 369,
375
Matonism of, 399, 545
Mistake on, set right, 544
Never finished, 339
Remodelling of, 376, 379, 447-54;
errors made in, 469; the
Induction, 450 et sqq.;
leading Ideas in, 447 et
sqq.
Shelley on. 482
Transcendental cosmopolities of.
Hunt on, 73
Idiot Boy, The (Wordsworth), 348
' / had a dove,' lines for music (Keats),
327
Iliad, The, 177
Chapman's, Keats's delight in, and
Sonnet on, 38, 40 A n., 41,
64, 87, 88, 133; echoes of,
in other poems, 177, 428
Metre of, 86
Strained rimes of, 211
Imagination and Fancy (Hunt), Keats
memories in, 632
Imagination and Truth, relation
between, elucidated by
Adam's dreams in Para-
dise Lost, 154, 155
Imagines, of Philostratus, 190 n.
Imitation of Spenser (Keats), 20;
published in Poems, 86
Immortality, Keats's attitude to,
345, 387, 492, 509
Indiaman surgeoncy, Keats's plan con-
cemmg, 355-6, 462
Indian Maiden, in Endymion, 197 et
sqq.; lines cited, 229-30;
echoes in, and inspiration
for, 33, 230 et sqq.
Indicator, The, 46
Lines from Cap and Bells published
in, 445
La Belle Dame published in, 468-9
*In drear-nighted December,' an
achievement, 386
Date and association of, 158 et sqq.
Model of, 158, 160
Text, 159
Versions, 159 n. 2
Induction to
Cdidore, 34, 111, 122, 470
Endymion, the intended, 122, 164
Hyperion, 450 et sqq.
Ingpen, Roger, his edition of the
Letters of Percy Bysshe
Shelley cited, 482 & n.
Invention and Imagination as the
prime endowments of a
Poet, Keats's insistence
on, 165
Inverary, woods at, Keats on, 288
lona, Keats's visit to, 291
Ireby, Keats at, 274
Brown's account of the dancing
school at, and Keats's of
the same, 277 & n., 278
Irish Melodies (Moore), money-worth
to the poet, 82
Isabella ; or, the Pot of Basil. A Story
from Boccaccio (Keats).
339. 386, 396, 406, 443;
an achievement, 399
Apostrophes and Invocations in,
391-2
Beauties of, 389, 392-3, and horror
turned to beauty, 393 et
sqq., 471
Date of, 260, 262, 390
Digging scene in, 394
Lamb on, 471
Dryden echoes in, 392
Induded in the Lamia volume, 470^
471
Keats's distaste for, 366, 369
INDEX
575
Isabella! or, the Pot of BomI — continued
Latin usage in, 431
Lines in, on the bittersweet of love,
360
Metre of, 393
Millais' picture from, 538
Reynolds's Boccaccio tales intended
for issue with, 259-60, 387,
521
Procter's poem on the same subject,
459
Shelley's delight in, 483
Story of, 390
Lamb on, 471
Reynolds on, 312-13
Wilson on (1828), 527
Isle of Palms, The (Wilson), 298
Isle of Wight, Keats's visits to, 135-6,
164, 357 et sqq., 405
*/ stood tip-toe upon a little hilV
(Keats), Cupid and Psyche
reference in, 412
Date of, 115, 122, 164
Included in Poems, 115
Influence on, of a passage in The
Excursion, 126
Metre, diction and subject of, 114-15
Planned as Induction to Endymion,
122, 164
References in, to the Moon, 123, 166
Scene described in, 36
Italian attitude to the Sick, 506
Literature, Hunt's preferences in,
47
Keats's studies in, 370, 398
Primitives, Keats's appreciation of,
325
Italy, winter in, planned for Keats,
467, 484, and undertaken,
485, journey to, illness and
death of Keats, 486 et sqq.
It is an awful mission (Keats), lines
quoted, 425
* It is a lofty feeling,^ sonnet (Hunt),
occasion of, 56
Jacobean" poetry, influence of, seen in
Endymion, 206, 207, 209 n.
James I., 101
Jasmine Bower scene in Endymion, a
flaw in the poem, 186-7
JefiFrey, Francis, editor of the Edinburgh
Review, 297; as critic,
299,528
on Keats's poems, 478-80, 481, 528
on Shelley's poems, 528
Jeffrey, Miss, letters to, from Keats,
on going as Ship's doctor,
355-6; on writing the Ode
to Indolence, 415
Jeffrey, Mrs, and her daughters,
Keats's friendship with,
262
Jeffrey, Mrs (Mrs G. Keats), and the
letters of Keats to his
brother, 531
Jennings, a common name in Corn-
wall, 5
Jennings, Captain Midgley John,
of the Royal Marines,
uncle of the poet, 5, 7, 12
Jennings, Frances (Mrs T. Keats, q.v.,
later Mrs Rawlings), mother
of the Poet, 3
Jennings, John, grandfather of the
poet, 3, 5
Will and bequests of, 9, 355 <6 n.
Jennings, John, of Penryn, 5
Jennings, Mrs John, grandmother of
Keats, 9
Character of, 6
Legacy of, to Keats, 354, 355 & n.
Trustees appointed by, for the
Keats children, 15-16
Death of, 16 <fe n. i
Jennings, Mrs Midgley John, lawsuit
by, as affecting Keats,
354, 365
Johnson, Dr Samuel, 537; Tour of,
m the Highlands, 282
on Greek mythology, 220
on Sheridan's pension, 481
Jones, Mrs, the mysterious, 334
Jonson, Ben, poems of. Influence of
on Keats, 206, 225, 396,
479
Life of, Keats on, 356
Metre used by, 389; faults in, 209
Use by, of the Heroic Couplet, 100
Joseph and his Brethren (Wells), en-
thusiasm for, of Swin-
burne and Rossetti, 77
'Judgment of Solomon,' picture by
Haydon, 60
Julian and Maddalo (Shelley), 241
Junius, Taylor an authority on, 133
* Junkets,' Keats's nickname, 83
Kean, Edmund, 245, 263
Departure to America, 370, 372
Dramatic powers of, 442
in Shakespearean parts, Keats's
criticisms on, 242-4
Keast, Thomas, of St Agnes' parish,
Cornwall, 5
Keate, Catherine, 5
Keate, Dr, Headmaster of Eton, 4 n.
Keats, Edward, 3
Keats family of Dorsetshire, 4, 5,
492
576
INDEX
Keats family (the poet's)
Brotherly affection in, 3, 11, 13, 24,
25, ?l-2, 133, 135, 145,
262, 271, 323, 324
Keats, Frances Mary (Fanny), sister
of the poet (later Llanos,
q.v.), 3, 505
Inheritance of, 355 & n., 529
Keats's affection for, 145
Letters to, from Keats, charm of,
338; on being friends, and
on the story of Endymion,
147-9; on dancing, 336-7;
on fine weather, 364-5; on
going to the Isle of Wight,
357; on going as a Ship's
Doctor, 355; on his health
and on Otho the Great, 381;
on his idleness, 347; in ill-
ness, 456; on keeping well,
487; on the Scotch tour,
290
Marriage of, 535
Verses addressed to, by Keats,
9-10
Visit to, by Keats, 366
Keats, George, brother of the poet, 3,
25, 58, 77, 162; at school,
8
Biographical references to, in order
of date
Business life of, 24; Money
troubles of, 139-40; and
the Publishers of the Poems,
133; at Teignmouth, with
Tom, 244; Marriage and
Emigration of, 24, 260,
269-72; Business troubles
of, 365; Keats's generosity
to, 371; Visit of, to Eng-
land, and Keats's further
generosity, 382-4; Good
news from, 504; Inherit-
ance of, 355 n.; Death of,
531
Brotherly devotion of, to Keats, 11,
24, 25, 82-3, 133; Keats
on, 356
Brown's indignation with, 516,
517, 529; proved unjust,
530
Character of, 11, 382
Letters to, from Keats, and Keats's
Journal letters to him and
his wife, 322-3, 327, 337,
339; on becoming a Ship's
surgeon, 355; on being a
Poet, and on Endymion as
, the test of this, 164-5; on
his Defenders, 315; on
Keats, George — continued
Letters to — continued
the Hostile Reviews and on
his Reading, and Idleness,
340 et sqq. ; on his Brotherly
love, 322, 323, 324; on
Miss Brawne, 336; on Sea
passage to London, 295
Value of, 317 ei sqq.
Wealth of topics in (1819), 344
et sqq., 370
on his Brother as a boy, 11
on his Grandfather and Mother, 6
on Keats's temper, 145
Keats, John, the poet
Acquaintancelof , with Chaucer, 75 n.,
and with the Elizabethans
{q-v.), 19
Appearance of, at different dates,
6, 12, 24, 25, 35, 79, 80,
143, 287, 296, 328. 346,
347, 459 n., 486.
Eyes, 143, 459 n., 466, 511
Height, 31, 79, 80
Portraits of, by
Haydon, 462
Severn, 328, 495, 511, 535
Appreciation by, of Wordsworth's
poems, 125, 145-6
Attitude of, to
Criticism, 311 et sqq., 321
Love, 181, 183, 213, 224, 262,
318-20, 330 et sqq., passim,
393, 549 & n.
Scenery, 153, 274 et sqq.
Scott's writings, 279
Women, 81, 89-90, 262, 271, 288,
318-20
Biographical projects of friends,
529-31
Biographies, appreciation and
Collections of his works,
531 et sqq.
Memoir of, by Monckton Milnes,
520
Biographical references in order of
date
1795-1817
Parentage, birth and family, 2,
3 et sqq.; school days, 7 et
sqq.; boyish amusements,
his lines on, 9, 10; in-
dustry, 13, and successes,
14; apprenticeship to Mr
Hammond, surgeon, 16
& n. 2 et sqq.; silence of,
on this period, 17; begin-
nings of poetry-writing, 17,
18; influences, 14, 18 et sqq.;
vocation first felt, 12, 21
INDEX
577
Keats, John, the poet — continued
Biographical references — continued
1815-17
Life as medical student, 17,
26«fcn., 27, 28 et sqq.\
the doctor's life abandoned,
28, 83; notebook of, 33
«t n. 2 ; Friendships made
and renewed, {see also
Friends, infra), with Cow-
den Clarke, 34; with Leigh
Hunt, 35-6 et sqq., et oliM,
effect of the friendship with
Hunt on his career, 41, 51
et sqq.; friendships, formed
through Hunt, 59 et sqq.;
the laurel crown episode
and his verses thereon
then, and later, 55, 57-8,
415; verse- writing on a
given subject, with Hunt,
65 et sqq.; at Margate, the
Epistles written from, 37;
first reading of Chapman's
Homer, the great sonnet
written on it, 38 ei sqq.;
walk of, to the Poultiy,
40 n.; Haydon's ac-
quaintance made, 59;
other new friendships, 68
et sqq.; social surround-
ings, 78-9; social sur-
roundings, aet. 21, 78-9;
at a Bear fight, 81-2;
growing passion for the
poetic fife, 83
1817
First book. Poems (q.v.), pub-
lished, 83 et sqq., 130 et sqq. ;
new publishers found, and
new friends gained, 133 et
sqq.; stay in the Isle of
Wight, Shakespeare studies
andworkon Endymion,duT'
ing, 135 et sqq. ; visit to Can-
terbury, eflFect of, 140; visit
to Bailey at Oxford, de-
scribed by the latter, 143
et sqq.; stay at Burford
Bridge, 152, Endymion
finished at, 161, 162; end
of first phase of mind and
art of, 163
Dec. 1817-June 1818
Dramatic criticism undertaken,
242 et sqq., life at Hamp-
stead, 242, meeting with
Wordsworth, 246; stay
at Teignmouth, 260 et
sqq., 429; marriage and
Keats, John, the poet — continued
Biographical references — continv£d
emigration of his brother
George, 268 et sqq.
