UC-NRLF 
 
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JOHN KEATS 
 
: 
 
JOHN KEATS 
 
 A STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 F. M. OWEN / 
 
 ' His clenched hand shall unclose at last, 
 I know, and let out all the beauty. 
 My poet holds the Future fast, 
 
 Accepts the coining ages' duty, 
 Their Present for this Fast ' 
 
 Robert Browning 
 
 LONDON 
 
 C. KEGAN PAUL & CO., i PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 1880 
 
■ 
 
 
 {The rights oj translation and of reproduction are reserved) 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 I HAVE not tried to write a Life of John Keats : 
 anyone who lias read Lord Houghton's com- 
 prehensive and appreciative Memoir would feel 
 that to do so would be an impertinence. 
 
 True lovers of Keats will have to forgive me. 
 My work, except perhaps as an attempt to make 
 others love him, will have small value for them. 
 All, and far more than I have said, they will 
 have known before, and they will possibly feel 
 it weakened in the saying, for 
 
 Heard melodies arc sweet, but those unheard 
 Are sweeter. 
 
 But because I have felt most praise has missed 
 that which to me is his highest beauty, and 
 because he is so often quoted in a fragmentary 
 
 183 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 way, which robs him of his human interest, I 
 have tried to express what Keats has taught mc 
 knowing well that if I have mistaken or misin- 
 terpreted him, or if any words of mine have 
 dimmed his beauty, his large heart would have 
 been the first to forgive me. 
 
 Frances M. Owen. 
 
 February, iSSo. 
 
JOHN KEATS. 
 
 i. 
 
 Oh, what a wild and harmonised tunc 
 
 My spirit struck from all the beautiful. — ENDYMK n. 
 
 In all true poetry there is an clement of pro- 
 phecy, an inner vision, the scope of which is 
 not, and ought not to be, comprehended at 
 once. The real harmony which will make the 
 poetry of John Keats lasting is to be found in 
 this prophetic element. For a work of genius 
 is the expression of a mind at its greatest, a 
 mind no longer limited and fettered with its own 
 individuality, but free and great by reason of 
 its union with general life. It is the voice 01 
 the many in one, of the one in many, and such 
 a voice must by its very nature be prophetic. 
 The true harmony of it will lie not only in 
 
 B 
 
2 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 metrical sweetness and melodious words, but in 
 the reconcilement of ' discordant elements' by 
 'the dark inscrutable workmanship of life,' the 
 realisation of the relations of the spirit to its 
 surroundings, the expansiveness of its sympathy, 
 and its hopes for humanity. 
 
 Keats is too often remembered as the poet 
 of sensuous perfection, to the exclusion of this 
 wider thought, but any careful study of his 
 poems will make it obvious that while he is 
 pre-eminently among English poets the one 
 who appeals most directly to the senses, his 
 work is full of indications that his imagina- 
 tion and poetic genius carried him beyond this 
 first and earliest development of the mind to 
 the spiritual and more permanent -elements of 
 human nature; and that however 'wild' the 
 music may have been which his 'spirit struck 
 ' from all the beautiful,' it bore in its harmony 
 the undertone of the discords necessary to its 
 completion and fulness. 
 
 'The still sad music of humanity ' was beau- 
 tiful to him, as well as the gladness and joy of 
 life, and he felt ' the giant agony of the world ' 
 while he gloried in the melody of its progress. 
 
A STUDY. 3 
 
 The sensuous faculties are the first to be 
 developed, and in Keats they were developed 
 to an unusual extent, probably by reason of the 
 lar^e scale of his whole nature ; for it must never 
 be forgotten that his life was an arrested one, 
 that his poetry remains to us a Titanic fragment 
 of that which might have been the unrivalled 
 work of genius of our age, and that the three 
 small volumes of verse which he left us, with the 
 memory of his twenty-five years of life, are but 
 a prelude to the music which never was played. 
 The perfection of his senses, the luxuriance 
 of his imagination, the strength of his friend- 
 ship, the warmth of his affections, and the 
 depth of his passion, arc sufficient warrant to 
 us for believing that the melody and creative 
 beauty so much associated with him arc but 
 a partial expression of his general power, and 
 that we are coming only by slow degrees to 
 know the worth of his legacy of verse and the 
 greatness of the elements which it contains. 
 
 The short sad story of his life is too well 
 known already to need more than the briefest 
 recapitulation in order to understand the se- 
 quence of his poems. 
 
 B 2 
 
A JOHX KEATS; 
 
 The son of a man employed in a livery-stable, 
 he was born in October 1795, in London. His 
 father died when John was only nine years old, but 
 his mother gave him what was considered a good 
 education. She is said to have been a stern 
 and severe woman, yet when she died, during her 
 son's school career, we are told that he hid him- 
 self for several days in a nook under the master's 
 desk, 'passionately inconsolable.' 
 
 His schoolmaster, Mr. Cowden Clarke, was 
 one of his earliest friends, and to Mr. Clarke's 
 son Charles ' he wrote, in one of those strange 
 rhyming letters which show his versatility and 
 command of language : — 
 
 . . . You first taught me all tlic 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 slendcrness. 
 Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly 
 Up to its climax, and then dying proudly ? 
 
 1 In some interesting. Personal Recollections of John Keats, 
 published by Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke in the Gentleman 's 
 Magazine of February 1S74, we see how close this friendship 
 continued to be after the school days of Keats were over. 
 
A STUDY. 5 
 
 Who -found for me the grandeur of the ocle, 
 Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load ? 
 Who let me taste that more than cordial dram, 
 The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram ? 
 Showed me that epic was of all the king, 
 Round, vast, and spanning all, like Saturn's ring ? 
 • ••••• 
 
 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. 
 
 This letter is dated September 1S16, the year 
 before 'Endymion' was written. 
 
 For five years Keats prepared himself for 
 the medical profession. It is strange how little 
 trace we find of this work in his poems. It 
 would seem as if he had been living a double 
 life at the time, and that while he walked the 
 hospitals his mind was straying in the old 
 classic fields or in ' the realms of gold ' of 
 Spenser's faery world ; for neither science, nor 
 the mechanism of the body, nor the subtle con- 
 nection of the body and mind, ever seem to 
 have specially touched his imagination. The 
 two principal inspirations of his early life were 
 Spenser's ' Faery Quecne ' and a translation o( 
 Homer by Chapman ; which last was to him 
 
6 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 such an intense delight, that he read it all night 
 long, even shouting aloud when some special 
 passage struck him. He knew no Greek. His 
 marvellous knowledge of Greek mythology 
 came through translations and his own innate 
 sympathy with Greek feeling ; and great as the 
 loss of not having mastered the language itself 
 must have been, there was certainly a compen- 
 sating gain in the fresh appreciative power which 
 had not been injured by the hackneying of the 
 Greek poets in school work. How great the joy 
 of this discovery of Homer was to him is well 
 known by the sonnet written on this occasion. 
 
 SONNET ON READING CHAPMAN'S HOMER. 
 
 Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, 
 And many goodly states and kingdoms seen, 
 Round many Western islands have I been 
 Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 
 Oft. of one wide expanse had I been told, 
 That dcep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne ; 
 Yet did I never breathe its pure serene 
 Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. 
 Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims into his ken ; 
 Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes 
 He stared at the Pacific — and all his men 
 Look'd at each other with a wild surmise, 
 Silent — upon a peak in Darien. 
 
'. A STUDY 7 
 
 The realms of Chaucer and of Spenser had been 
 a veritable land of Havilah to him, but this first 
 dawn of Greek beauty was a joyous inspiration, 
 equalled only by one other feeling in his life. 
 For he was himself a Greek born in the after 
 time, in as far as the longing for perfection 
 in beaut)-, the culture of the senses, the respon- 
 siveness to nature, the spontaneous appreciation 
 of all sensuous objects of enjoyment, could make 
 him one. But 'Pan is dead,' and Keats was 
 weighted with the modern spirit o^ change and 
 of that restlessness which must necessarily be- 
 long to all transition and progress. He could 
 not 'lull himself into immortality,' in his dreams 
 of beauty, untouched by the suffering on ever)' 
 side of him : he could not be content with 
 things as they were : he looked forward to a 
 brighter future for the world he loved so keenly 
 and understood so well. 
 
 And oilier 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 ! 
 Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb. 1 
 
 ' Sonnet to Uaydon. 
 
JOHN KEATS; 
 
 In London he met with friends who appreciated 
 him and fostered his talent. Leigh Hunt, 
 Hazlitt, Godwin, Shelley, &c, were all good 
 and true to him, and it is pleasant to think 
 that the few years he lived were filled with 
 their love. Although his face was strong and 
 manly, one of his friends writes of it : ' There was 
 4 in the character of his countenance the femi- 
 1 neity which Coleridge thought to be the mental 
 ' constitution of true genius.' Another says : ' His 
 1 countenance lives in my mind as one of singular 
 ' beauty and brightness ; it had the expression as 
 1 if he had been looking on some glorious sight.' 
 In 1817, as his health was not good, he went 
 to the Isle of Wight, and there began to write 
 ' Endymion,' for he had a strong feeling that 
 every true poet ought to write some long piece. 
 ' True lovers of poetry,' he said, ' like to have a 
 1 little region to wander in, and a long poem is a 
 ' test of invention] which he took to be ( the polar 
 1 star of poetry.' 
 
 At the time of its publication ' Endymion ' 
 was but a partial success. It was not of the 
 ephemeral character which commands instan- 
 taneous popularity. Critics in the ' Quarterly ' 
 
A STUDY. 
 
 and i Blackwood ' wrote down the new young 
 poet. The ' Quarterly ' confessed it had not read 
 1 Endymion,' but proceeded to review it, and 
 stamped it as 'unintelligible, rugged, diffuse, 
 1 tiresome, and absurd ; ' and thought it unlikely 
 that Mr. Keats 'had put his real name to such 
 ' a rhapsody.' ' Blackwood' committed itself to 
 writing of ' the calm, settled, imperturbable dri- 
 * veiling idiotcy of " Endymion," ' and even went 
 so far as to prophesy that no bookseller would 
 venture £50 a second time on anything Keats 
 could write ; ending with the assertion that it 
 1 is a better and a wiser thincr to be a starved 
 1 apothecary than a starved poet.' 
 
