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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 Qh 
 
 -J* 
 
 ■'-' 
 
 <u 
 
 ni 
 
 V 
 
 CJ 
 
 n 
 
 -d 
 
 c 
 
 a: 
 
 
 
 
 'T-; 
 
 -J5 
 
 
 
 < 
 
 < 
 
 •^ 
 
 j::: 
 
 ?! 
 
 U 
 
 
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 O 
 
 ^ 
 
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. 
 
^^Lyi ^^^^K ' ' ^^^BH^JwB^^^i^'^'^^iHH 
 
 H ^ ^^«^1 «« 
 
 ^1 *4 vliSfe. 
 
 ^r .'^ "''^^^i! 
 
 
 
 i 9^ ^^'-^^ ^ ;;^ v» , 
 
 i? ,,^^rir^'' 
 
 
 :^»>^^H^^t 
 
 ^ir""^ 
 
 w 
 
 '«J 
 
 o o 
 
 h H 
 
 s s 
 
 o o 
 
 ai a£ 
 
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. 
 
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