June 1818-June 1819
the Scottish tour with Brown,
272 et sqq., and its effect
on his health, 293 et sqq.,
384, 545; the attacks on
him in Blacktoood, and
the Quarterly Review, 297
et sqq.; the defence by his
friends, 238, 311 e< sqq., 516
et sqq.; effects of, 311 et
sqq., 315, 316, 506, 515,
524, 534; the nursing of
Tom Keats till his death,
316-20; the attraction of
'Charmian,' 318-19; life
with BroTNTi at Wentworth
Place, 320 et sqq.; work
on Hyperion, 322, 323,
327; harassed by bor-
rowers, 323, 337 et sqq.,
354-5; gift to, from an
unknown admirer, 325;
meeting with Fanny
Brawne and his love for
her, 329 et sqq., passim,
510, 534, 549; financial
position of, 337-8, 354-5,
lightened by Brown, 357;
fight of, with a butcher-
boy, 342-3 & n.; idleness,
and work, 342 et sqq.,
meeting with Coleridge,
346-8, unsettlement in
health and plans, 355 et
June 1819^Feb. 1821
Stay at Shanklin and work on
Lamia and King Otho,
358 et sqq.; love letters
from, to Fanny Brawne,
360 et sqq.; stay at Win-
chester, 362, 369; letters
from, 370 et sqq.; deter-
mination to work for the
Press, 373; his financial
position, 373; attempted
parting from Brown, stay
with the Dilkes and return
to Brown at Hampstead,
374-6; collaboration with
Brown, 375 et sqq., 387;
fluctuating spirits of, be-
fore his seizure, 375; hard
work, 375-6, 379; inward
sufferings, 376 et sqq.;
laudanum - taking by
578
INDEX
Keats, John, the poet — continued
Biographical references — continued
(1819), 379, 380, 505 et
sqq. ; financial position,
at this time, 379; trouble
and health failure, 375
et sqq.; work of this
period, 436 et sqq.; the
fatal chill, 384, 455; invalid
life, 456 et sqq.; letters
from his sick bed, 455;
slight improvement, 460;
relapses, 462; at Kentish
Town, 463, 466, 468;
Shelley's invitation to
Italy, 467-8; work pub-
lished while at Kentish
Town, 268-9; the Lamia
volume issued, 470 et sqq.y
the Reviews again severe,
473 et sqq.; stay with the
Brawnes, 468, 485; winter-
ing in Italy decided on,
with Severn as companion,
485-7; the voyage, 486
et sqq.; life in Naples,
496 et sqq., and in Rome,
503; his 'posthumous
existence,' 384, 504, 510;
the last days, 505 et sqq.;
choice by, of his own
epitaph, 510, 523-4;
death, 512, and after,
513 et sqq.; burial place
and memorial stone, 510,
523-4; the * might-have
been' had he lived, 548
et sqq.; posthumous at-
tacks on, in, and by Black-
wood, 519-20, De Quincey,
528-9 & n., and Quarterly
Review, 527-8; rare allu-
sion by, to the Reviews,
521; Shelley's lament for,
in Adonais, 517-19
Character and characteristics
Admiration of, for Chatterton,
146-7
Artistic tastes of, 66, 92, 255-6,
325
in Boyhood, 9 et sqq.: in Young
Manhood, 24, 25
Brotherly affection of, 3, 11, 13,
24. 262, 268, 271, 371,
382-4, see also Keats,
Fanny, George, and Tom
Contrasted with Shelley, 72-3
Conversation of, 145-7, 459 n.
Devotion of, to his Mother, 7,
14-15
Keats, John, the poet — continued
Character, etc, — continued
Duality of, 15, 318
Early tendency to rhyming, 7
Feeling of, for the poetry of the
past, 38
Genius of, 128-9, 234, 267-8, 484,
550
His own statements on, 153,
^ 200-1, 223, 269, 368, 497
Indecision, Indefiniteness and
Variableness of, 128-9, 142,
173, 223, 269, 270, 314,
315-16, 545
Interest of, in history and politics,
371
Keenness of perception, 52
Late awakening of literary pro-
clivities, 12
Limitations due to social setting,
444
Love of
English spring flowers, 446-7
Liberty, foundations of, 14
the Moon, 22, 123-4, 153,
215-16 et sqq.
Nature, and its expression in
his poems, 21, 22, 36,
79-80, 84, 90, 113, 114,
122-3, 128, 144, 149, 152-3,
159 et sqq., 216 et sqq., 226,
232
as Lover, seen in his letters, 360
et sqq.
Loyalty to his given word, 379
Manner, 143
Manners, 31, 32, 81, 459 n.
as Mimic, 81-2
Modesty, 269, 313, 314
Morals, 32
Morbidity of Temperament, 11,
12, 15, 80, 139, 464-5
Naturalness and simplicity, 143
Perceptiveness, 441-2
Pride, 15, 31, 313
Pugnacity as schoolboy, 10 et sqq.,
17, in later years, 17
Reading, and Reading gifts of,
81,366
Wide range of, 88
Religious indefiniteness, 51, 71,
509
Reserve and inward bitterness
(1820), 382, 383
Sensitiveness as to his origin, 71-2
Skill of, in friendship, 255
Social qualities, powers and taste^
81-2
as Sportsman, 326
Temper of, 145
INDEX
579
Keats, John, the poet — continued
Character, etc. — continued
Tender-heartedness &c., 444
Thirst for knowledge, 260, 265, 269
'Vein of flint and iron' in, 15, 315
Voice, 81, 145
Chief agent in revitalization of
Greek mythology, 220 et
sgq.
Critics and commentators of, 540
as Dramatist, 441 et sqq.
Epitaph of, chosen by himself, 510,
effect of, on public opinion
on his Poems, 523-4
Eulogists of, 544-5
Fame of, slow growth and spread of,
520, 526 et sqq.; triumph
of, 536, 540; forecasts on
its disabiUty, 546-8
Favourite flowers of, 510
Friends and Friendships of, see also
Names of Friends
Estrangement from, in illness, 465
Indignation of, at the Reviews,
309 et sqq., 516 et sqq., 522
Love of his friends, 513 et sqq., 521
Loyalty of, long surviving, 527
Heir of the Elizabethans, 171
Italian Studies of, 370, 398
Letters from, and to, see, chiefly,
under Names of Corre-
spondents, and E'pistles
Bradley's lectures on, 545
Compared with Shelley's, 541
Dr. Gamett on, 541
on Endymion, 150, 151, 153,
value of, in the study of
the poem, 154
Journal-letters from, to George
Keats, value of, 317 ef sqq.
Riches of, 262 et sqq.
Self-revelation in, 153-4, 371
Library of
Books in, 228 n., 390 n., 397 n. i,
447 n.
List of, 556 et sqq.
Poems and Verses by, see also, and
chiefly, under Names
Achievements, 385 et sqq.
Beauties in, 368
Charm of, 119-20
Cockneyism charged against {see
cfeoCockney School), 109n.
Collected
Editions of
First English, 520
Forman's, 544, 549, & see
footnotes
, Galignani's, 159 n., 527
Milnes's, 520, 531 et sqq.
Keats, John, the poet — continued
Poems — continued
Concordance to, published by
Cornell University, 575
Copy of, carried about by Shelley,
521, 522
Couplet as used in, 93 et sqq.,
113-14, 207 et sqq., 209 n.
Criticism of, easy, 119-20
Early writings, 22-3
Echoes in, of earlier poets, 89,
90 et passim
Elizabethan influence on, 389,
479
Essential principle of versifica-
tion, 208
Faults avoided in, 209
Faults existing in, 50, 186, 187,
207 et sqq., 211, 212, 213,
214-15, 221, 307, 368, 459
Felicitous compoimd epithets in,
412-13
Flippant note in, 404
Fragments and experiments, 385,
417 et sqq.
Insight into Keats's mind and
genius from, 424 et sqq.
Fugitive pieces, 256-7
Genius in. Evocative not Ex-
pository, 128-9, 234, 267-8
Gift of, to Browning and the
effect, 526
Growing appreciation of, 520,
526 et sqq.
Inspiration of, from
Art, 54, 92, 117, 122, 200, 219,
231 n., 264, 414-16 <fe n.,
417 446
Nature, 21-2, 122-3
Sources, nature of, 165-6
Last lines written by, 435
Latest Eulogists of, 545
Lectures on, of Mackail, 545
Lyric experiments, 157 et sqq.,
386
Mental experiences worked into,
173
Method of composition, 143-4
Metres and Styles used in, 109-10,
210-11, 258, 286 n., 287,
345, 349, 350 & n. 2, 386,
387, 414
Models of, see Echoes, supra, see
also Elizabethan, & Hunt
Naturalness of, 395
Nature of, 541
Nature Poems, see Endymion
Odes written m 1819, 352 et sqq. ,
Opinions on, in the early '40's,
628
y
580
INDEX
Keats, John, the poet — continued
Poems — continued
Poems, published, 85 et sqq.
Poor sale of, 526, 528
Posthumous, two printed in
Mihies's book, 537
in progress and written in eariy
1819, 339
Promise in, of Dramatic and
Ironic power, 222
Publishing schemes (1819), 366
Referring to his love for Fanny
Brawne, 334 et sqq.