 The coarse and superficial character of such 
 criticism could not fail to jar upon the exquisite 
 refinement and sensitiveness of such a mind as 
 his ; but Keats did not die of these ' baaing 
 'vanities' and 'tiptop nothings,' as has sometimes 
 been affirmed. It is impossible that if they had 
 had sufficient power to touch his vitality he could 
 have written of them as he did. ' This is a mere 
 ' matter of the moment. I think I shall be among 
 1 the English poets after my death. It docs me not 
 1 the least harm in society to make me appear little 
 
io JOHN KEATS : 
 
 ' 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 again : ' Praise or 
 1 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.' It only 
 shows that Shelley and his other friends had 
 not fathomed the depth and strength of Keats if 
 they believed that a man who could write the pre- 
 face to ' Endymion' and the opening lines of the 
 third book, could die of the 'Quarterly Review.' 
 The ■ Edinburgh Review ' was fairer, and 
 confessed that ' " Endymion " was at least as 
 ' full of genius as of absurdity.' But Keats knew 
 himself that ' his poem had not at all succeeded.' 
 Yet he adds : ' I have no doubt of success in a 
 * course of years, if I persevere ; but I must be 
 ' patient, for the reviewers have enervated men's 
 'minds and made them indolent: few think for 
 ' themselves.' And in another letter of about the 
 same time : ' 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 
 
A STUDY. ir 
 
 ' about its being a perfect piece, and with that 
 1 view asked advice, and trembled over ever)* 
 1 P a g e > ft would not have been written : for it is 
 1 not in my nature to fumble. I will write in- 
 1 dependent!)'. I have written independently 
 'without judgment, I may write independently 
 'and with judgment hereafter. The genius of 
 1 Poetry must work out its own salvation in a 
 ' man. It cannot be matured by law and pre- 
 1 ccpt, but by sensation and watchfulness of itself. 
 1 That which is creative must create itself. In 
 ' " Endymion " I leaped into the sea, and thereby 
 'have become better acquainted with the sound- 
 ' ings, 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.' Thus 
 was ' Endymion ' launched amidst the condem- 
 nation of the ignorant many, the guarded ap- 
 preciation of the enlightened few, and in 
 humility by its writer, who knew not how 
 prophetic of itself were its opening words : — 
 
 A thing of beauty is a joy for ever ; 
 Its loveliness increases ; it will never 
 Fass into nothingness. 
 
12 JOHX KEATS: 
 
 By this time the medical profession was re- 
 nounced, and Keats had given himself up to 
 poetry and to love, for he had met Fanny Brawnc, 
 and life was changed to him as only an absorb- 
 ing passion could change it. Hitherto the 
 women who had chiefly influenced him seem to 
 have been his sister Fanny and his sister-in-law, 
 the wife of George Keats. Of the latter he says, 
 in a letter written to her and to his brother out 
 in America : ' The moon is now shining full and 
 1 brilliant I she is the same to me in matter 
 ' that you are in spirit. If you were here, my 
 4 dear sister, I could not pronounce the words 
 1 which I can write to you from a distance. I 
 
 * have a tenderness for you, and an admira- 
 
 * tion, which I feel to be as great and more 
 1 chaste than I can have for any woman in 
 1 the world. You will mention Fanny. 1 Her 
 1 character is not formed, her identity does not 
 ■ press upon me as yours does. I hope, from 
 1 the bottom of my heart, I may one day feel 
 • for her as much as I do for you. I know 
 1 not how it is, my dear brother, I have never 
 1 made any acquaintance of my own, nearly all 
 
 1 His sister. 
 
A STUDY. 13 
 
 8 through your medium : through you I know 
 4 not only a sister, but a glorious human being.' 
 / There can be little doubt that this sister-in- 
 law was one of the pure and beautiful influences 
 at work in his mind when he wrote ' Endymion.' 
 It is as impossible not to feel the shadowy pre- 
 sence of a high ideal throughout its pages, as it 
 is in * Lamia' not to feel the presence of a wo- 
 man loved with feverish passion and restless 
 dissatisfaction. But in this same letter Keats 
 goes on to mention having met a lady who had 
 deeply impressed him. ' She is not a Cleopatra, 
 ' but she is at least a Charmian ; she has a rich 
 
 * Eastern look ; she has fine eyes and fine man- 
 
 * ners. When she comes into the room, she 
 
 * makes the same impression as the beauty of a 
 'leopardess. . . . She kept me awake one night, 
 1 as a tune of Mozart's might do. I speak of 
 
 * the thing as a pastime and amusement, than 
 1 which I can feel none deeper than a conversa- 
 
 * tion with an imperial woman, the very "Yes" 
 
 * and " No " of whose life is to me a banquet. . . 
 1 She is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way, 
 
 * for there are two distinct tempers of mind in 
 1 which wc judge of things — the worldly, theatrical, 
 
14 JOHN KEATS : 
 
 1 and pantomimicai ; and the unearthly, spiritual, 
 1 and ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord 
 ' Byron, and this Charmian hold the first place 
 1 in our minds : in the latter, John Howard, 
 ' Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and 
 
 * you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. 
 ' As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of 
 1 a Charmian ; as an eternal being, I love the 
 1 thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, 
 1 and I should like you to save me. 
 
 I am free from men of pleasure's cares, 
 
 By dint of feelings far more deep than theirs. 
 
 * This is Lord Byron's, and is one of the finest 
 ' things he has said/ 
 
 In his Memoir of Keats, Lord Houghton 
 quotes this passage as referring to Fanny Brawne, 
 but Mr. Buxton Forman, in editing the letters of 
 Keats to Fanny Brawne, brings some proof to 
 show that it refers to some one else. The real 
 value of the passage lies in the spiritual and 
 refined appreciation which it shows Keats had 
 for his sister-in-law, and the description of 
 1 Charmian ' is certainly very like that which is 
 given of Miss Brawne in a letter written a month 
 or two later. ' She is about my height, with a 
 
A STUDY. 15 
 
 4 fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort: 
 1 she wants sentiment in every feature ; she 
 1 manages to make her hair look well ; her nostrils 
 1 are very fine though a little painful ; her mouth 
 1 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.' 
 
 His letters to her, which have lately been 
 published, give an impression of passionate suf- 
 fering love without rest or calm, claiming no 
 sympathy with his higher life ; for his poetry, 
 which was his true life, is rarely mentioned, and 
 he seems content with pouring out an elemental 
 worship of beauty as embodied in her whom he 
 loved. He became engaged to her, but he had 
 not money enough to enable him to marry, and 
 he loved and suffered with the intensity which 
 belongs to such a nature as his : — a glimpse into 
 such suffering sometimes startles an easy-going 
 world into a momentary consciousness of a heaven 
 and hell in the midst of its every-day life, of 
 which it goes on its unheeding way in pro- 
 foundest ignorance. 
 
1 6 JOHN KEATS; 
 
 By this time the great fragment < Hyperion ' 
 was begun. It was probably the first version of 
 it, which Keats says was given up because 
 'there were too many Miltonic inversions in it,' 
 and he did not live to finish the second. 
 
 It was to this effort he makes allusion in the 
 Preface to * Endymion.' ' I hope I have not in 
 * too late a day touched the beautiful mythology 
 ' of Greece, and dulled its brightness, for I wish 
 1 to try once more before I bid it farewell.' And 
 in the last book of ' Endymion ' itself, the line, 
 Thy lute-voiced brother will I sing ere long, 
 
 evidently refers to Apollo in the third book of 
 ' Hyperion.' 
 
 It was of ' Hyperion ' that Eord Byron, who 
 was not disposed to do Keats full justice, wrote : 
 ' It seems actually inspired by the Titans and 
 'sublime as .-Eschylus ; ' and Shelley said, 'I 
 1 consider the fragment of " Hyperion " as second 
 1 to nothing that was ever produced by a writer 
 1 of the same years.' 
 
 The « Eve of Saint Agnes,' ' The Tot of Basil, 
 some of the odes, and ' Lamia,' were written about 
 this time ; and a tragedy called ' Otho the 
 1 Great ' was composed in partnership with a 
 
A STUDY. 17 
 
 friend, and seems to lack the peculiar genius 
 and inspiration of Keats altogether." 
 
 A Highland tour, a visit to Shanklin, a 
 sojourn in Winchester, a more prolonged re- 
 sidence in Ilampstead, and the death of his 
 brother Tom, whom he nursed to the end, seem 
 to make up the few circumstances of the period 
 of his literary life ; and then the shadows begin 
 to fall rapidly, and the sunlight is broken off 
 abruptly and for ever. Money troubles pressed 
 upon the young poet, and in the autumn of 1 S 19 
 his health gave way altogether, and he broke 
 a blood-vessel. ' That is my death-warrant/ 
 he said, when he saw the blood. ' I must die/ 
 
 For a while he partially rallied, and cast 
 about for something to do. The choice seemed 
 to lie between going to South America or 
 being surgeon on an Indiaman. He inclined to 
 the latter scheme, but consumptive signs came 
 on rapidly, and he was ordered abroad. The 
 artist Severn went with him, and the devotion 
 and self-abnegation of this friend, and the 
 kindness of Sir James Clark, then a doctor in 
 Rome, are the only gleams of light which break 
 through the gloom of the end. From Naples 
 
 c 
 
iS JOHN KEATS 
 
 Keats wrote to one of his friends : ' It surprises 
 1 me that the human heart is capable of con- 
 
 * taining and bearing so much misery.' With 
 
 what mournfully prophetic power must the 
 
 words of the sad princess' in his own ' Endy- 
 
 1 mion ' have come back to him : — 
 
 Yet I would have, great geds, but one short hour 
 Of native air. Let me but die at home. 
 