Revision of, uncertainty and un-
wisdom shewn in, 469
Runes used by, 119, 210-11, 307
Self-expression in, 222-3, 411
Snatches expressive of Moods,
424-5
Speculative and symbolic mean-
ings underiying, the key
to, 153-4
Steriing's appreciation of, 528
Technique of, see also Metre,
Rime, Ac, 88
Thackeray's allusion to, 538
Unquenchable by literary work
done on them, 546
Unwritten, his distress over, 534,
548
Value of, to the reader, 546, 548
as Poet, Milnes's words on, 536
Poetic impulses, causes checking,
in 1819, 339, 340, 437
Political interests and views of, 14,
25,371
Portraits of, by Haydon, 462,
Severn, 328, 495, 511, 533
Reflections by, ethical and cosmic,
344-5
Spirit of poetry and pleasantness
retained by, to the end, 511
Sayings
on Abandoning Hyperion, and
on its Miltonisms, 436;
on Beauty and Truth,
'-^ 418; on Brotherly affec-
tion, 271; on Brown's
regular habits, 281; on
Bailey's appetite for books,
133-4; on the Black-
vxxyd article on Hunt,
152; on Fanny Brawne's
appearance &c., 329; on
Brown's rummaging out
his old sonnets, 354 n.;
on Devonshire weather
and folk, 260-1, 262; on
the Effect of the Reviews
on the public, 340-1; on
Keats, John, the poet — continued
Sayings — continued
Endymion, his aims in,
165, 237, his dissatis-
faction with it, 150, and
its defence by his iriends,
314-15, on its theme,
148; on Endymion's con-
fession, 180; on George
Keats's money troubles,
371; on Hazlitt's Shake-
spearean Lectures, 68; on
lus ambitions as Poet, 324;
'— on his feelings on life and
literature, 364; on his
own attitude to women,
288; on his own capacity
for judging paintings, 256;
on his own character,
153-4, 200-1, 223, 497, as
^~. poet, 269, 314-15; on his
' own need of Poetry, 136;
on his own place in Poetry,
543; on his plans for
Hyperion, 426; on his own
pride &c., 368; on his
poetry, and determination
never to write for writing's
sake or for a livelihood,
339-40; on his poetry-
writing idleness, (1819),
342, 348, 349, 352, 353; on
his ' posthumous existence,*
505-6, 510; on his sensa-
tions in ordinary society,
326; on his own skill as
operator, 29; on his state
„^of mind in 1819, 356, 380,
491-2; on his unwritten
poems, 534, 548; on his
wishes as to future
work (Nov. 1819), 380-1;
on his work on the Ode
to Psyche, 413-14; on the
Ireby dancing-school, 277
& n., 278; on the Lasinio
engravings, 325; on a
mawkish popularity, 313;
on his Nile sonnet and
other writings (1818), 256;
on the quarrels of his
friends, 255; on the
Quarterly's attack and its
good results, 326; on his
reading, and on his mental
state (1819), 341, 342;
on the Scotch tour, 289;
on Sickness, in the lighter
vein, 263; on some friction
with Hunt and others,
INDEX
581
Keats, John, the poet — continued
Sayings — continued
150-1; on street quarrels,
81 ; on three witty friends,
383; on Winchester ways,
371; on Wordsworth in
1817, 250, on his dogmatism
and Hmit's, 252-3, on his
genius and Milton's, 266
Keats, Mrs George {nie Wylie, q.v.,
later Mrs Jeffrey), 323, 365
Keats's pleasant relations with, 270,
271
Letter to, from Keats, 383
Remarriage of, 531
Keats, Mrs Thomas {n^e Jennings),
mother of the poet, 3
Appearance and character of, 6-7
Devotion to, of Keats, 7, 14, 15
Second marriage of, 8-9
Death of, 14, 15
Keats, Sir Richard Godwin, of the
'Superb,' 4
Keats, Thomas, father of the poet,
2-3,5
Characteristics of, 6
Death of, 8
Origin of, Senora Llanos on, 3
Keats, Thomas (Tom), brother of the
poet, 3, 135, 137, 280, 466,
505
Hi-health of, Keats's devotion
during, 15, 162, 244, 262,
269, 295, 316 et sqq., 333,
426
Letters to, from Keats, on Fingal's
cave, 292, and on his
health, 293; on the Lake
District, 275-6; on Scot-
tish Society, Economics
and Racial character, 281-3
Wells's hoax of, 77, 346
Death of, 15, 320, 322, 387
Keats, D. J. Llanos y, artist, son of
Fanny Keats, 535-6
Keats Crescent, Shanklin, 358 n.
Keats, the name, its variants and
locales, 3-5
Keats-Shelley Memorial at Rome, 542;
Bulletin of, 16 n., 510 n.
*Keen, fitful gu^ts are whispering here
and there,' sonnet (Keats),
52, included in Poems, 90
Kelmscott Press edition of Keats,
and the restoration of the
text of La Belle Dame, 470
Kendal, Keats at, 273
Kent, Miss (Mrs Leigh Hunt), 43
Kentish Town, Keats's stay in, and
health during, 463
Ker, Prof. W. P., suggestion of, on
source of Keats's 'Magic
casements ' lines, 291 An.
Kerrera, and the Goylen legend, 291
Kete, meaning of, 4
King Lear, words from, used by
Keats, 285 (fen.
King Stephen, dramatic fragment
(Keats), 364, 370, 443
Kingston, , and Wordsworth,
246-7, 251
Kirkmen, the, Keats on, 282-3
Kirkup, Seymour, at Florence, 523
Knighfs Tale (Chaucer), metre of, 94
KuUa Khan (Coleridge), 288
Echo of, in Endymion, 230
La belle Dame sans Merci (Keats),
an achievement, 350
Date of, 370, 441
Included in Milnes's Book, 537
Morris, WUUam, on, 470
Publication of, alterations in, and
notices of, 468-70
Rossetti on, 439
Subject, perfection, and metre of,
350 *n.
Transcript of, by Brown, 469 & n.
True version, given in fiill, 351-2
Lai d'Aristote, 33
Ladye, The, of Provence (Reynolds), 333
Laidlaw, William, Scott, and Black-
wood, 304
Laira Green, Brown's life at, 530
Lake District, places visited in, by
Keats with Brown, 272-3
et sqq.
Lake School Poets, morbidity as-
scribed to, by Hunt, 121
Lalla Rookh (Moore), price paid for,
82; popularity of, 313
Lamb, Charies, 388
Appearance, conversation and habits
of, 69, 246 et sqq., 327
and the Baby, 370-1
Champion of the Poetic Revolution,
119
and the Enfield stiles, 18
Friendship of, with
Haydon, 62
Hunt, 43
Keats, 69
Parties of, given with Mary, 68
Publishers of, 131
Verse-letters to, from Hunt, 51
Works of, two volume ed. of 1818,
Fuller's Holy State quoted
in Specimens, 388 & n.
on the Digging Scene in Isabella,
395, 471
582
INDEX
Lamb, Charles — continued
on Keats's place in poetry, 484
on the Lamia volume poems, 471;
the pick of, 395 n.
on Shelley, 70
Lamb, Dr, 466
Lamb, Mary, 43, 68
Lambeth, Brown's birthplace, 142
>j{^ Lamia (Keats), 239, 370, 386, 405, 421
'^ Keats on, after re-reading, 372
Keats's reading of, 366
Keats's wish for instant publication
of, 366
Place of, in the volume of 1820,
115 n.
Publication of, with other poems,
463
Full title and contents, 470-1
Reception of, and criticisms on, 471
et sqq., 481
Subject, source, metre and form of,
358, 404-10
Hunt on, 404-10
Lamb on, and other critics, 471 et
Wilson on (1828), 527
d^ Lamia, Isabella, and other Poem^,
' Keats's inunortality se-
cured by, 470
Byron's fury over, 481
Gift of, by Keats to Shelley, 468
Passage singled out from, by
Lamb, 395 n.
Publication of, 463, 470-1
Publishers' note in, disowned by
Keats, 463
Lancaster, Keats at, 271
Land, The, East of the Sun (Morris),
438
Landon, Letitia, verse of, 526
Landor, Walter Savage, 530; ad-
mirer of Keats's poems, 523
on Milnes's book, 537
Landseer, Sir Edwin Henry, at Hay-
don's, 246
Land's End, Keats's father said to have
come from, 3
Lang, Andrew, on errors in Criticism,
308
on the 'gallipots' article, 308, 309-10
Lanteglos, the Keats of, 5
Laon and Cythna (Shelley), 73
Lara (Byron), form used in, 108
Lasinio, engravings by, Keats's delight
in, 325
Laureation or Intercoronation affair,
reference to, in the Ode to
Indolence (Keats), 415
Sonnets on, by
Hunt, 56
Laureation aflPair — continued
Keats, 57, 91, 307
Amplification of, in Endymion,
57-8, 189
Law Life Insurance Society, Wood-
house's connection with,
134
Lawn Bank, Hampstead, 321 n.
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 501
Lay Sermons (Coleridge), 134
Lay, The, oftheLastMinstrel{S>cott),S%
Leander, sonnet on (Keats), see On a
Picture of Leander
Leander gems of Tassie, 92 & n. 2
Lea Valley, in Keats's day, 21-2
Leicester, Earl of, Keats's notion of,
writing about, 381
Lelant, the name Jennings at, 5
Le Sage, name 'Sangrado' borrowed
from, 309 n.
Letter to William Gifford, Esq. (Haz-
litt), 341
Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed.
Ingpen, 482 n.
Liberal, The, Brown's contributions
to, 522
*Libertas,' Hunt's sobriquet, 44
L.S.A. degree, obtained by Keats, 27
Life of Dry den (Scott), 45
Life of Joseph Severn (Sharp), new
knowledge of Keats given
in, 545
Life, Letters, and Literary Remains
of John Keats, edited by
Richard Monckton Milnes
(1848), 520, 531 et sqq.
Life of Scott, by Lockhart, 310
Lindo, (later Lindon, ),
husband of Fanny Brawne,
535
Lindon, Mrs, see Brawne, Fanny
Line endings of couplets
Closed or open, varieties of usage,
94 et sqq.
Double, objections to, and usual
employment of, 103; il-
lustrated, 104
Lines composed a few miles above
T intern Abbey (Words-
worth), Keats on, 267
Lines on the Mermaid Tavern (Keats),
258; date and metre of,
327, 386; hints on im-
mortality in, 387; in-
cluded in the Lamia
volume, 470
Lines toritten in the Highlands after
a Visit to Bums's Country
(Keats), 285; metre and
interest of. 286 «fe n.
INDEX
583
Lisbon, Keats's scheme of a visit to,
151, abandoned, 162
List of Books in Keats's Library, 390 n.,
397 n., 556 et sqq.
Literary Criticism, cruelty of, early
19th century, 299 et sqq.
Literary ladies and 'the Matchless
Orinda,' 150
Literary Pocket Book (Himt), 324
Little Britain, the Reynolds' House in,
74,288
Littlehampton, the Reynolds' at, 147
Live Pets, Keats on keeping, 10, 338
Llanos, Fanny {nSe Keats), 535
Civil List pension secured for, by
Forman, 536
Death of, in ripe years, 536
on the Cornish origin of her father, 3
Llanos, Valentine, husband of Fanny
Keats, 535
Loch Awe, Keats on the first sight of,
289
Loch Fyne, doggerel verses on (Keats),
288
Loch Lomond, Keats on, 287-8
Locker-Lampson, Frederick, on Sefiora
Llanos and her husband,
536
Lockharts, the, Scotch tour of, 290-1
Lockhart, John Gibson, co-editor of
BlacktDood, partisan ex-
cesses of, 298, 525-6, and
later regrets, 299, 310
Article attributed to, in error,
528 n. I
Challenge of, to John Scott, 519
and the Death of Keats, current
belief as to, 525-6
Keats's death-bed saying on, 521
at Weimar, 298, 309
London Magazine, The, and its editor-
publisher, 133, 311, 519
Lord Byron and some of his Contem-
poraries (Himt, 1828),
Keats's memories in, 36,
532
Louisville, Kentucky, George Keats's
death at, 531
Love, effect of, on Keats, 332, 334 et
sqq.
Keats's conception and treatment
of, 181, 183, 213, 221,
393, 549 & n.
Love and Death, Keats's double goal,
112, 336, 344, 362, 375
Love and Marriage, Keats's early fears
of, and attitude to, 262,
318-20, justified, 330 et sqq.
vassim
Love and War, Poetry of, 221
Lover's complaint. A, sonnet (Keats),
when written, 492-4
Lowell, James Russell, 540
Lowther family, and the Election of
1818, 272, 274
Lucas, , surgeon, described by
South, 29; Keats as
dresser to, 27
Lucas, E. v., debt to, as concerning
Charles Lamb, 471 n.
Lucy, Wordsworth's poem on, Keats
on, 146
Lulworth Cove, landing at, 492, 494
Lyddas (Milton), 19, 262
Adonais compared with, 517
Echoed by Keats, 111, 431
Lyric effects in, 122
Lyly, John, prose comedy of Endi-
mion, by 167, allegorical
nature of, 168 n.
Lyrical Ballads of Coleridge and
Wordsworth, 21, poetical
revolution introduced by,
108, 118, 119, 207
Lyrical effect attempted by Keats in
/ stood tip-toe, and else-
where, 122
Lyrics, in Endymion, in relation to the
Classics and Elizabethan
poets, 224 et sqq.
'Macbeth,' picture by Haydon,
60
Macfarlane, Charles, on Keats and
the scentless roses, 501,
and on the macaroni
eaters, 502 & n.
Mackail, J. W., Lectures of, on Keats's
poetry, 545; on the Mys-
tic Shell in Endymion &
in The Prelude, 196 & n.
Mackereth, George Wilson, fellow-
student of Keats, 30, 176
Mackintosh, Sir James, and Endy-
mion, 313
Macpherson, James, and the pseudo-
Ossian poems, 107
M'Cracken, H. Noble, article by,
referred to, 398 n.
Macready, WiUiam Charles, in BMri-
bution, Keats's criticism on,
242
Mad Banker of Amsterdam, comic
poem (Lockhart), 309
Madeline, in the Eve of St Agnes, 401
et sqq., et alibi
Mad Mother, The (Wordsworth), 121
Madness, from ecstasy, Keats on,
257
Keats's fear of, lines on, 425
584
INDEX
* Magic casements' phrase, possible
sources of, 264-5, 291
Maginn, William, critical ferocity of,
137; insolent article and
parody by, on Adonais,
519-20
Maid's Tragedy (Beaumont and Flet-
cher), 341; Endymion
references in, 168
Man, relations of to Nature, Words-
worth's exposition of, 128,
129
Man, The, Bom to be King (Morris),
438
Man, The, in the Moone (Drayton),
echoes from, in Endymion,
169 et sqq.
Manfred (Byron), 302
Margaret (Wordsworth), 121
Margate, letters from, by Keats, to,
various friends, 137 et sqq.
Maria Crowther, ship which took Keats
to Italy, 486, 488, fellow-
passengers on, 488-9, 490,
495, 496, 498
Marlowe, Christopher, poems by, 169,
Endymion lines in, 67;
use in, of the Heroic
couplet, 96-7
Marvell, Andrew, use by, of the
Heroic couplet, 102
Mathew, Ann, and Caroline, 24;
Keats's verses to, 23, 24, 86
Mathew, George Felton, Epistle to,
by Keats, 93, 109 dc n.,
110, 470
on Keats in early manhood, 24-5,
and on his appearance, 25
Maurice, Rev. Frederick Denison,
editor of The Athenaeum, 52
Measure for Measure, words from,
used in Endymion, 201
Mediaeval Mythology, vitality of, to
Keats, 110
Mediaevalism of Keats, 439-41
Medwin, T., Letter to, from Fanny
Brawne, on Keats and his
passions, 330 n., 465 & n.
on Shelley's views on the poems in
the Lamia volume, 482-3
Meg Merrilees, Ballad of (Keats),
279-80, 386
Melody in verse, and the Vowel sounds,
Keats's ideas on, 147, 209,
401-2
MeTnorials of a Tour in Scotland,
poems (Wordsworth), 387
<fr n.
'Me rather all that bowery loneliness*
alcaics (Tennyson), 38
Mermaid Tavern, verses on, see * Lines
on the Mermaid Tavern'
Metamorphoses (Ovid), in Sandys's
translation, source of
Keats's mythological
knowledge, 171, 174 n., in-
fluence of in Endymion,
190, 195, 201, 206
Metre, decay of, 100
Metres employed by Keats, 86; Keats's
revolutionary treatment
of, 207 et sqq.
Midsummer Night's Dream, 86;
source of Oberon &c. in,
87 n.
Milanese pictiu-es, engravings of, 325
A n.
"Milky Way" of poetry. Quarterly's
phrase on Keats's work,
528
Mill, James, and Hunt, 43
Millais, Sir John Everett, the Italian
Primitives and the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood,
325; a Keats worshipper,
538
Milman, H. H., 263
Milnes, Monckton (Lord Houghton,
q.v.). Memoir of Keats by,
620, sources, 531 et sqq.,
merit and timeliness, gaps
and errors in, and recep-
tion of, 336 et sqq.
Milton, John, and the Faithful
Shepherdess, 168
Genius of, relative to that of Words-
worth, Keats on, 266;
Keats compared with, by
Landor, 537
Hair of. Lines on, by Keats,
257
Poems of. Brown's travelling book,
272
Influence of, on Keats, and Keats's
study of, 195, 262, 386,
399, 428, 429, 430-6, 545
Model for English epic poetry,
429
Sprightly lines in, 109 n.
Use in, of the
Heroic couplet, 101-2
SiciUan pastoral elegy form,
517
Minstrel, The (Beattie), 19
* Minutes are flying,' see On Receiving
a Laurel Crown from Leigh
Hunt
Mitford, Mary Russell, friend of
Haydon, 62, his letter to
her, on Keats's death, 521
INDEX
585
Mnemosyne, In Hyperion, 429, 433 et
sqq., passim
Mole river, in Keats's poem, 159
Moneta, in Hyperion, 447 & n., 450
Monitress, the, in Hyperion, 453-4
Monkhouse, Cosmo, 246
Montagu, Basil, on Keats's poems, 41
Monthly Chronicle, The, 53
Monthly Review, 354 n.; on the
Lamia volmne, 474
Moods, Keats on, 265, 269, 270-1,
344, 348; his suflferings
from, 359 et sqq., passim
Moon, the, Keats's attitude to, 123,
166-7, 189; fine lines on,
in Endymion, 215-16
Moore, Thomas, 86, 518
Poems of. Hunt's verdict on, 44
Lines on the Hunts in prison, 43
Popularity of Lalla Rookh, 313
Sums received for, 82
Prose works, see Epicurean, & Tom
Cribb's Memorial
Verse-letter to, from Hunt, 50-1
Morgan MSS., 366 n., 477 n.
Morning Chronicle, attitude of, to
Endymion, 311
Morris, Harrison S., on Keats's choice
of epitaph, 510 n.
Morris, William, anticipations of, by
Keats, 438-9
True text of La Belle Dame, re-
stored by, 470
Poems of, inspiration and model
for, 539
on Keats's poetry, 470, 539
Moschus, his elegy on the death of
Bion, 517, 518
Mother Hubbard's Tale (Spenser),
Heroic couplet used in, 96
Mountain Scenery as Inspiration for
a Poet, Keats's rare phrase
on, 284
Mull, Keats's expedition to, 291, and
the first failure of his
health, 293
Murray, A. S., on the inspiration of the
Ode to a Grecian Urn, 416 n.
Murray, John, and Blackvxyod, 302;
and the Quarterly Review,
297
Muse of his Native Land, address to,
in Endymion, 197
MusSe Napoleon, The, classic prints in,
Keats's tracing from, 416
<fe n.
*My spirit is too weak,' see On Seeing
the Elgin Marbles
Mythology, Greek and Mediaeval,
vitality of, to Keats, 110
NAIAD, The (Reynolds), 74
Naples, Keats in quarantine at, 496,
ill-effects of, 498
Napoleon L, 416 & n.; aggressions of,
effect on the Lake poets,
45
Art collection of, 416 «fe n.
Narensky, opera (Brown), 359
Nature, attitude to, of Keats, and its
influences as seen in his
poems, 21-2, 79-80, 114,
122-3, 189, 215-16 et
alibi
'Nature, red in tooth and claw'
(Tennyson), Keats's anti-
cipation of, 448-9
Negative capability, Keats on, 253-4
Nelson, Admiral Lord, 4
Newcome, Colonel, in The Newcomes,
and his son's views on
Keats, 537
Newmarch, , and Keats, 32
New Monthly Magazine, Colbum's,
review in, of the Lamia
volume, 473-4
Newport, Isle of Wight, Reynolds's
County Court post at, 533
New Times, Lamb's critique in, of the
Lamia volume, 471-2
Newton, Sir Isaac, in Haydon's pic-
ture, 247, 462
New York Herald, 1889, Recollections
of Fanny Brawne, by a
cousin, published in, 330 n.
New Zealand, Brown's death in,
531
Nile, the, sonnets on, by Shelley,
Keats, and Hunt, 256
Nodes AmbrosianoB (Wilson), on
Keats's poems (1828), 527 n. 3
Wordsworth, 300
Northampton, Countess of, death of,
Scott's grief at, 525
Northcote, James, on the ass in Hay-
don's painting, 461
'Not Aladdin Magian' (Keats), re-
ferring to Fingal's Cave,
292-3
Notes on Gilfillah's Literary Portraits
(De Quincey), outburst in,
against Keats, 528-9 * n.
Novello, Mary Victoria, see Clarke,
Mrs Charles Cowden
Novello, Vincent, musical parties of,
Keats at, 327, 328
'Nymph of the Downward smile,' sonnet
(Keats), addressed to Miss
Wylie, and included in
Poems, 89, 270
Nymphs, The (Hunt), 138
586
INDEX
OBERON (Wieland), Sotheby's transla-
tion of, 86-7 A n., 309
Modified Spenserian stanza in, 445
Oberon and Titania, Keats's lines on,
and possible sources, 86,
87 &n.
Ocean floor theme, in Endymion, in
relation to Shakespeare
and Shelley, 189, 239
Oceanus (Hyperion), speech of, 433-4
Ode to Apollo (Keats), 23
Ode to Autumn (Keats), 386; date of,
370, 421; form, perfec-
tions, and lines from, 421-3
Greek influence seen in, 426
Ode to Fanny (Keats), as a cry of the
heart, 334; date of, 334,
339; lines from, quoted,
335-6
Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats), IJ
386, 4^, a masterpiece\
inspiration, sources, sub-]
ject, &c., 232, .26< 4^
416 & n., 417-18
Date of, 352, 353
Ode to Hope (Keats), 23
Ode on Intimations of Immortality
(Wordsworth), Keats's com-
ment on, 145-6, 159 n.
Ode on Indolence (Keats), 386; .date
of, 352, 353 f
Echo from, 356 ;
Greek influence seen in, 414 *
Keats's pleasure in writing, 415
lanes on Visions in, probable source
of, 412 n.
Not included in the Lamia volume,
470
Ode to Maia (Keats), unfinished, 265;
Greek influence seen in,
426; included in the
Lamia volume, 470
Ode on Melancholy (Keats), 386;
date of, 352, 354, 419
Embryo ideas of, 259 n.
Subject and splendours of, 419-21
OdetoaNighiingale(Ke&ts),2G3,d8S,422
Date of, 352, 353-4, 418
Echoes in, 344, 418
Embryo ideas of, 259 n.
Hippocrene passage in, 542
Keats's genius at its height in, 419
Inspirations of, 264-5
Line in, anticipated, 344
Publication of, 354
Ode to Psyche (Keats), 386; date,
352, 411, 441
Germ of lines in, 276
Sources, qualities, faults and beau-
ties, 411, 412 A n., 413-14
Odes and Addresses by Eminent Hands
(Hood and Reynolds), 533
Odes (Keats), in Lamia volume,
470
Odes, the six (Keats), 308
Dates of, 411 et sqq., 441
Metre and form of, 411-13, 414-15
Odes, The, of Keats (Downer), Urn
illustrated in, 416 n.