 From Rome, at the end of November 1S20, he 
 
 wrote his last letter, which ends thus : — ' If I 
 
 1 recover I will do all in my power to correct 
 
 1 the mistakes I made during sickness, and if I 
 
 ' should not, all my faults will be forgiven. 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 
 1 imagination like a ghost, she is so like Tom. 
 ' I can scarcely bid you good-bye even in a 
 ' letter. I always made an awkward bow. God 
 1 bless you. — JOHN KEATS.' 
 
 The story of those days of dying is chiefly a 
 story of pain : 'the sense of darkness coming over 
 1 him/ ' the eternal vision of her whom he loved 
 eternally vanishing;' and his friend Severn 
 praying by his side ' that some angel of good- 
 
A STUDY. 19 
 
 ' ncss may yet lead him through this dark 
 
 1 Wilderness.' His thoughts grew calmer as death 
 
 came near. He c felt the daisies growing over 
 
 ' him,' he said. He begged that a letter and 
 
 purse of his sister's, and a letter of his beloved's 
 
 might be put into his coffin, and that his epitaph 
 
 might be, ' Here lies one whose name was writ 
 
 1 in water.' When death actually took him, his 
 
 last words were, ' Thank God it has come.' He 
 
 is buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, 
 
 where the flowers grow over him all the year 
 
 round. 
 
 Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doth not sleep ! 
 He hath awakened from the dream of life. 
 'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep 
 With phantoms an unprofitable strife, 
 And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife 
 Invulnerable nothings. We decay 
 Like corpses in a charncl ; fear and grief 
 Convulse us and consume us day by day, 
 And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. 
 
 He has outsoared the shadow of our night, 
 Envy and calumny and hate and pain, 
 And that unrest which men miscall delight 
 Can touch him not, and torture not aerain. 
 From the contagion of the world's slow stain 
 He is secure ; and now can never mourn 
 A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain ; 
 Nor when the spirit's self has ceased to burn, 
 With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. 
 
 c 2 
 
20 JOHN KEATS 
 
 II. 
 
 The sadness of this short life-story seems to 
 stand out in sharp contrast to the joyous 
 character of much of the poetry of Keats, for, 
 until blighted by disease, joyousness was a 
 distinct feature of his many-sided nature, a 
 joyousness which keenly appreciated all natural 
 delights and all pleasant sensations ; which 
 brought the undertone of music into ' Endymion/ 
 the triumph into ' Hyperion,' the completed 
 happiness into the ' Eve of St. Agnes,' the fairy 
 fun into the 'Cap and Bells,' and the Greek feel- 
 ing into all 'his handling of nature.' 
 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold particularises four 
 ways of handling nature, two of which ways he 
 attributes to Keats, viz., 1 the ' Greek lightness and 
 ' brightness,' and 'the charm and magic' Keats 
 in these respects has more sympathy with 
 
 1 Lectures on Celtic Literature. Lect. vi. 
 
 . 
 
 t 
 
A STUDY. 21 
 
 Shakespeare than with any of our other poets. 
 possessing the same power of bringing to us in 
 a few words all that sight, smell, or touch could 
 carry away from anything beautiful, and weaving 
 it into the very tissue of the memory, to abide 
 with us as a possession. He draws no lessons from 
 it, he points no morals ; he simply leads us with 
 a magical expression into the close sympathy 
 which he has himself with nature, and makes 
 it live for us as it docs for him. He is pene- 
 trated by it in some measure as the Greeks were, 
 and gives us its essence in his own nature. With 
 two or three words of charm, he creates an atmo- 
 sphere around the creatures of his imagination 
 and makes them live, never lowering nature to 
 their moods or his own, but harmonising all moods 
 with nature. It is thus that he has left us such 
 a wealth of complete word-pictures. We seem 
 to be with him on the 
 
 Swelling downs, where sweet air stirs 
 
 Blue harebells lightly, and where prickly furze 
 
 Buds lavish gold. 
 
 We stand upon the little hill and see the pure 
 white clouds, ' like flocks new-shorn.' 
 
22 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 Sweetly they slept 
 On the blue fields of heaven, and then there crept 
 A little noiseless noise among the leaves, 
 Born of the very sigh that silence heaves. 
 
 We feast our tired eyes upon 'the wideness of 
 1 the sea,' and watch 
 
 The moving waters at their priestlike task 
 Of pure ablution round earth's human shores. 
 
 We wander 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. 
 
 We linger with him enchanted where, 
 
 Upon a tranced summer night 
 Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, 
 Tall oaks, branch charmed by the earnest stars, 
 Dream, and so dream all night without a stir, 
 Save from one gradual solitary gust, 
 Which comes upon the distance and dies oft", 
 As if the ebbing air had but one wave. 
 
 We see his filbert hedge overtwined with wild 
 
 briar, and find 
 
 the quaint mossiness of aged roots, 
 Round which is heard a springhead of clear waters, 
 Babbling so wildly of its lovely daughters, 
 The spreading bluebells. 
 
 We gather into our loneliness those 
 
A STUDY. 
 
 undcscribed sounds 
 That come a-swooning over hollow grounds, 
 And wither drearily on barren moors. 
 
 We listen to the 
 
 Distant harvest-carols clear, 
 Rustle of the reaped corn, 
 Sweet birds antheming the morn. 
 
 Or the nightingale sings to us 
 
 Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path 
 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home, 
 She stood in tears amid the alien corn ; 
 
 The same that oft-times hath 
 Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 
 
 Whatever the picture or the sound may be, it 
 is touched with the same charm, it is described 
 truly, but it is given an added radiance, and a 
 subtler power than we should have found in it. 
 
 His ear for words was keen and fine, and 
 produced combinations which would in them- 
 selves give him a high rank among English 
 poets. More of the lines of condensed beauty 
 and melody which linger in our minds arc from 
 Keats than we easily recognise, and those who 
 love his poems have an almost irresistible 
 desire to read them aloud, even when alone, 
 for the sake of their music. 
 
24 JOHN KEATS 
 
 A short and exquisite example of his melody 
 
 may be quoted in this little Faery Song. 
 
 Shed no tear ! Oh, shed no tear ! 
 The flower will bloom another year. 
 Weep no more ! Oh, weep no more ! 
 Young buds sleep in the root's white core. 
 Dry your eyes ! Oh, dry your eyes ! 
 For I was taught in Paradise 
 To ease my breast of melodies. 
 
 Shed no tear ! 
 
 Overhead ! look overhead ! 
 'Mong the blossoms white and red, 
 Look up, look up. I flutter now 
 On this flush pomegranate bough. 
 See me ; 'tis this silvery bill 
 Ever cures the good man's ill. 
 Shed no tear ! Oh, shed no tear ! 
 The flower will bloom another year. 
 Adieu, adieu— I fly, adieu, 
 I vanish in the heaven's blue. 
 
 Adieu, adieu ! 
 
 But to linger over this melodious and creative 
 beauty in Keats, is but to reiterate what every 
 one is ready to acknowledge, that if this alone 
 accounted for his high place among the English 
 poets, it is already done. He has a stronger 
 hold on our minds, from the greatness of the 
 thoughts which he was always striving to express, 
 than from his recognised power of expression. 
 However partially it was developed, owing 
 
A STUDY. 25 
 
 to his untimely fate, the idea which underlies 
 
 his poetry most deeply is that of the onoh-ss of 
 
 all true life. 
 
 Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know, 
 
 was the lesson written for him on the Grecian 
 urn, a lesson which bound the glorious Greek 
 past with the sadder English present, and which 
 he said would still remain 'the friend of man ' 
 in midst 'of other woe than ours.' And the 
 words have an intensity of meaning which no- 
 thing but the gradual unfolding of life can reveal 
 to us. For our eyes sec but dimly and learn 
 but slowly to know what is beauty, or to realise 
 that what is beautiful to God can only become 
 beautiful to us as our vision becomes more God- 
 like. 
 
 Any careful study of ' Endymion ' will show 
 us that this is the thought which most deeply 
 penetrates it from beginning to end, overlaid as 
 it is sometimes with redundant fancy and 
 imagery. We cannot forget that Keats was 
 strongly under the influence of that which 
 Wordsworth and Shelley were writing at this 
 time ; that the atmosphere in which he breathed 
 
26 JOHN KEATS 
 
 was alive with the renewed hopes of mankind ; 
 that American Independence and the French 
 Revolution were recent events in his childhood ; 
 and that though his manhood was attained in a 
 time of comparative peace, it was the peace of a 
 changed world. All life, national and individual, 
 had received a fresh impetus and was expanded. 
 The reaction in literature, too, was a powerful 
 influence with Keats. lie sympathised with 
 Wordsworth and learnt of him ; and the warrant 
 for his advancement and progress lay in the 
 fact that he was mature enough to know and 
 recognise his own immaturity. 
 
 In a letter written to his friend Mr. Reynolds 
 in 1818, Keats says: 'I compare human life 
 1 to a large mansion of many apartments, two 
 
 * of which I can only describe, the doors of 
 ' the rest being as yet shut on me. The first 
 ' we step into we call the Infant, or Thought- 
 
 * less Chamber, in which we remain as long as 
 1 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 
 
A STUDY. 27 
 
 1 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 
 1 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, 
 1 is that tremendous one of sharpening one's 
 1 vision into the heart and nature of man, of 
 ' convincing one's nerves that the world is full 
 ' of misery and heartbreak, pain, sicknesss, and 
 ' oppression ; whereby this Chamber of Maiden 
 1 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 
 1 and evil ; we are in a mist; we arc now in that 
 ' state; we feel "the burthen of the mystery." 
 