Odyssey (Chapman's version), in-
fluence seen in Endymion,
206
Use in, of the Heroic couplet, 99
*0 fret not afler knowledge — / have
none,' lines by Keats, 260,
424
' golden-tongued Romance with serene
lute,' sonnet (Keats), date
and subject of, 257
Old Plays (Dodsley), Dilke's continua-
tion of, 142
Oilier Brothers, publishers for Shelley^
Keats and others, 83, 263;
and the unsuccess of Poems,
131, 133
Oilier, Charles, sonnet by, on Poems,
131
Oilier, James, on the public attitude
to Poems, 133
'0 Melancholy, linger here awhile,'
Invocation in Isabella,
beauties of, 392
*0 mighty-mouthed inventor of har-
monies' (Tennyson), a
Keats anticipation of, 237
On first looking into Chapman's Homer,
sonnet (Keats), 38, 40 <fc n.,
41,54
Full text of, 88
Included in Poems, 133
Technical perfection of, 87
On the Grasshopper and Cricket, sonnet
(Keats), 55; included in
Poems, 91
On Leaving Some Friends at an Early
Hour, sonnet (Keats), 90
On Leigh Hunt's Poem 'The Story of ,
Rimini,' sonnet (Keats),
91
On the Peace of Paris (1814), sonnet
(Keats), 23, 44, 91
On [an engraved Gem of] Leander, sonnet
(Keats), 92 A nn. I & 2
On Receiving a Laurel Crown from
Leigh Hunt, sonnet (Keats),
57
On Receiving a Curious Shell and a
Copy of Verses [from some
Ladies], stanza (Keats),
metre of, 86
INDEX
687
On the Sea, sonnet (Keats), written at
Carisbrooke, 135
On seeing the Elgin Marbles, sonnet
(Keats), 66 ^ ^
On sitting down to read King Lear once
again, sonnet (Keats), 257
Opposites, A Song of (Keats), 263, 389
Optics and the Poet, 400-1
Orcagna, picture by, possibly inspiring
Keats, 446
Orlando Innamorato (Boiardo), 552
*0 Solitude I if I vnth thee must dwell*
sonnet (Keats), 35 <£ n.;
included in Poems, 90
Othello (Shakespeare), Kean's voice
in, Keats on, 243
Oiho the Great, a tragedy by Keats and
Brown, 357, 359, 364, 421,
an experiment, 386, 441
Admiration for, at Rome, 526
First printed, 537
Plot, construction and poetry of,
442-3
Production of, difficulties on, 370,
372, 381
Ottava rima, used by Byron, 390
Ovid, Arethusa myth as told by, 187
Cosmology of, 174 <t n.
Echoes of, in Endymion, 168, 171,
174 & n., 185, 187, 201
Metamorphoses of, in Sandys's trans-
lation, value of, to Keats,
171, 174 n,; influence seen
in Endymion, 190, 195,
201,206
Owen, Mrs F. M., Study by, on Endy-
mion, 544
Oxford, Keats's visit to, 142, 429; his
own words on, 143 et sqq.
Endymion, partly written at, 143-4,
147
Oxford Herald, Endymion praised in,
by Bailey, 270
Oxford University Press, Delegates of,
edition issued by, of La
Belle Dame, 469 <fe n.
PAIN» THE, of Memory, a variant of
In drear-nighted December,
third stanza of, 158 n. "^
Palgrave, F. T., admiration of, for
the sonnet Woman, when
I behold thee flippant, vain,
89; place given by, to
Lamia, 406
on Keats's Poems {Golden Treasury
Series), 544
Pan, see Hymn to
Pan's Anniversary (Jonson), 225,
lines from, 226
Paradise Lost (Milton), compared with
Hyperion, 333
Echoes of, in Keats's poems, 90, 154,
155, 401, and in Shelley's,
430
Feast of Fruits in, 401
Keats's notes to, 152
Keats's study of, and criticisms on,
262, 369
Titans in, 428
Parisina (Byron), 302
Park, Mungo, 246
Park, Thomas, editor of Heliconia,
157 n.
Pamaso Italiano, Hunt's reading of, 44
Parsons, Keats on, 335
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, 226
Patmore, Coventry, 300; and Milnes's
Life of Keats, 531, 540, 542
Pause, the, in metre, 94-5
Peacock, Thomas Love, Keats on, 263
Letter to, from Shelley, on Hyperion,
482
Poem by, metre of, and similarity
of subject to Lamia, 405
Penseroso, U (Milton), metre of, 386
Peona, in Endymion, 177, 202, 203.
204; the confession to,
178, her expostulation,
179, and his defence, 180
et sqq.
Percy's Reliques, 107
'Peter Corcoran,' in Reynolds's The
Fancy, 475 & n.
Peter Bell (Wordsworth), skit on, by
Reynolds: notice of the
latter by Keats, 348
Petersburg, Brown's connection with,
142
*Pet lamb' phrase, in the Ode to
Ifidolmce, 415
Pharonnida (CKamberlayne), charac-
ter of the verse of in, 100-1
Philaster (Beaumont and Fletcher),
phrase from, adapted by
Keats in his epitaph, 510
Philips, Katherine (Orinda), poems
of, Keats on, 150; use by,
of the Heroic couplet, 103
Philological Journal of Chicago Uni-
versity, article in, on
Keats, 398 n.
Philosophy, Keats's use of the word,
266
588
INDEX
Pidgeon, Miss, Keats's fellow-passen-
ger, 488, 489, 499
Piron, allusions to, by Lockhart, 309
Pisa, 517, 522
Adonais printed at, 519
Plato, and the myths of the Aphro-
dites, Pand^mos and
Urania, 549 n. i
Shelley's enthusiasm for; Keats's
indirect knowledge of, 237
Plays, Keats's ambition to write, 381
Plymouth and Devonport Weekly
Journal, Brown's touring
diary published in, 273 n.
Poems, Keats's first book, its spirit and
contents, 85 et sqq.; pub-
lication of, 164; public
reception of, and Reviews
on, 130-3, 311
Sonnet dedicating it to Hunt, 83,
90, and the reply, 130-1
Poems, long. Hunt's adverse view on;
controverted by Keats, 165
Poet, the. Death-bed feelings of,
Keats on, in the Ejnstle
to George Keats, 112
Prime endowments of, Keats on, 165
Wordsworth's doctrine on, 233-4,
endorsed by Keats and by
Shelley, 234 et sqq.
Poet, The, a fragment (Keats), 425
Poetic license revived by Keats, 207
Revolution, the captains of, 108,
118, 119, 207
Style, Hunt's views on, 47, 49
Poetical Sketches (Blake), on the older
style of verse, 107
Poetry,
Keats on
Axioms, 254
Conception of, 252-3
His own need of, 136
Polar Star of, 165
New, arising from the worid war,
647-8
Renaissance of, in England, 1, 21, 82
Romantic, 19th century, Morris's
perhaps the last of, 539
Weirdness and terror in the early
period, 396
Technique of, Keats's insight into, 38
Polymetis (Spence), picture in, 200,
possibly inspiring Keats,
200,231
Polyphemus and Galatea story; Ovid's
version, and Keats's, 201,
204
Pope, Alexander, 428
Poems of (and of his school), Bjron's
championship of, 480
Pope, Alexander — continued
Poems of — continued
Early Victorian depreciation of,
537
Keats's dislike of, 18, 31, 139,
393
Use by, of the heroic couplet, long
ascendancy of his method,
104, 106-7; illustration
and contrast with Shake-
speare, 105-6
on 'our rustic vein' in poetry, 207
Pope-Boileau passage in SUey and
Poetry, Blackwood on,
307; Byron's rage at,
480-1
Popular Antiquities (Brand), on the
legend of St Agnes' Eve,
397
Popular Tales of the West Highlands
(Campbell), on the Goylen
story, 291 n.
Porphyro, in Eve of St Agnes, 401 et
sqq.
Porter, Jane, and Anna Maria, works
of, and encouragement by,
of Keats, 325
Pen portraits by the former, 326
Portsmouth, Keats's landing at, 491
Poultry, The, home at, of the Keats
brothers, 28, 38, 40 n.,
135
Poussin, Nicholas, picture by, inspira-
tion of, to Keats, 198, 219,
416
Prayer, Haydon's letter on, to Keats,
62, 138-9
Pre-Raphaelitism, evoking cause, 325
Pre - Raphaelitism and the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood
(Morris), 538 n.
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, enthus-
iasm of, for Keats, as shown
by its paintings, 538
and The Eve of St Mark, 439
Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 128; the
last published passages in,
250-1; the Mystic SheU
in, Mackail on, 196 n.
Prince Regent, the, and The Examiner,
42; Moore's skits on, 43
Pride in his work, Keats on, 364 &
see n. i
Prior, Matthew, metre of his day, 86
Procter, Bryan Waller (Barry Corn-
wall), 321 n.; kindness of,
to Keats, 459
Poem by, on the same subject as
Isabella, 459
Style of, Shelley's disgust at, 482
INDEX
589
Procter, Bryan Waller — continued
on Keats's manner, conversation and
appearance, 459 n.
on the Lambs* evening parties, 68
on Leigh Hunt, 47 n.
Procter, Mrs, 321 n.; on Keats's eyes,
466
Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 89;
Keats echoes in, 239;
lines cited, 240
Keats on, in advance, 467
Review of, in Blackwood, 477-8
Proper Wooing Song, A, echo of, by
Keats, 157-8
Prothero, George, 528 n. i
Prowse, Mrs, and Keats, 262
Psyche (Tighe), 19, 412
Punning, 327
Purgatory (Dante), the Eagle in, 186
Pymmes Brook, tJie, Keats's allusions
to, 10
QUARTERLY Review, The, 77
Harsh criticisms in, 299
on Endymion, 137, 310-11. 476,
627-8
Influence of, 316, Keats on, 341
Keats's illness ascribed to, by his
friends, 516 et sqq.
Politics, publisher and rivals of, 297
Review in, of Tennyson's poems,
527-8
Queen Lab, oriental counterpart of
Circe, 195
RACCOLTA of Prints by Zanconi, 325 n.
Raebum, Sir Henry, portrait by, of
the Countess of Northamp-
ton singing, 525
Rainbow, The (Campbell), echoed by
Keats, 408-9
Rawlings, Mrs, see Keats, Mrs Thomas
Rawlings, William, stepfather of
Keats, 8-9
Rawlings v. Jennings, 15 n.
'Read Me a Lesson, Muse^ see Ben
Nevis, sonnet
Recollections of Writers (Cowden
Clarke), 13 n.
Redding, Cyrus, 473, and Galignani's
edition of Keats's and other
poems, 527 n. 2
Redgauntlet (Scott), the dancing dame
in, 277 n.
Reflector, edited by Hunt, 46
Lamb's Specimens printed in, 388 n.
Regalities, Keats on, in Endymion, 189
Rejected Addresses, 533
Reminiscences of a Literary Life
(Macfarlane), 502 n.
Restoration Poets, compared with
Georgian, 207
Retribution, or The Chieftain's Daughter
(Dillon), Macready in,
Keats's criticism on, 242
Reviews, effect of, on the public,
Keats on, 340-1
Hostile to Keats, and their effect,
see Coleridge, Severn and
others on, see also Black-
tDood's, 'Cockney School,'
Quarterly Review, Severn,
Shelley, Taylor, ' Z ' articles
Revolt of Islam (Shelley), first title for,
73
Reynolds, Charlotte, 55, 76
Reynolds family, 74; Keats's estrange-
ment from, 465
Reynolds, Jane (later Mrs Thomas
Hood), 55
Keats's verses in her album, 76
Letter to, from Keats, on gay and
grave, 149
on the date of */n a drear-nighted
December,' 158
Reynolds, John Hamilton, friendship
of, with Keats, 65, 73-6,
141, 151, 242, 504, 529
Bailey's friendship with, and with
his family, 134, 341
Epistle to, from Keats, 389
Latter days of, 533
as Lawyer, 75, 76, 533
Letters to, from Keats, on Autumn
weather, 421-2; on being
Haunted by a Woman's
shape and voice, 316-17;
on Confused and Clear
Mental Images, 263-5; on
Endymion, and on Shake-
speare's sonnets, 153, on
iie intended preface to
Endymion, 269; on his
feelings on Life and Litera-
ture (1819), 364; on the
genius of Wordsworth and
Milton, 266; on Human
life, 267; on Isabella; or.
The Pot of Basil, 312-13;
on leaving town, 135, and
one from Carisbrooke,
135-6; at Oxford, 149; on
Social doings, 245; on his
Thirst for Knowledge,
265-6; on Thrush music,
260, 424; on the two
Chambers of Thought, 267,
448; on the Visit to
Bums's cottage, 284, 285;
with lines to Apollo, 257;
590
INDEX
Reynolds, John Hamilton — continued
Letters to — continued
from Winchester, 371 et
sqq.; on Wordsworth's
dogmatism and on Hmit's,
252-3
literary work of, 65, 74, 75, 348,
475 n., 521, 533
and Milnes's Biography, 533-4
Medley by {The Fancy), 475 n.
Poems, 521, 533
Letters on, from Byron and from
Wordsworth, 74
Models of, 74
Lispired by Boccaccio, 259-60,
333, 389
Parodies, 74
Skit by, on Peter Bell (Words-
worth), 348
Sonnet to Keats (Thy thoughts,
dear Keats), 75
Sonnet to Haydon, 65
Quarrels of, 254-5
Wit of, Keats on, 383
on Endymion, 312-13, and on the
preface thereto, 269
on Fanny Brawne, 331; on hopes
for Keats's recovery, 5 13 ; on
/5a6e;/a, 312-13; on Keats,
as killed by the Reviews,52 1
Reynolds, Mariane, 55, 76
Bailey's attachment to, 134, end
of, 341
Reynolds, Misses
Keats's letter to, from Oxford, 147
Keats's changed feelings for, 337
Reynolds, Mr and Mrs, friends and
home of, 74
Rhododaphne, poem (Peacock), re-
semblance of, to Lamia,
406,408
Rice, James, friend of Reynolds and
ofKeats,76, 135, 141,263,
366, 533
Help from, to Keats, 486
Keats's stayjwith, at Shanklin, 357-9
Letter to, from Keats, during his
illness, 458
Wit of, Keats on, 383
Richard, Duke of York, and Kean's
acting in, Keats's criticism
on, 242-3
Richard III. (Shakespeare), Keats's
criticism of, and of Kean's
acting in, 242-4
Undersea Imes in, Keats's challeng-
ing passage in Endymion,
239, Jeffrey's praise of,
and Shelley's assimilation
of, 239-40
Richards, , wit of, Keats on, 383
Richardson, Sir B. W., on the
composition of the line
' A Thing of Beauty,' 176 n.
Rime, Keats's faults in use of, 211-12
Rimed couplet, Shelley's use of, 241
Ritchie, Joseph, the explorer, 246 et
sqq., 324
Robin Hood, poem (Keats), 258; date
of, 386; included in the
Lamia volume, 470
Robinson, Clement, echo of, in Keats,
158 An.
Robinson, Henry Crabb, 244-5;
friendly to Keats, 251
on poems in the Lamia volume, 483
on Wordsworth at the time of Keats's
meeting with him, 245 et
sqq.
Rob Roy (Scott), Wordsworth's ad-
vance criticism on, 246
Rob Roy (Wordsworth's ballad), the
writer's estimate of, 246
Rogers, Samuel, poems of, Jeffrey on,
528
Use by, of the Heroic couplet, 108
Roman laws on Infectious Disease, 508
Romantic poetry of the 19th century,
Morris's perhaps the last
of, 539
Weirdness and Terror of, in early
period, 390
Romaunt of the Rose (Chaucer), 437
Rome, Keats's journey to, and death
m, 498, 501, 502 et sqq.,
512 et sqq.
Keats-Shelley Memorial at, 542
Severn at, after Keats's death, 522,
530
Shelley's burial place at, 521
Rondeau, the, Keats's view on, 388
Ronsard, Pierre, Ode of, to Michel de
I'Hdpital, on the Titans,
428-9
Ross, Sir John, and the search for the
North- West passage, 324
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, enthusiasms
of, and high tribute to
Keats, 538, 539
Evocation in, of Pre-Raphaelitism,
325
on The Eve of St Mark, 437, 439-40
Rossetti, William, on the poetry of
Shelley and of Keats, 541
'Rowleyism' of The Eve of St Mark,
438
Rune-inscribed Shell, in Endymion,
196 & n.
Ruskin, John.^nd others, praises by,
of the Ode to Psyche, 413
INDEX
591
Ruth (Wordsworth), 121
Rydal, Keats's visit to, in Words-
worth's absence, 274
Sabhina, Keats's poem planned on,
495, 504
* Sacrifice to Apollo,' picture by
Claude, as inspiration to
Keats, 264
Sad Shepherd, The (Fletcher), 206
'Sad stories of the deaths of Kings,'
Shelley's outburst with,
138 An.
Safie (Reynolds), 74
St Columb Major, the Keats of, 5
St Paul's School, Reynolds at, 74
Saintsbury, Professor, and the debt
of Endymion to the Phar-
onnida of Chamberlayne,
209 n.
St Stephen's, Colman Street, burial-
place of Keats's grand-
mother, 16 n. I
St Thomas's Street, Keats's "chum-
mery" at, 28, 30
Samson Agonistes (Milton), 272
St Teath, the Keats' of, 4 n., 5
Sanctuary, the, in Hyperion, 451-2
Sandell, Rowland, 16
Sandoval (Llanos), 536
Sandys, George, translation by, of
Ovid's Metamorphoses,
Keats's use of, 171
Echoes of, in Keats's poems, 206,
224, 428
Use in, of the Heroic Couplet,
99-100
San Giuliano, Adonais composed at,
517
Sangrado, Dr, origin of the name,
309 * n.
Sappho, lines from, on Love, the limb-
loosener, 332 «fe n.
Poem of, on the Endymion legend,
166 n.
Sarcophagus reliefs, as inspiration of
Keats's Bacchic lines, 231
& n., 232
Satyr, The, masque (Jonson), and the
legend of St Agnes' Eve,
396
Metre of, 386
Scenery, Keats's attitude to, 153, 174
el sqq.
Science and Poetry, views on, of
Hunt, Keats and Words-
worth, 408-11
Scotland, Keats's comments on, 278,
282 et sqq.
Scott, Anne, 525
Scott, John, the *Z' papers' denounced
by, 311; duel over, re-
sulting in death of, 519,
526
Scott, Sir Walter, friend of Haydon, 62
Letter from, to Lockhart, on his
method of criticism, 305-6
Poems of, 21, 49, 108, 537
Attitude to, of Hunt, 21, 45, 303
Environment as affecting, 1
Commercial success of, 82
Position of, as poet, 526
and his Publishers, 303
Relations of, with the Blackwood
group and Lockhart, 303-6
in Rome, 525
Smile of, Haydon on, 525 n.
Wordsworth's sonnet to, 525 n.
on the Chaldee Manuscript, 304
on Criticism, 305-6
on Keats, 525
Scott, William Bell, on The Eve of
St Mark, 440-1
Scottish Chiefs, The (Porter), 325
Scottish Lowlands, Keats's tour in, 278
Scots and Edinburgh Magazine, Re-
view in of 'Poems,' 132,
311 * n.
Scylla, in Endymion, 190 et sqq.
Sea, the, Keats on, 149
Sonnet on (Keats), 135
Selections from the English Poets
(Ward), Arnold's essay on
Keats in, 543 n.
Selene, Artemis, Diana, and the
Endymion myth, 116 n.
Sensations, Keats's use of the term,
155-6, 266
Sentence-structure, Keats's aptitude
for, 209
That of Endymion and of Pharon-
nida compared, 209 n.
Session of the Poets (Suckling), 44
SUhos, old French romance, imitations
of, 186 n.
Severn^ James, father of Joseph, 78;
wrath at Severn's going to
Italy with Keats, 488
Severn, Arthur, and the lost drawing
of Keats, 495
Severn, Joseph, artistic gifts of, 78
Account by, of the voyage with
Keats to Italy, 489 et sqq.
and A Lover's Complaint, 492-4
Attitude of, to Fanny Brawne,
33 & n., 331
Drawings by, of Keats in his Berth
at sea, 495 (lost); in his
Bed in Rome, 511; at
NoveUo's (lost), 328; a
592
INDEX
Severn, Joseph — continued
Drawings by — continued
miniature once owned by
Fanny Brawne, 533
Friendship of, with Keats, 77-8, 141,
262
Keats's companion in Italy, 487 et
sqq.'y devotion shown by
to the end, 504 et sqq.; and
the effect of the Reviews
on Keats, 516, 522; loyalty
to Keats, 324; a touching
incident recorded by, 524-5
Letters from, to various friends on
the journey to Italy and
Keats's last days there, 489
et sqq., passim
Letters to, from Keats's friends,
while in Rome, 513 et sqq.
Life of, m Rome, 530, 536
Parents of, 78
Pictures by, 380, 487
Religious views of, 71
Sharp's Life of, new knowledge of
Keats derived from, 545
on Fanny Brawne, 330; on Keats's
artistic instincts, 255-6;
on Keats's eyes, 79; on
Keats's elation over a
meeting with Wordsworth,
250; on Keats as invalid,
456; on Keats's Museum
reveries, 416; on the
True cause of Keats's dis-
tress in his illness, 534
Shakespeare, William, birth-place of,
Keats's visit to, 144
Coleridge's Lectures on, 244
Influence seen in Endymion, 185,
189, 206, 217, 239
Keats compared with, 537, 543
Keats's study of, 135-6, 430
Keats on his understanding of, 254
Line by, criticised by Wordsworth,402
Lines of, on Endymion, 167
Middle age of, Keats on, 356
Negative capability of, 253
Plays of, see under Names
Sonnets of. Brown's book on, 530-1;
Keats's appreciation of, 153
Use by, of the couplet compared
with Pope's, 105
Shakespearean quality of certain lines
in Endymion, 217, 239
Shanklin, Keats's stay at, and writings
while there, 357 et sqq., 405
Sharp, William, new Imowledge of
Keats furnished by his
Life of Severn, 545
on Keats at 21, 79
Shelley, Harriet, death of, 70
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 245
Anatomical studies of, 29
Appearance, voice and manner of,
70,71
Challenge to, in Endymion, 189, 239
Characteristics, contrasted with
those of Keats, 72-3
Debt of, to Endymion, 238, 239-40
Derivation and nature of the beliefs
sung by, 220, 540-1
Devotionto,apparentlyincompatible
with full justice to Keats,
540-1
Domestic difficulties of, and gener-
osity during that time to
Hunt, 69-70
Eccentricities of, 138 & n.