 • To this point was Wordsworth come as far as 
 1 I can conceive when he wrote " Tintcrn Abbey," 
 1 and it seems to me that his genius is cxplora- 
 1 tive of those dark passages. Now if we live 
 
 * and go on thinking we too shall explore them. 
 1 He is a genius, and superior to us, in so far as 
 
2 3 JOHX KEATS: 
 
 4 he can, more than we, make discoveries and shed 
 4 a light in them.' And then, after comparing 
 the genius of Wordsworth with that of Milton, 
 he adds: 'He did not think with the human 
 1 heart as Wordsworth has done, yet Milton as 
 4 a philosopher had surely as great powers as 
 
 * Wordsworth. What is then to be inferred ? 
 1 Oh! many things. It proves there is really a 
 
 * grand march of intellect, it proves that a 
 
 * mighty providence subdues the mightiest minds 
 4 to the service of the time being, whether it be 
 ' in human knowledge or religion.' 
 
 This appreciation of Wordsworth in so 
 young a man, and at the time that Wordsworth's 
 thought was new to the world and only partially 
 understood, is in itself a remarkable proof of the 
 maturity of Keats. But his treatment of all 
 subjects, though influenced by Wordsworth's 
 truth and simplicity, was essentially different in 
 many ways. It is enough to compare 4 Dion ' and 
 1 Laodamia ' with any of the Greek subjects of 
 Keats, and we shall see this at once. Wordsworth' 
 deliberately meant to be a teacher, Keats did 
 not. Wordsworth pressed his philosophy and 
 his moral purpose into public view wherever 
 
A STUDY. 20 
 
 it was possible, the philosophy of Keats was 
 hidden under a luxuriant overgrowth of fancy. 
 
 I lis desire was to be a dramatist — 
 
 to gather men and women, 
 Live or dead, or fashioned by his fancy, 
 Enter each and all, and use their service. 
 Speak from every mouth — the speech, a poem ' — 
 
 though at the time of his death he had very 
 imperfectly developed the dramatic faculty. 
 
 But different as were their modes of reaching 
 it, it was the same end which both Wordsworth 
 and Keats pursued, the growth of the spirit to 
 harmony by the reconcilement of its discord- 
 ant elements. 
 
 1 If I should die,' said Keats, in one of his 
 letters to her whom he loved, ' I have left no 
 ' immortal work behind me ; nothing to make 
 ( my friends proud of my memory ; but I have 
 1 loved the principle of beauty in all things, and 
 1 if I had had time I would have made myself 
 1 remembered.' lie had lived long enough to 
 realise that the sense of beauty, which is the 
 earliest to be awakened in every creative spirit, 
 is incomplete until it so penetrates life, and 
 
 1 Robert Browning. One Word More. 
 
3 o JOHN KEATS: 
 
 allies itself with the reality which docs not at 
 first appear to our perceptions beautiful, that 
 they become one. And this realisation seems 
 to be the hidden inspiration of 4 Endymion.' 
 
 There are many indications in the poems 
 which preceded 'Endymion' thatKeatshad con- 
 sciously an underlying meaning in its sequence 
 and incident, though its sudden changes and 
 entanglement of images have many of the 
 characteristics of a dream. 
 
 In one of the earliest poems, ' Lines written 
 
 1 on looking over the Vale of Health, Hampstcad,' 
 
 we have the first notes of this longer work 
 
 which was soon to follow. 
 
 Where had he been, from whose warm head outflew 
 
 That sweetest of all songs, that ever new, 
 
 That aye refreshing, pure deliciousness, 
 
 Coming ever to bless 
 
 The wanderer by moonlight ? to him bringing 
 
 Shapes from the invisible world, unearthly singing 
 
 From out the middle air, from flowery nests, 
 
 And from the pillowy silkiness that rests 
 
 Full in the speculation of the stars. 
 
 Ah ! surely he had burst our mortal bars, 
 
 Into some wondrous region he had gone 
 
 To search for thee, divine Endymion ! 
 
 He was a poet, sure a lover too, 
 Who stood on Latmus' top, what time there blew 
 
A STUDY. 31 
 
 Soft breezes from the myrtle vale below, 
 And brought in faintness solemn, sweet and si )w, 
 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. 
 
 But the poem ' Sleep and Poetry ' may be 
 considered as the closest index we possess of 
 Keats's scheme of life, and the principles on 
 which he worked. The motto from ' the Flower 
 ' and the Leaf,' at the head of it, is its key-note. 
 
 As I lay in my bed slepc full unmetc 
 Was unto me, but why that I ne might 
 Rest, I ne wist, for there n 'as erthly wight 
 (As I suppose) had more of hcrtis ese 
 Than I, for I n 'ad sicknesse nor discse. 
 
 It is evident from the choice of these lines, 
 
 as prologue to what follows, that Keats was 
 
 puzzled by the contradictions in his own nature. 
 
 He would fain sleep, his dreams were glorious 
 
 and inspiring, and 
 
 why that I ne might 
 Rest, I ne wist ; 
 
 but the fact remained the same. The reign of 
 
32 JOHN KEATS : 
 
 sleep and dreams was over for poetry, and the 
 awakening spirit in him knew it. ' The refresh- 
 ing, ■ the pure deliciousness ' of an old world time 
 might linger, but it could no longer suffice. It 
 is with a wistful tenderness and regret that he 
 admits this truth. 
 
 What is more gentle than a wind in summer? 
 What is more soothing than the pretty hummer 
 That stays one moment in an open flower, 
 And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower ? 
 What is more tranquil than a musk rose blowing 
 In a green island, free from all men's knowing? 
 More healthful than the leafiness of dales ? 
 More secret than a nest of nightingales ? 
 More serene than Cordelia's countenance ? 
 More full of visions than a high romance ? 
 What, but thee, Sleep ? Soft closer of our eyes, 
 Low murmurer of tender lullabies ! 
 Light hoverer around our happy pillows ! 
 Wreather of poppy buds and weeping willows ! 
 
 But the regret is a passing one. The change he 
 recognises as a sign of health and life, it is not 
 lack of ' hertis ese,' nor any sign of sickness or 
 decay, but the restlessness of advancement, of 
 new birth, of a wider and diviner growth. Sleep 
 is good and dreams are sweet, but in a world of 
 suffering it is those only who wake and keep 
 vigil who can be master spirits ; and to tell the 
 
A STUDY. 33 
 
 mind that it may ' sleep on now, and take its 
 • rest,' is but the sorrowful cry of one who knows 
 it to be impossible. 
 
 Therefore Keats with a brave joy, which had 
 then had nothing to daunt it, rises to the higher 
 life. He demands of sleep: — 
 
 But what is higher beyond thought than thee ? 
 
 Fresher than berries of a mountain-tree? 
 
 More strange, more beautiful, more smooth, more regal, 
 
 Than wings of swans, than doves, than dim-seen eagle ? 
 
 What is it? And to what shall I compare it? 
 It has a glory, and nought else can share it. 
 
 The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy, 
 Chasing away all worldlincss and folly : 
 Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder, 
 Or the low rumblings of earth's regions under ; 
 And sometimes like a gentle whispering 
 Of all the secrets of some wondrous thing 
 That breathes about us in the vacant air ; 
 So that we look around with prying stare, 
 Perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning, 
 And catch soft floatings from a faint-heard hymning, 
 To see the laurel-wreath on high suspended, 
 That is to crown our name when life is ended. 
 Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice, 
 And from the heart upsprings, rejoice ! rejoice ! 
 Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things, 
 And die away in ardent mutterings. 
 
 No one who once the glorious sun has seen, 
 And all the clouds, and felt his bosom clean 
 For his great Maker's presence, but must know 
 What 'tis I mean, and feel his being glow. 
 
 D 
 
34 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 From these lines it is clear that Keats felt 
 poetry had entered on a new phase, and the 
 next lines, the direct appeal to poetry itself, 
 expand this thought, for the young poet in 
 his humility feels that he is not yet a denizen of 
 its glorious heaven, but he has felt the dawnings 
 of its life within him ; the rapturous apprecia- 
 tion of beauty, the influence of all sweet sounds 
 and sights, the intoxication of the clear air which 
 poets find around them wherever they breathe, 
 the gladness, and the glory, and ' the sanctuary 
 'splendour' unknown to the many, 
 
 And many a verse from so strange influence. 
 That we must ever wonder how, and whence 
 It came. 
 
 In the next lines we come upon what is 
 probably, an inspiration from Wordsworth, for 
 surely none other is so likely to have waked in 
 the roving imagination of Keats the conception 
 of finding the truest beauty in the life which lay 
 immediately around him. It is one of those 
 expressions which make us feel that we are not 
 wrong in attributing to the young poet a ma- 
 turity which may warrant us in looking for a 
 deeper meaning in much that he says than 
 lies upon the surface. 
 
A STUDY. n 
 
 Also imaginings will hover 
 Round my fireside, and haply there discover 
 Vistas of solemn beauty, where I'd wander 
 In happy silence, like the clear Meander, 
 Through its lone vales ; and where I found a spot 
 Of awfuller shade, or an enchanted grot, 
 Or a green hill o'erspread with chequer'd dress 
 Of flowers, and fearful from its loveliness : 
 Write on my tablets all that was permitted, 
 All that was for our human senses fitted. 
 
 And he knows that the individual life and home is 
 but the school for wider flights and higher aims. 
 The mind that has insight for the solemn beauty 
 of the lives around it, 'the awful height of 
 1 human souls,' will be the best fitted to scale 
 other heights of life, and to feel the infinite in all 
 things. It is this which shall make the true poet, 
 and be also the fulfilment of his prayer. 
 
 Then the events of this wide world I'd seize 
 Like a strong giant, and my spirit tease, 
 Till at its shoulders it should proudly see 
 Wings to find out an immortality. 
 
 The poet's thought deepens. In the sweet- 
 ness of the next lines there is merged the des- 
 pairing pathos of the Royal Preacher with the 
 unconscious sadness of a French philosopher. 
 