Exasperation of, with certain verse,
459
Friendship of, with Hunt, 69 et sqq.,
515
Impression made on, by
the Alps, 237
Wordsworth's Excursion, 233-4
Influence of, seen in Endymion, 235
et sqq.
and Keats, relations between, 69, 70,
71-3, 256, 481, 483
Keats's fear of being influenced by,
236
Letter drafted by, to the Quarterly
Review after the attack on
Keats, 238 ^
Letters from, to Keats, inviting him
to Italy, 467, 501
from Switzerland, &c., compared
with those of Keats, from
the Lakes, &c., 275
to Mrs Leigh Hunt on his desire
to take care of Keats in
Italy, 483
Letters to, from Keats, on the
invitation to Italy, 405;
on his own unripe men-
tality, 411
Poems of, see under Names
Allegoric theme of Alastor, 171-2
Beauty of rhythm used by, 241
Cambridge enthusiasm for, 520,
527, 530
Echoes in, of Milton, 430
Freedom of, from faults, 50
Galignani's edition of, 159 n. 2,
527 An. 2
Gift of, to
Browning, effect of, 526
Keats, the reception of, 467
Influences moulding, 241
Lyrics in, 241
INDEX
593
Shelley, Percy Bysshe — continued
Poems of — continued
Posthumous, Hazlitt's criticism
of, 521-2
Rossetti's enthusiasm for, 536
Referred to by Hunt in Young
Poets, 54, 69
Use by, of rimed couplet, 241
Publishers of, 83, 131
Views of, on the Blackwood and
Quarterly Reviews on
Keats's poems, 238, 315,516
Death of (1822), 521, 522
on Endymion, 238, 467, 481; on
Keats's place among the
Poets, 545; on the Lamia
volume, 481-3; on study
of the great Poets, 89
Shenstone, W., poems of, 19
Use by, of Spenserian stanza, 445
Shepheard's Calendar, The, 19
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, pension
of, 481
Sicilian Story, The (Procter) ,f identical
in subject with Isabella, 459
Sickness, Keats on, 263
Siddons, Mrs, on the Head of Christ
in Haydon's painting, 461
Sidmouth, Reynolds's love of, 74
Siege of Corinth (Byron), tag from,
used by Keats, 243
Skiddaw, Keats's climb on, 274, 275-6
Sleep, invocations to, in Keats's
poems, 177
Sleep and Poetry (Keats), 53, 58, 75 n.,
122
Adverse criticism on, 132
AflSnities with lines in Endymion,
176 n., 198-9
Analysis of, with quotations, 115
et sqq.
Date discussed, 115
Echoes in, of the * Great Spirits^
sonnet, 121
Haydon on, 130
Ideas in, 448
Invocation in, to Sleep, 177
Metre, diction and subject of, 1 14-15,
124, 125
Pope-Boileau passage in, derided by
BlacJcvx)od, 307; wrath of
Byron on, 480-1
Published in Poems, 114, place of
in the volume, 115
References in, to the intimacy with
Hunt, 53-4
Relation of, to contemporaries, 125,
and to the Elizabethans,
124-5
Use in, of the couplet, 124-5
*SmaUy busy flames play through the
fresh-laid coals' {To My
Brothers) sonnet (Keats),
53
Included in Poems, 90
Smith, Horace, friend of Haydon, 62
Keats's acquaintance with, 245
Smith's Standard Library, first separate
collected edition of Keats's
poems issued in, 528 n. 2
Snook, John and Mrs, Keats's visits
to, 333, 491
Soames, William, 82
Solitude wrong for the Poet, Words-
worth's doctrine on, en-
dorsed by Keats and Shel-
ley, 234 et sqq.
*Some Titian colours touched into real
life' (Keats), from Epistle
to Reynolds, 264
Somerset, the Keates of, 4 n.
Song of the Four Fairies (Keats), 350,
441
Song of the Indian Maiden in Endy-
mion, fine quality of, 225;
in style an Ode, 411
Song, A, about Myself (Keats),
{'There was a naughty
boy'), 9-10
Song, A, of Opposites (Keats), 263,
389
Sonnet-beginnings of Dante, and of
Keats, 92 A w. I
Sonnet-forms employed by Keats, 86,
257
Sonnet on Poems (Hunt), 130-1
Sonnet, written at the end of The
Floure and the Lefe (Keats),
75
Sonnets by Keats, see under First
Lines, and Titles
ia Poems
Character of, 87
Classes or Groups
Autumn group, 90-1
Exceptions
Chapman sonnet, 87-8
Kosciusko sonnet, 91
Margate sonnet, 91
Leigh Hunt group, 90
Occasional, 87; the great ex-
ception, 87-8
Sex-chivalry group, 89
Forms employed, 86
Haydon pair, the, 91
Problems of selection, 91-2
Sonnets on the Nile by Hunt, Keats,
and Shelley, 256
Sonnets showing strain of Keats's love
affair, 343-4
594
INDEX
So reaching back to boyhood: make me
ships, lines in Endymion,
10
Sosibios, Vase of, Keats's tracing of,
416 & n.
Sotheby, W., translator of Wieland's
Oberon, 86-7 <fc n., 309
Stanza invented by, 445
South, John Flint, on Lucas, 29
Southey, Robert, as Critic, 299
Poems by, 121
Political change of view of, 45
Hazlitt's fierce criticism on, 137
Spaniards Inn, Nightingales near, as
inspiration to Keats, 353
Spanish Fryar (Dryden), as model for
In a drear-nighted Decem-
ber, 160
Specimens of Early English Metrical
Romance (Ellis), the St
Agnes' Eve legend in,
398 n.
Spence*s Polymdis, picture in, as
inspiration to Keats, 200,
231
Spenser, Edmimd, Compound epithets
of, equalled by Keats,
413
Keats's delight in, 19-21, and in-
fluence of, seen in the
Poems, 20-1, 22, 23, 31,
85, 86, 132, 136, 171, 177.
185, 206, 209, 399
Lines of, on the Endymion story, 167
Platonism in the Hymns of, 237
Sonnet on, or in imitation of, by
Keats, postponed, 259
Use by of the Heroic Couplet, 96
Spenserian Stanza unfit for satire, 445
Used by Chatterton, 369
Spirit, The, of the Age (Hazlitt),
251 n.
Spirit, The, of Man (ed. Bridges),
Keats's Meg Merrilees bal-
lad included in, 280 n.
Staffa (Keats), on Fingal's Cave, 292-3
StaflFa, visited by Keats, 291-2
Stair Hole, 494
Stephens, Henry, fellow-student of
Keats, 28
on the composition of *A thing of
Beauty, ' 176 <& n.
on the date at which Keats entered
Guy's, 26 n.
on Keats as Medical Student, 30-2
on Mrs George Keats, 271
Sterling, John, on Keats and his poems
(1828). 526-7
on the poems of Tennyson and of
Keats, 528
Story, The, of Rimini, poem (Hunt),
34,44
Aims of, 47-9, 108-9
Criticism of, in Blacktoood, 301-3
Haydon on, 64
Keats's allusion to, 113
Lines quoted illustrative of the
style, 48
Stranger, The, performed to bagpipes,
Keats on, 288
Stratford-on-Avon, Keats's visit to,
144
Styx, the, 429 n.
Subaltern, The (Gleig), 341
Suddard, Mary, critic, on Keats's Un-
felt. Unheard, Unseen,
157 & n.
Suovetaurilia Urn, at Holland House,
as possible inspiration to
Keats, 416 n.
Superb, H.M.S., and its Keats cap-
tain, 4
Surrey Listitution, Hazlitt's lectures
at, 244,1300
Swan and Hoop Stables, birth-place
of Keats, 3
* Sweet Philomela,' lines by Browne,
echoed by Keats, 418 n.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, metrical
magic of, and use by, of
the Heroic measure, 161
on Keats's poetry, 540, 541
Symbolism in Keats's poems, 153-4;
Wordsworth's influence
shown in, 233
Table Talk (Coleridge), on the
meeting with Keats in
1819, 346-7
Tales, his own, and Brown's, sent by
Keats to his brother, 345
Tales of my Landlord (Scott), 303
Talfourd, Sergeant, 68
Talk, A, with Coleridge, in Comhill for
April, 1917, ed. Miss E. M.
Green, cited, 347-8 A n.
Tassie, James, paste reproductions by,
of antique gems, 92, 338
Taylor, John, Keats's publisher, 7 n.,
335 n., 513
Copyright of Endymion bought by,
486; further financial help
from, 509
Letters to, from
Keats, on Cap and Bells, 380, 38,
445 «fe n. ; corrections to
Endymion, 260; Endy-
mion's confession, 180;
on the journey to Italy,
485-6; on his thirst for
INDEX
595
Taylor, John — continued
Letters to, from — continued
Keats — continued
knowledge, 265; on plans
for work, 380-1, 445 n.
Woodhouse, on Keats's pride, &c.,
368
Severn (unfinished), on Keats's
condition in Rome, 506-8
Literary standing of, 133
Memorial volume on Keats projected,
with Woodhouse, 529; the
Woodhouse transcripts lent
by, to Milnes, 533
on Endymion, 313
Taylor and Hessey, Messrs, Keats's
second publishers, 133,
348, 519
Keats's applications to, for ad-
vances on Endymion, 140,
141
Notice appended by, to Hyperion,
427
Steadfast loyalty of, 313
Teignmouth, George and Tom Keats
at, 244, Keats's letters to,
245 et sqq.; Keats's stay
at, 266 et sqq., 429
Teniers, Wordsworth's pun on, 250
Tennyson, Alfred, fame of, 537, 538,
slow growth of, 526
Poems by
Alcaics, 38, 257
Influence on, of Keats, 527
Quarterly's criticism on (1832),
. ?27-8
Reminiscence of Keats, in Enid,
123
Thackeray's allusion to, 537-8
Sterling's appreciation of, 528
on the poetry of Keats, 550, and
of Shelley, 541
Terror, the, effect of, on the Lake
poets, 45
Textual criticism, perversion in, 469
Thaddeus of Warsaw (Porter), 325
Theocritus, Echoes of, in Endymion,
201, and in the sonnet on
Fame, 349-50 & n. i
Endymion passage from, para-
phrased by Fletcher, 168
Theogony of Hesiod, Cooke's transla-
tion of, 428
* There is a charm in footing slow, ' see
Lines written in the High-
lands
* There was a naughty hoy,' see Song
about Myself
* Think not of it, sweet one, so,' love-
lyric (Keats), 157
* This pleasant tale is like a little copse, '
sonnet on Floure and Lefe
(Keats), 75
Thomson, James, poems of, 19
Influence of, on Keats, 23
Verse forms used in, 108, 445
'Thought appalling,' in one version
of In drear-nighted Decem-
ber, possible source of, 160
Thoughts suggested on the banks of
Nith ... (Wordsworth), 387
& n.
Thrush, song of, Keats's pleasure in,
321, 459, and lines on, 260
* Thus have I thought : and days on
days have flown,' Epistle to
Cowden Clarke (Keats), 37
*Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like
fresh-gathered leaves,' son-
net by Reynolds, on Keats's
sonnet on The Floure and
the Lefe, 75
Tighe, Mrs, poem of, on Cupid and
Psyche, 19, 412
Times, The, 39
'Time's sea,' sonnet, see To a Lady
seen for a few moments at
Vauxhall
Tintem Abbey (Wordsworth), ideas in
paralleled in Sleep and
Poetry, Bridges on, 126 et
sqq.