 Stop and consider, life is but a day, 
 A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way 
 
 D 
 
3 6 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 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 everchanging tale, 
 The light uplifting of a maiden's veil ; 
 A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air, 
 A laughing schoolboy, without grief or care, 
 Riding the springy branches of an elm. 
 
 And for him who thus wrote the days were 
 
 even then so few. Not even the ten years he 
 
 craved for, that he might 'overwhelm himself in 
 
 ' poesy,' were to be his lot. He had planned so 
 
 much, he accomplished so little. Shall we not 
 
 hold the more sacred and value the more 
 
 lovingly that which he did ? But when ' Sleep 
 
 1 and Poetry ' was written he could be prodigal of 
 
 hope. Life was a vista of endless possibilities 
 
 and purposes, and it is in the next lines that 
 
 we get the first indication of the leading thought 
 
 of ' Endymion.' 
 
 First the realms I'll pass 
 Of Flora, and old Pan : sleep in the grass, 
 Feed upon apples red, and strawberries, 
 And choose each pleasure that my fancy sees. 
 Catch the white-handed nymphs in shady places, 
 To woo sweet kisses from averted faces. 
 
 And can I ever bid these joys farewell ? 
 
A STUDY. 37 
 
 Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life, 
 
 Where I may find the agonies, the strife 
 
 Of human hearts ; for lo ! I see afar 
 
 O'ersailing the blue craggincss, a car 
 
 And steeds with streamy manes — the charioteer 
 
 Looks out upon the winds with glorious fear : 
 
 And now the numerous tramplings quiver lightly 
 
 Along a huge cloud's ridge ; and now with sprightly 
 
 Wheel downward come they into fresher skies, 
 
 Tipt round with silver from the sun's bright eyes. 
 
 Still downward with capacious whirl they glide ; 
 
 And now I see them on a green hill-side 
 
 In breezy rest among the nodding stalks. 
 
 The charioteer with wondrous gesture talks 
 
 To the trees and mountains ; and there soon appear 
 
 Shapes of delight, of mystery, and fear, 
 
 Passing along before a dusky space 
 
 Made by some mighty oaks : as they would chase 
 
 Some ever-fleeting music, on they sweep. 
 
 Lo ! how they murmur, laugh, and smile, and weep ; 
 
 Some with upholden hand and mouth severe, 
 
 Some with their faces muffled to the ear 
 
 Between their arms : some clear in youthful bloom 
 
 Go glad and smilingly athwart the gloom ; 
 
 Some looking back, and some with upward gaze. 
 
 Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways 
 
 Flit onward — now a lovely wreath of girls 
 
 Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls 
 
 And now broad wings. Most awfully intent, 
 
 The driver of those steeds is forward bent, 
 
 And seems to listen. Oh, that I might knor/ 
 
 All that he writes with such a hurrying glow ! 
 
 The visions all are fled — the car is fled 
 Into the light of heaven, and in their stead 
 
38 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 A sense of real things comes doubly strong, 
 And, like a muddy stream, would bear along 
 My soul to nothingness ; but I will strive 
 Against all doubtings, and will keep alive 
 The thought of that same chariot, ?nd the strange 
 Journey it went. 
 
 From such words as these it is plain how 
 
 deeply the mind of Keats was penetrated with 
 
 the sense of progress. Few lines that he has 
 
 written show more completely how he realised 
 
 himself as being only in ' the chamber of 
 
 4 Maiden Thought,' and not yet acquainted with 
 
 1 the burthen of the mystery,' though conscious 
 
 of its existence. The vision of the chariot has 
 
 an echo of Plato's chariot, but it is more than 
 
 this : it is the vision of all the poetry that is 
 
 yet to be ; that is, not necessarily of expressed 
 
 thought, but of all the highest interpretations of 
 
 the human mind, of the noblest hopes and deeds 
 
 of which humanity is capable, rolling on with a 
 
 melodious progress to the unknown future. 
 
 Most awfully intent, 
 The driver of those steeds is forward bent, 
 And seems to listen. 
 
 It is from feeling within himself this glorious 
 
 power of vision and far-reaching hopefulness that 
 
 Keats is brought to the questions of his own day. 
 
A STUDY. i) 
 
 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 enfolding? From the meaning 
 Of Jove's large eyebrow, to the tender greening 
 Of April meadows. 
 
 He remembers the clays of Chaucer, Shake- 
 speare, Spenser, and Milton, wh.cn the ' Muses 
 'were nigh cloyed with honour ' even In our own 
 isle. Have these days passed for ever ? Could 
 all this be forgotten ? He laments the foppery 
 and barbarism in poetry which has crept in and 
 defiled it ; the men who 
 
 with a puling infant's force 
 Have swayed about upon a rocking-horse, 
 And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-soul'd, 
 The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd 
 Its gathering waves — ye felt it not. The blue 
 Bared its ethereal bosom, and the dew 
 Of summer nights collected still, to make 
 The morning precious. Beauty was awake ! 
 Why were ye not awake ? 
 
 He appeals passionately to the poets of long 
 ago, saying that he cannot name them by these 
 common folk and in ' this unholy place/ but he 
 
40 JOIfX KEATS: 
 
 would know if they delighted in our old lament- 
 ing Thames or our delicious Avon. 
 
 Or did ye stay to give a welcoming 
 
 To some lone spirits who could proudly sing 
 
 Their youth away and die ? 
 
 And with this connecting thought of Chat- 
 terton, whose memory he loved, he came back 
 to the present day and the benediction of poetry 
 poured out on our own time. 
 
 For sweet music has been heard 
 In many places. 
 
 The Lake Poets are enshrined in the next lines. 
 
 Some has been upstirr'd 
 From out its crystal dwelling in a lake 
 By a swan's ebon bill : from a thick biake 
 Nested and quiet in a valley mild 
 Bubbles a pipe ; fine sounds are floating wild 
 About the earth. 
 
 Some of the modern poets are reproached for 
 the horror of the subjects they have chosen. 
 
 The poets' Polyphemes 
 Disturbing the grand sea. 
 
 But Keats looked forward to a brighter day, 
 when the music would be harmonised, the weeds 
 of the past age would be cleared, and those who 
 
A STUDY. 41 
 
 came after would find a fresh sward overgrown 
 with simple flowers. 
 
 And they shall be accounted poet-kings 
 Who simply tell the most heart-easing things. 
 
 And from the poetry of his contemporaries he 
 comes diffidently, and with the humility which 
 was such a strong characteristic of his greatness, 
 to his own, 
 
 Will not some say that I presumptuously 
 Have spoken? that from hastening disgrace 
 Twere better far to hide my foolish face ? 
 That whining boyhood should with reverence' bow 
 Ere the dread thunderbolt could reach me ? How ! 
 If 1 do hide myself, it sure shall be 
 In the very fane, the light of poesy. 
 If 1 do fall, at least I will be laid 
 Beneath the silence of a poplar shade, 
 And over me the grass shall be smooth shaven, 
 And there shall be a kind memorial graven. 
 But off, despondence ! miserable bane ; 
 They should not know thee who, athirst to gain 
 A noble end, are thirsty every hour. 
 What though I am not wealthy in the dower 
 Of spanning wisdom ; though I do not know 
 The shiftings of the mighty winds that blow- 
 Hither and thither all the changing thoughts 
 Of man : though no great ministering reason sorts 
 Out the dark mysteries of human souls 
 To clear conceiving ; yet there ever rolls 
 
42 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 A vast idea before me, and I glean 
 Therefrom my liberty ; thence too I've seen 
 The end and aim of poesy. 
 
 An ocean dim, sprinkled with many an isle, 
 Spreads awfully before me. How much toil ! 
 How many days ! what desperate turmoil ! 
 Ere I can have explored its widenesses. 
 
 He returns gently to thoughts of his friends, 
 and descriptions of the pictures round his room, 
 and rises 'refreshed and glad and gay.' 
 
 Such were the thoughts and hopes which 
 were filling the poet's mind before he com- 
 menced ' Endymion,' and they warrant us in 
 looking for their fruition in this his longest work. 
 It is a noteworthy fact that Shelley's prophetic 
 poem,' ' The Revolt of Islam,' was written at the 
 same time. Captain Medwin says he was told 
 by Shelley that this poem and 'Endymion' were 
 written in friendly rivalry, and that the compact 
 was to produce both works within six months. It 
 seems possible that both poems may in some 
 measure have been the result of ideas and hopes 
 for humanity discussed together, though Keats 
 writes subsequently, ' I refused to visit Shelley, 
 'that I might have my own unfettered scope.' 
 
 But Keats was dissatisfied with his work when 
 
A STUDY. 43 
 
 it was done. Besides what he said of ' the slip- 
 
 1 shod " Endymion " ' in the passage already 
 
 quoted, we find him writing to his publisher, 
 
 Mr. Taylor : c In " Endymion " I have most likely 
 
 moved into the £0-cart from the leading-strings. 
 
 In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see 
 
 how far I am from their centre. 
 
 1 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. 
 
 1 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 coun- 
 tries with " Oh, for a muse of fire to ascend." If 
 " Endymion " serves me as a pioneer, perhaps I 
 
44 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 1 ought to be content, for, thank God, I can read 
 ' and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his 
 1 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, 
 1 rather than to a bitterness that I am not ap- 
 
 * predated. / am anxious to gel " Endymion" 
 
 * printed i that I may forget it, and proceed. I 
 1 have copied the third book, and begun the 
 ■ fourth.' 
 
 That this humility about his long poem was 
 not deprecatory, but sincere, is shown by the 
 preface to it, which is worth quoting, for its own 
 intrinsic beauty of expression as well as for its 
 characteristics of the writer. 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 Knowing within myself the manner in which this 
 poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling 
 of regret that I make it public. 
 
 What manner I mean, will be quite clear to the 
 reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, 
 immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish at- 
 tempt, rather than a deed accomplished. The two 
 st books, and indeed the two last, I feel sensible 
 
A STUDY. 45 
 
 arc not of such completion as to warrant their passing 
 the press ; nor should they if I thought a year's 
 castigation would do them any good. It will not, 
 the foundations are too sandy. It is just that this 
 youngster should die away : a sad thought for me 
 f I had not some hope that while it is dwindling I 
 may be plotting and fitting myself for verses fit to live. 
 This may be speaking too presumptuously, and 
 may deserve a punishment ; but no feeling man will 
 be forward to indict it : he will leave me alone with 
 he conviction that there is not a fiercer hell than the 
 failure in a great object. This is not written with the 
 least atom of purpose to forestall criticisms of course, 
 but from the desire I have to conciliate men who are 
 competent to look and who do look with a jealous 
 eye to the honour of English literature. 
 
 The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the 
 mature imagination of a man is healthy ; but there is 
 a space of life between, in which the soul is in a 
 ferment, the character undecided, the way of life 
 uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted. Thence pro- 
 ceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters 
 which those men I speak of must necessarily taste 
 in going over the following pages. 
 
 I hope I have not in too late a day touched the 
 beautiful mythology of Greece and dulled its bright- 
 ness, for I wish to try once more before I bid it 
 farewell. 
 
 Teignmouth, April io, 1S1S. 
 
46 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 The characters, the circumstance, and the 
 poetic dress of ' Endymion ' are Greek, but they 
 are English too. The scenery is English, and 
 there is an unrest, a questioning, and a pro- 
 gression of thought throughout the poem, which 
 is altogether foreign to Greek calm. 
 
 It may be noted, too, in passing, that ' En- 
 * dymion ' was written before the deepest part 
 of the nature of Keats had been touched by 
 the passion of love. 
 
 It is a more spiritual poem than he would 
 have written a few years later, describing love 
 as one who had not gained his knowledge from 
 individual suffering but from a powerful imagi- 
 nation would be likely to describe it, and more 
 interested in an ideal future than an absorbed 
 present. The poem gains rather than loses 
 from this fact. The spirit in a state of energy 
 and activity, but free from self-concentration, 
 would be winged for wider flight, and would see 
 with clearer vision than when in its mortal pain 
 it had 
 
 To question heaven, and hell, and heart in vain, 
 
 though it might lack the wider sympathy of 
 deepened and increased knowledge. 
 
A STUDY. 47 
 
 It was in April I S 17 that Keats went to the 
 Isle of Wight, and stayed by himself, writing 
 with a child's glee of all he saw. ' The sea, Jack, 
 1 the sea ; the little waterfall ; then the white 
 1 cliff; then St. Catherine's Hill; the sheep in 
 1 the meadows, the cows in the corn. ... As 
 1 for primroses, the island ought to be called 
 ' Primrose Island, that is if the nation of cow- 
 4 slips agree thereto.' In a fortnight of this in- 
 spiration he produced the two first books of 
 
 1 Endymion.' 
 
 So I will begin 
 Now while I cannot hear the city's din, 
 Now while the early bucklers are just new, 
 And run in mazes of the youngest hue 
 About old forests ; while the willow trails 
 Its delicate amber, and the dairy pails 
 Bring home increase of milk. 
 
 The openings of the four books arc all remark- 
 able, and worth studying apart from the poem 
 itself. The first consists of the well-known lines 
 familiar to those whose knowledge of Keats often 
 begins and ends with them. 
 
 A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, &c. 
 
 The second is an invocation to the power of 
 love. 
 
4 8 JOHN KEATS 
 
 O sovereign power of love ! O grief ! O balm ! 
 All records, saving thine, come cool and calm 
 And shadowy, through the mist of passed years, &c. 
 
 The third is an outpouring of scorn for those 
 
 who lord it o'er their fellow-men 
 With most prevailing tinsel ; 
 
 those 
 
 with not one tinge 
 Of sanctuary splendour, 
 
 who criticise the work they are unable to under- 
 stand. And the fourth is an .invocation of the 
 Muse of Poetry in our native land, and contains 
 the well-known lines : — 
 
 Great muse, thou know'st what prison 
 Of flesh and bone, curbs, and confines, and frets 
 Our spirit's wings, despondency besets 
 Our pillows ; and the fresh to-morrow morn 
 Seems to give forth its light in very scorn 
 Of our dull, uninspired, snail-paced lives. 
 Long have I said how happy he who shrives 
 To thee ! But then I thought on poets gone, 
 And could not pray — nor can I now — so on 
 I move to the end in lowliness of heart. 
 
 With the exception of these openings, the 
 hymns to Pan and to Neptune, the picture of 
 the sleep of Adonis, the roundelay which intro- 
 duces Bacchus and his train, and the hymn of 
 
A STUDY. 49 
 
 Dian's festival, there are no digressions from 
 
 the sequence and the regular development of the 
 
 story, though the ' Edinburgh Review' asserted of 
 
 it : ' The thin and scanty tissue of the story is 
 
 4 merely the light framework on which his florid 
 
 ' wreaths are suspended, and while his ima- 
 
 1 ginations go rambling and entangling thcni- 
 
 1 selves everywhere, like wild honeysuckles, all 
 
 1 idea of sober reason, plan, and consistency is 
 
 1 utterly forgotten, and strangled in their waste 
 
 1 fertility.' A more modern and appreciative 
 
 critic ' also says that in ' Endymion ' ' there are 
 
 ' no complete conceptions, no continuance of 
 
 ' adequate words.' But it was ' a vast idea ' 
 
 which was before the poet's mind, and from 
 
 which he 'gained his liberty;' and as we trace 
 
 the windings of the story we feel the inner 
 
 meaning of it gleaming before us, as the fair 
 
 shrine ever gleamed before Endymion. This 
 
 'ghost of melodious prophesying ' comes to us 
 
 with power even in the attractiveness of the 
 
 narrative, and when we look beyond it, into 
 
 the poet's hidden thought, — 
 
 : Walter T.a^ehot. Littrary Remains* vol. i. p. 51. 
 
 E 
 
$o JOHN KEATS, 
 
 that moment have we stept 
 Into a state of oneness, and our state 
 Is like a floating spirit's. But there are 
 Richer entanglements, aithralments far 
 More self-destroying, leading by degrees 
 To the chief intensity. 
 
 For the prophesying is of the ideal beauty 
 which shall comprise not only the beauty already 
 realised, but even the seeming ugliness and loss, 
 and which will have had fused into its glowing 
 splendour all reality. \ 
 
 It is a ditty 
 Not of these days, but long ago 'twas told 
 By a cavern wind unto a forest old ; 
 And then the forest told it in a dream 
 To a sleeping lake, whose cool and level gleam 
 A poet caught as he was journeying 
 To Phcebus' shrine. 
 
 It is a story so old that it is of no special time 
 r or date, but is ever new, for it is of an eternal 
 truth — the story of an ideal filled with vast 
 possibilities and limitless desires. It is the 
 1 stretched metre of an antique song' reaching 
 out to a great hopc^ across ages of the world's 
 restlessness and chancre. 
 
A STUDY. 51 
 
 III. 
 
 ENDYMION. 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 TlIE story of ' Endymion ' opens with the de- 
 scription of the mighty forest outspread on the 
 sides of the mountain Latmos — a forest dank 
 with weeds, hidden roots, o'crhanging boughs, 
 'palmy ferns,' rushes, and ivy-banks; through 
 which winds pleasantly shadowed paths that 
 lead out into the wide lawn where the marble 
 altar stands, to which troops of little garlanded 
 children are speeding in the early morning. 
 Around the altar the children are joined by 
 damsels bringing offerings, and shepherds, 
 
 Such as sat listening round Apollo's pipe, 
 When the great deity, for earth too ripe, 
 Let his divinity o'erfiowing die 
 In music, through the vales of Thessaly. 
 
 Close after these comes the venerable Priest of 
 Pan, in his hand the basket of sacred herbs, and 
 
 E 2 
 
52 JOHN KEATS : 
 
 on his head the becchen wreath. Then follow- 
 more shepherds, and the fair-wrought car which 
 bore Endymion. 
 
 His youth was fully blown, 
 Showing like Ganymede to manhood grown ; 
 And, for those simple times, his garments were 
 A chieftain kind's : beneath his breast, half bare, 
 Was hung a silver bugle, and between 
 His nervy knees there lay a boar-spear keen. 
 A smile was on his countenance : he seemed, 
 To common lookers-on, like one who dreamed 
 Of idleness in groves Elysian ; 
 But there were some who feelingly could scan 
 A lurking trouble in his nether lip, 
 And see that oftentimes the reins would slip 
 .Through his forgotten hands; then would they sigh 
 And think of yellow leaves, and owlets' cry, 
 Of logs piled solemnly. Ah, well-a-day, 
 Why should our young Endymion pine away ? 
 
 The circle of worshippers range themselves 
 
 round the altar ; every look becomes reverent, 
 
 every voice silent. 
 
 Endymion, too, without a forest-peer, 
 Stood, wan and pale, and with an awed face, 
 Among his brothers of the mountain chase. 
 
 The venerable priest reminds them of the 
 joys and mercies the gods have showered on 
 them, the sacred fire rises, the libation is poured 
 forth, the chorus in Pan's worship is sung. 
 
A STUDY. 53 
 
 Chorus to Pun. 
 
 O thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang 
 
 From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth 
 
 Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death 
 
 Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulncss ; 
 
 Who lovest to see the hamadryads dress 
 
 Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken ; 
 
 And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken 
 
 The drear) melody of bedded reeds 
 
 In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds 
 
 The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth, 
 
 Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth 
 
 rhou 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 ripened fruitage ; yellow-girted bees 
 Their golden honeycombs ; our village leas 
 Their fairest blossomed beans, and poppied corn ; 
 The chuckling linnet its five young unborn, 
 To sing for thee ; low creeping strawberries 
 Their summer coolness ; pent-up butterflies 
 Their freckled wings ; yea, the fresh-budding year 
 All its completions — be quickly near. 
 By every wind that nods the mountain-pine, 
 O forester divine ! 
 