Passage in, discussed by Keats, 146
'Tion,' or *shion' termination, as used
by Keats, 208
Titans, the, in Hyperion, sources of,
428 et sqq.
Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne picture,
as inspiration for Keats, 231
Tiverton, the name Keat at, 4 An., 5
To Ailsa Rock, sonnet (Keats), 284
To Byron, sonnet (Keats), 23, 91
To a Cat, sonnet (Keats), 256
To Celia (Jonson), metre of, 386
To Chatterton, sonnet (Keats), 23, 91
To G. A. W., sonnet (Keats), 89, 270
To Hay don, sonnet (Keats), {'Great
Spirits'), 65; echoes of,
in Sleep and Poetry, 120;
included in Poems, 91
To Hay don (sonnet). With a sonnet
written on seeing the Elgin
Marbles (Keats), 66-7
To Kosciusko, sonnet (Keats), 91
To a Lady seen for a few moments at
Vauxhall, sonnet (Keats),
23, and the allied sonnet,
258-9
To the Ladies who saw me crowned,
sonnet (Keats), 57
596
INDEX
To Leigh Hunt, Esq., Dedication of
Poems, sonnet (Keats),
83-90, 130-1
To M. A. at Parting, verses (Kathe-
rine Philips), Keats's plea-
sure in, 150
Tom Cribb's Memorial to Congress
(Moore), 341
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), 256
To one who has been long in city pent,
sonnet (Keats), in Poems,
90
Tory critics, ferocity of, matched by
Hazlitt and others, 137
To some Ladies, verses (Keats), metre
of, 86
Townley (Bacchic) Vase, 416
Translation from an Ancient Chaldee
Manuscript, satire, in
Blackwood, 301, 302, 303,
Scott on, 304
Trelawny, Edward John, 142; rela-
tions of, with Brown, 522,
523, and with Shelley, 521
'Triumph of Death,' picture by
Orcagna, 446
Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer), 391
Two Chambers of Thought, Keats on,
267, 448
Twopenny Post Bag, The (Moore), and
the Prince-Regent, 43
'Ugly Clubs,' in Sleep and Poetry,
120-1 & n.
Underground journey theme in Endy-
mion, 186 & n.
Undying Art, the great poets on, 417
^Unfelt, unheard, unseen,' stanzas
(Keats), 157 & n.
Unknown beloved, the, in Endymion,
186, 187
'Unseam/ used by Keats and by
Shakespeare, 218 & n.
Unwritten poems, Keats's distress over,
534, 548
VAC A TION Exercise (Milton), echoed by
Keats, 431; Keats's know-
ledge of, 262; sprightly
lines from, 109 n.; versi
fication of, 101-2
Valentine, by Keats, for Miss Wylie,
see *Hadst thou lived in
days of old'
Valleys, Keats's love of, and notes on,
152
Van Staveren's edition of Auctores
MythographiLatim,Keaits's
copy of, 447 & n.
Vathelc (Beckford), echoes of, in
Endymion, 184
Vegetable Diet, in Hunt's circle,
Wordsworth on, 250
Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare),
beauties of, Keats on, 153
Verses written during Medical lecture
(Keats), 33
'Versifying Pet-Lamb,' phrase of
Keats, 356
Victorian poets. The Newcomes cited
on, 537-8
Victory, parentage of, 429 n.
Villa Aldobrandini, sarcophagus from,
231 n.
Villa Gherardesca, Landor's Floren-
tine home, 530
Visconti, , and the Elgin Marbles,
59
Vita Nuova (Dante), sonnet-begin-
nings in, 92 <fc n. I
Vivar^s, , engraver of the "En-
chanted Castle," 265 n.
Voltaire, called dull, by Words-
worth, 247
Head of, in Haydon's picture, 462
Vowel sounds, Keats's use of, 147, 209,
401-2
Voyage d'AntSnor, parallel in, to pas-
sage in Endymion, 186 n.
Wade, Keats's school-fellow, pranks
of, 12
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Millais'
"Isabella" picture in, 538
Waller, Edmund, mythological poetry
of, Jonson on, 220
Use by, of the Heroic Couplet, 102
Walsh, Captain Thomas, of the ' Maria
Crowther,' kindness of, to
Keats, 488-9, 499
Walthamstow, Fanny Keats at school
at, 147, 337, 462
War, the world's, as stimulus to Poetry,
547-8
Ward, T. H., Book by, containing
Arnold's measured judg-
ment on Keats, 543 n.
Warton, Joseph, protest of, against
moral essays in verse, 106,
echoed by Keats, 165
Use by, of the Heroic Couplet,
107
Warton, Thomas, Poet Laureate,
pioneer of change in spirit
of poetry, 106, 107
Warwickshire, tlie Keytes of, 4
INDEX
597
"Waverley novels, authorship unknown
(1818), 279
Way, Mr, a great Jew-converter, 333
Way, G. L., translation by, of Le
Grand's Fabliaux, 33 <fe n. i,
552
Webb, Cornelius, verses by, gibes at,
in Blackwood, 76, 152,
301, 307
Weirdness and Terror, in Romantic
poetry, early 19th century,
396
* Welcome Joy, and Welcome Sorrow,'
see Song of Oppodtes
Well Walk, Hampstead, home in, of
the Keats brothers, 141;
friends frequenting and
frequented, 141, 167
Keats's life at (1817-18), 244; de-
scribed by himself, 245 et
sqq.
Wells, , of Redleaf, owner of
Claude's 'Enchanted
Castle,' 265 n.
Wells, Charles, author of Joseph and
his Brethren, association of,
with Keats, 77
Hoax by, on Tom Keats, 77,
346
Wentworth Place, Hampstead, Keats's
life at, with Brown, 320
et sqq.
Wesleyan Place, No. 2, Kentish To^ti,
Keats at, 463
West, - — , 263
*Whai is there in the universal earth'
(Intercoronation sonnet by
Keats), 57
What the Thrush said (Keats), 260, 424
* When I have fears that I may cease to
be,' sonnet (Keats), date,
subject and pendant of,
258-9
'Where's the Poet,' fragment (Keats),
425
Whistleeraft, Orlando (J. H. Frere), 309
White Hart Hotel, Bath, 134
*Who loves to peer,' sonnet (Keats),
see On Leigh Hunt's Poem
* The Story of Rimini'
'Why did I laugh to-night,' sonnet
(Keats), 343, text of, 344
Wieland, Endymion by, 309
Oberon by, translation of, by
Sotheby, 86-7 & n., 309
Stanza used in, 445
Wilkie, Sir David, and Hunt, 43
Letter to, from Haydon, on Hunt
and his Story of Rimini,
63-4
Wilson, Dr John (' Christopher North')
ferocious criticism by, 137,
298-9, 300, 301; on Lamia
and Isabella, &c., 477-8,
527; on Shelley's Prome-
theus, 477-8
Winchester, Keats and Brown at
(1819), 360, 405; last
good days spent there,
363-4, work done during
the stay, 364
*Wuid, across the barley,' Keats's
delight in, 80
Windermere, Keats's first sight of,
273
Wobm-n, carven sarcophaguses at,
231 n.
•Wolters, Paul, on Keats's inspira-
tions from the antique,
416 n.
* Woman, when I behold thee flippant,
vain,' sonnet (Keats), 34;
published in Poems, 89
Women, Keats's attitude to, and ideal-
isation of, 81, 89-90, 262,
271, 288, 318-20, 549; see
also Brawne, Fanny
Woodhouse, Richard, friend of Taylor
and of Keats, 134, 159,
160, 257 n., 340; loyalty
of, 313
Letters of, to Taylor and another,
on Keats, 368
List of Books in Keats's Library,
compiled by, 556-8
Memorial volume on Keats, planned
by, with Taylor, 529, see
Woodhouse Transcripts
Sonnet by, on ' Poems, ' 131
on the Date of In a drear-nighted
December, 158
on the Inspiration of the two
sonnets When I have Fears,
and Time's Sea, and the
lines From my despairing
heart, 259 & n.
on Hyperion, 426-7; on Isabella, on
Keats's reading aloud and
on the changes in Eve of St
Agnes, 366-7; on Keats's
character and poetry, 368;
on a Long talk with Keats
(1819), 366 et sqq.
Woodhouse Transcripts in Crewe
MSS., 259 n.
Lent by Taylor to Milnes, 533
WooUett, W., engraver of 'The
Enchanted Castle,' 265 n.
*Word-of-all-work, Love,' phrase of
George Eliot, 549 n.
598
INDEX
Words, lax use of, and free modifica-
tion of, in Endymiorit
212-13
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 250, 290
Wordsworth, Mrs, 250
Wordsworth, Rev Christopher, 245
Wordsworth, William, 244; absent
on Keats's visit to Rydal,
274
Appearance, voice, manner and
mannerisms of, 79, 249
Bailey's acquaintance with, 133
Characteristics of, 246, 249, 315
Conversation of, Hazlitt on, 251
Fame of, steady growth of, 526
Friendship of, with Haydon, 62,
462 A n.
Genius of, compared with that of
Keats, 234, 267-8, 484;
Bridges and the author on,
128-9
in relation to that of Milton,
Keats on, 266
and Greek mythology, 125-6, 220
Head of, in Haydon's picture,
462 An.
Hunt's verdict on, 44
Keats's meeting with and relations
with, 245 et sqq.
and Kingston, 246 et sqq., 251
Letter from, to Reynolds on his
poem The Naiad, 64
Poetry of, 21, 196 n.
Disuse in, of the older verse forms,
108. 119
Influence of, on Keats, seen in
Endymian, 125, 126, 233-4
La Belle Dame, 350
Keats's appreciation of, 145-6, and
critical judgments on,
251-2, 263, 267
Local influences on, 2
Poems of humble life, attitude
to, of the Himt circle, 121,
348
Poems of tragic life, 121
Stanzas on Bums, countered by
Keats in * Bards of Pas-
sion,' 387
Political change of view of, 45
Reminiscence of, in the Solitude
sonnet by Keats, 90
Wordsworth, William — continued
Reminiscence of — continued
Sonnets
of God-speed to Scott, 525 n.
to Haydon, three, 65
Scotch tour of, witji his sister,
290
Wilson's attitude to, in Noctes
Ambrosiance, 300
on Keats's Hymn to Pan, 227. 249;
on the Poetic Revolution,
119; on the Sources of
poetic Inspiration, 89; on
Vowel-variation, 401-2
World-sadness, Keats on, and on the
duty of relieving it, 448-9
et sqq.
Written on the day that Mr Leigh
Hunt l^t Prison, sonnet
(Keats), 23
Written in disgust of Vulgar Super-
stition, sonnet (Keats),
91
Wylie, Georgiana Augusta (after-
wards Mrs George Keats,
and later Mrs Jeffrey),
141; engagement of. to
George Keats, 24, 34
Keats's poems written for, 34, 86,
89, 269, 270
Marriage of, 268, 269, 271; second
marriage, 331; hereafter
see Jeffrey, Mrs, and
Keats. George and his
wife
Wylie family. 366
YOUNG POETS, essay (Hunt)
Beginners of promise referred to.
54,69
Keats's Chapman Sonnet printed in,
54
*You say you love, hut with a voice,'
love-plaint by Keats,
Elizabethan echo in, 157-8
*Z* Papers in BlachtDood, gibes of
at Hunt and Keats, 301-3,
307-8, 474; fatal duel
fought over, 519
*Zack,' 4
Zanconi, Milanese prints by, 325 n.
f
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