54 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 Thou to whom every fawn and satyr flies 
 For willing service ; whether to surprise 
 The squatted hare while in half-sleeping fit, 
 Or upward ragged precipices flit 
 To save poor lambkins from the eagle's maw ; 
 Or by mysterious enticement draw 
 Bewildered shepherds to their path again ; 
 Or to tread breathless round the frothy main, 
 And gather up all fancifullest shells 
 For thee to tumble into Naiads' cells, 
 And, being hidden, laugh at their outpeeping : 
 Or to delight thee with fantastic leaping, 
 The while they pelt each other on the crown 
 With silvery oak-apples and fir-cones brown- 
 By all the echoes that about thee ring, 
 Hear us, O satyr king ! 
 
 O hearkener to the loud-clapping shears, 
 While ever and anon to his shorn peers 
 A ram goes bleating : Winder of the horn, 
 When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn 
 Anger our huntsmen : Breather round our farms, 
 To keep off mildews, and all weather harms : 
 Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, 
 That come a-swooning over hollow grounds, 
 And wither drearily on barren moors : 
 Dread opener of the mysterious doors 
 Leading to universal knowledge— sec, 
 Great son of Dryope, 
 
 The many that are come to pay their vows 
 With leaves about their brows ! 
 
 Be still the unimaginable lodge 
 
 For solitary thinkings; such as dodge 
 
A STUDY. 55 
 
 Conception to the very bourne of heaven, 
 
 Then leave the naked brain ; be still the leaven 
 
 That spreading on this dull and clodded earth, 
 
 Gives it a touch ethereal — a new birth. 
 
 Be still a symbol of immensity, 
 
 A firmament reflected in a sea ; 
 
 An element filling the space between ; 
 
 An unknown — but no more ; we humbly screen 
 
 With uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending, 
 
 And giving out a show most heaven-rending, 
 
 Conjure thee to receive our humble pajan, 
 
 Upon thy Mount Lycean ! 
 
 The simple worship over, the nymphs dance, 
 the shepherds pitch their quoits or rest in the 
 grass, and Endymion lingers among the shep- 
 herds ' gone in eld ' and with the aged priest. 
 
 There they discoursed upon the fragile bar 
 That keeps us from our homes ethereal ; 
 And what our duties there. 
 
 Their hopes and fears stray into Elysium, 
 and they tell them one to another. 
 
 One felt heart-certain that he could not miss 
 
 His quick-gone love, among fair blossom'd boughs, 
 
 Where every zephyr-sigh pouts, and endows 
 
 Her lips with music for the welcoming. 
 
 Another wished, 'mid that eternal spring, 
 
 To meet his rosy child, with feathery sails 
 
 Sweeping, eye-earnestly, through almond vales : 
 
 Who, suddenly, should stoop through the smooth wind, 
 
 And with the balmiest leaves his temples bind : 
 
56 JOHX KEATS: 
 
 And, ever after, through tho^c regions be 
 
 His messenger, his little Mercury. 
 
 Some were athirst in soul to see again 
 
 Their fellow-huntsmen o'er the wide champaign 
 
 In times long past ; to sit with them, and talk 
 
 Of all the chances in their earthly walk. 
 
 But Endymion dreams among them. His 
 hopes are wider than any of theirs, but he can- 
 not express them in their words, and he swoons 
 into the trance which has so often held him of 
 late. Then comes Pcona, his sister, and guides 
 him, 
 
 like some midnight spirit nurse 
 
 Of happy changes in emphatic dreams, 
 
 to the island where his sleep may have its way, 
 guarded by her— and he wakes refreshed and 
 strengthened, ready to raise his voice once more 
 upon the mountain heights, to cut his bow from 
 the ' fair-grown yew-tree,' to 
 
 linger in a sloping mead 
 To hear the speckled thrushes ; 
 
 to taste again the simple joys of life that had 
 sufficed him until the enchantment had fallen 
 upon him, which was his hope and yet his 
 doom. 
 
 • He implores for music. Peona's lay is sad 
 
A STUDY. 57 
 
 and ' subtle-cadenced.' Her lute seems to be 
 
 under some spiritual influence of which she is 
 
 unconscious : she flings it away, and demands 
 
 the cause of her brother's sorrows, and he tells 
 
 her of the vision which has possessed his life. 
 
 It was a land where ' sacred dittany and 
 
 ' poppies red ' seemed to cover the earth by 
 
 magic, in which he had fallen asleep ; and there 
 
 in the darkness, beneath the light of the stars, 
 
 he had lain watching the zenith until the dome 
 
 of heaven seemed to open to him. For one 
 
 moment the moon appeared sailing among the 
 
 clouds, then passed into a 'dark and vapoury 
 
 ' tent.' 
 
 Again I looked, and, O ye deities, 
 
 Who from Olympus watch our destinies ! 
 
 Whence that completed form of all completeness? 
 
 Whence came that high perfection of all sweetness ? 
 
 Speak, stubborn earth, and tell me where, O where 
 
 Hast thou a symbol of her golden hair? 
 
 Not oat-sheaves drooping in the western sun. 
 
 He goes on to describe passionately the joy 
 of the moments spent with this beloved vision. 
 
 A moment more 
 Our feet were soft in flowers. There was store 
 Of newest joy upon that Alp. Sometimes 
 A scent of violets, and blossoming limes, 
 
5S JOHN KEATS: 
 
 Loiter'd around us ; then of honey cells, 
 Made delicate from all white-flower bells; 
 And once, above the edges of our nest 
 An arch face peep'd — an Oread as I guess'd. 
 
 But the vision seemed to slip from his 
 embrace, he was conscious of his ' stupid sleep,' 
 and when he woke the poppies hung 'dew- 
 ' dabbled on their stalks,' the ' solitary breeze' 
 was sad ; and as he wandered away the world 
 was changed to him, the pleasant hues of earth 
 and heaven had faded: ' deepest shades were 
 ' deepest dungeons.' The rills were sooty, the 
 fish were dying, the rose blew scarlet, and its 
 thorns were like the spikes of aloe ; the very 
 birds seemed 'disguised demons' luring him to 
 darkness. But 
 
 Time, that aged nurse, 
 Rocked him to patience. 
 
 He is now returning to the delights of nature, 
 and feels that they help ' to stem the ebbing sea 
 'of weary life.' His sister answers him with 
 tenderness, but rallies him — he must not lose 
 his life for a dream's sake. She too dreams of 
 heights, and has visions of impossible joys ; but 
 she would never ' tease her pleasant days ' 
 
A STUDY. 59 
 
 because she cannot Amount into those regions.' 
 Why should he sully 
 
 the entrusted gem 
 Of high and noble life with thoughts so sick? 
 
 But while accepting her reproach, he feels 
 that she does not understand him — she has not 
 seen what he has seen — she has not known 
 what he has known. Hitherto he has been 
 content with the world's praises, he has longed 
 for them. Nothing base could have wrecked him 
 as he is wrecked, but his ' higher hope ' is 
 
 Of too wide, too rainbow large a scope, 
 To fret at myriads of earthly wrecks. 
 
 Whatever joy can be gathered by the senses, 
 whatever realisation of itself the spirit can attain, 
 leads to * enthralments more self-destroying,' to 
 •the Move and friendship' which 'crown the fore- 
 * head of humanity.' What is fame to him in 
 comparison with the ideal love for which he 
 pines ? There is no good in life but love. 
 
 what merest whim 
 Seems all this poor endeavour after fame 
 To one, who keeps within his steadfast aim 
 A love immortal, an immortal too. 
 
 He goes on to plead that the vision is not a 
 
60 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 merely passing one ; it has come again and again 
 into his life since he first saw it. He has seen it 
 mirrored in the well as he bent above it, he has 
 heard its voice in the screen of overhanging 
 weeds, it exists somewhere for him, but he will 
 bear up against sorrow. Peona shall see ' what a 
 1 calm round of hours shall make his days.' 
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 After the introductory lines on the sovereign 
 power of love, the second book opens with a 
 picture of Endymion after many days of wander- 
 ing resting beside a shady spring, and pavilioned 
 in the bloom of a wild rose-tree. His feverish 
 fingers pluck a bud and plunge its stalk into the 
 cool water, its petals unfold, and a golden butter- 
 fly escapes. With clasped hands and renewed 
 delight Endymion follows it. 
 
 From languor's sullen bands 
 His limbs arc loosed, and eager, on he hies, 
 Dazzled to trace it in the sunny skies. 
 It seemed 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. 
 
A STUDY. Ci 
 
 He flics on in the beautiful chase until he 
 
 reaches the side of a splashing fountain, into 
 
 which the butterfly plunges and disappears, and 
 
 Endymion throws himself down on the grass by 
 
 the water in vain search, and there appears to 
 
 him suddenly 
 
 A nymph uprisen to the br:ast 
 In the fountain's pebbly margin, and she stood 
 'Mong lilies, like the youngest of the brood. 
 
 She pours out words of sympathy, but knows 
 
 that all joys which she could give him would 
 
 avail nothing to his life's purpose. 
 
 But woe is me, I am but as a child 
 To gladden thee ; and all I dare to say- 
 Is, that I pity thee ; that on this day 
 I've been thy guide ; that thou must wander far 
 In other regions, past the scanty bar 
 To mortal steps before thou canst be ta'en 
 From every wasting sigh, from every pain, 
 Into the gentle bosom of thy love. 
 Why it is thus, one knows in heaven above : 
 But, a poor Naiad, I guess not. Farewell ! 
 I have a ditty for my hollow cell. 
 
 ■ Hereat she vanished from Endymion's gaze, 
 Who brooded o'er the water in amaze : 
 The dashing fount poured on, and where its pool 
 Lay, half-asleep, in grass and rushes cool, 
 Quick waterflies and gnats were sporting still, 
 And fish were dimpling, as if good nor ill 
 Had fallen out that hour. 
 
62 JOHN KEATS; 
 
 But it was a crisis in Endymion's life :. he 
 realises henceforth that his search must be one of 
 suffering as well as of joy. 
 
 I can see 
 Nought earthly worth my compassing ; so stand 
 Upon a misty, jutting head of" land— 
 Alone ? No, no ; and by the Orphean lute, 
 When mad Kurydice is listening to't 
 I'd rather stand upon this misty peak, 
 With not a thing to sigh for, or to seek, 
 But the soft shadow of my thrice-seen love 
 Than be — I care not what. 
 
 Then follows a passionate outpouring of his 
 love to Cynthia, deepened and intensified by the 
 revelation which the nymph of the fountain had 
 made to him of the difficulties that lay before 
 him. 
 
 I do think the bars 
 That kept my spirit in are burst— that I 
 Am sailing with thee through the dizzy sky ! 
 How beautiful thou art ! The world how deep ! 
 
 Dear goddess, help ! or the wide-gaping air 
 Will gulf me— help ! At this, with madden'd stare, 
 And lifted hands and trembling lips, he stood, 
 Like old Deucalion mountain'd o'er the flood, 
 Or blind Orion hungry for the morn. 
 
 And in his despair he might have perished, but 
 for a voice from the depths which bids him— 
 
A STUDY. 63 
 
 Descend 
 Young mountaineer ! descend where alleys bend 
 Into the sparry hollows of the world ! 
 . . . He ne'er is crowned 
 With immortality, who fears to follow 
 Where airy voices lead : so through the hollow, 
 The silent mysteries of earth, descend ! 
 He heard but the last words, nor could contend 
 One moment in reflection : for he fled ^ 
 
 Into the fearful deep, to hide his head 
 From the clear moon, the trees, and coming madness. 
 'Twas far too strange, and wonderful for sadness : 
 Sharpening, by degrees, his appetite 
 To dive into the deepest. Dark, nor light, 
 The region ; nor bright, nor sombre wholly, 
 But mingled up, a gleaming melancholy, 
 A dusky empire and its diadems, 
 One faint eternal eventide of gems. 
 
 He wanders on from one surprise and change 
 to another in this mysterious region, at the end of 
 which through all his wanderings there gleams 
 a fair shrine ; but at last, wearied out, he finds 
 himself at the mouth of a wide outlet fathomless 
 and dim. He craves in his solitude for the life 
 he has left, the wild joys of Nature, which are 
 now denied him, and he would ' o'erleap his 
 'destiny' if he could, but his wish is vain. He 
 is impelled onward, always onward, on his fair 
 journey, where the sights grow more beautiful, 
 
64 JOHN KEATS : 
 
 the sounds more enchanting. For music now 
 breaks upon him. 
 
 It came more softly than the east could blow 
 Arion's magic to the Atlantic isles. 
 
 Oh, did he ever live, that lonely man, 
 Who loved — and music slew not ? 'Tis the pest 
 Of love, that fairest joys give most unrest ; 
 That things of delicate and tenderest worth 
 Are swallow'd all, and made a seared dearth, 
 By one consuming flame : it doth immerse 
 And suffocate true blessings in a curse. 
 Half happy, by comparison of bliss, 
 Is miserable. 'Twas even so with this 
 Dew-dropping melody, in the Carian's ear ; 
 First heaven, then hell, and then forgotten clear, 
 Vanished in elemental passion. 
 
 At last after a thousand mazes Endymion 
 finds himself in a chamber, myrtle-walled, where 
 Adonis watched by Cupids is sleeping. There 
 is a deviation from the main thread of the poem 
 here for the purpose of describing this picture. 
 It is one of the imaginations which Lord Jeffrey 
 complained of as ' rambling and entangling them- 
 * selves everywhere, like wild honeysuckles.' But 
 there is probably subtle art in the digression, 
 for it comes with exquisite relief of beauty be- 
 tween the underworld of mystery through which 
 Endymion has been wandering and the terror of 
 
A STUDY. 65 
 
 the world of suffering to which he is passing. It is 
 artistic, full of graceful outline, colour, and light. 
 We can see the classic form of Adonis sleeping 
 until Venus shall waken him to his summer life 
 of beauty, the lilies above him, the green tendrils 
 enmeshing him everywhere, the rich colouring of 
 the convolvulus and velvet leaves, the 
 
 Serene Cupids watching silently. 
 
 One, kneeling to a lyre, touch'd the strings, 
 
 Muffling to death the pathos with his wings ; 
 
 And, ever and anon, uprose to look 
 
 At the youth's slumber ; while another took 
 
 A willow bough, distilling odorous dew, 
 
 And shook it on his hair ; another flew 
 
 Jn through the woven roof, and fluttering-wise 
 
 Rain'd violets upon his sleeping eyes. 
 
 One of the Cupids tells the Latmian the story 
 of the sleep of Adonis, and of the expected ap- 
 proach of Venus to waken him. The elves arc- 
 afoot : the stir of summer life is heard : Adonis 
 moves. 
 
 Arise ! awake ! clear summer has forth walk'd 
 Unto the clover-sward, and she has talk'd 
 Full soothingly to every nested finch. 
 
 And Venus comes with her car and her doves, 
 and there is universal joy, the God of Love himself 
 standing by superb to share the general gladness. 
 
 F 
 
66 JOHN KEATS : 
 
 Endymion alone is sad, and Venus, noticing it, 
 prays of Love that he will give him his heart's 
 desire, for she has watched him loner and knows 
 
 O 
 
 his secret. 
 
 Endymion ! one day thou wilt be blest : 
 
 So still obey the guiding hand that fends 
 
 Thee safely through these wonders for sweet ends. 
 
 And with these words of blessing the bright 
 pageant vanishes, the car is lost to sight, the 
 celestial hum is silent, and Endymion is alone 
 once more. But hope is alive again, and he passes 
 on through wild magnificence, along gleaming- 
 pathways, chasms and roaring streams, by caves 
 and high fantastic roof, ' with overhead a vaulted 
 1 dome like heaven's,' and everything huge and 
 * strange,' as the diamond balustrade which has 
 guided him upward breaks off in mid air. 
 
 The solitary felt a hurried change 
 Working within him into something dreary — 
 Vex'd like a morning eagle, lost and weary, 
 And purblind amid foggy midnight wolds. 
 
 A vision of Cybele crowned with turrets, with 
 her chariot and attendant lions, passes before 
 him in the dusk below, heightening the effect of 
 dreariness, but to his rescue there comes an ea^le 
 which he mounts, once more descending to dark- 
 
A STUDY. 67 
 
 nessand gloom as he thinks, yet finding himself 
 of a sudden in a jasmine bower bestrewn with 
 golden moss. Suffering has but sharpened his 
 capability for joy, he gives himself up to the ex- 
 quisite delight around him. 
 
 His every sense had grown 
 Ethereal for pleasure ; 'bove his head 
 Flew a delight half-graspable ; his tread 
 Was Hesperean ; to his capable cars 
 Silence was music from the golden spheres; 
 A dewy luxury was in his eyes ; 
 The little flowers felt his pleasant sighs, 
 And stirred them faintly. 
 
 In this enchanted land his own passion 
 embodies itself once more in a dream of his 
 immortal love. He believes that she has become 
 real to him at last, he speaks to her, and clasps 
 her in his arms, and is answered by her. But 
 again he wakes to loneliness the deeper for 
 his dream of joy. His sadness is no longer loud 
 and violent, his love is now too deep for that, it 
 is quieted with its own intensity. 
 
 Love's madness he had known : 
 Often with more than tortured lion's groan 
 Moanings had burst from him ; but now that rage 
 Had passed away : no longer did he wage 
 A rough-voiced war against the dooming stars. 
 No, he had felt too much for such harsh jars. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 He is in the depths of the earth and dreams 
 over his past life. Step by step he retraces his 
 old dreams of usefulness, his shepherd's throne, 
 his first vision of his love, the great Pan festival, 
 his sister's sorrow. He recalls all his own sad 
 story, and compares himself as he is with that 
 which he has been. The vision has changed 
 all. 
 
 Now I have tasted her sweet soul to the core 
 
 All other depths are shallow. 
 
 But lie turns from his own sorrows to listen 
 to those of Arethusa and Alpheus, who have 
 also failed to understand the complex ways of 
 Dian, and his prayer to the gentle goddess of his 
 pilgrimage is no longer for himself but for them. 
 
 Soothe and assuage, 
 If thou art powerful, these lovers pains, 
 And make them happy in some happy plains. 
 
 And suddenly he himself has reached the 
 greatest depth he has yet sounded. 
 
 The visions of the earth were gone and fled : 
 He saw the giant sea above his head. 
 
A STUDY. 69 
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 And Endymion, having readied the deep 
 
 water-world, is surprised by the light which 
 
 shines around him there. It is Cynthia who has 
 
 found him, but he does not know her. He 
 
 recognises only a sense of blessedness from her 
 
 presence : he rests, and then rises in silence to 
 
 * fare along his fated ' way at the bottom of the 
 
 sea. 
 
 Far had he roam'd 
 With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam'd 
 Above, around, and at his feet ; save things 
 More dread than Morpheus' imaginings : 
 Old rusted anchors, helmets, breastplates 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. 
 
 In his wanderings he pours forth his soul to 
 the moon. She is bound up with every thought 
 of his childhood, with all his love of nature, with 
 everything that he holds most sacred. But he 
 fears to confess to her how his new love has ab- 
 sorbed his heart ; and large as his mental vision 
 has become through suffering, it has failed to 
 
7o JOHN KEATS : 
 
 recognise the unity of the old love and the new. 
 
 Then suddenly lifting his eyes, he sees far in ' the 
 
 1 concave green 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 : 
 
 And, ample as the largest winding sheet, 
 
 A cloak of blue t-vrapp'd up his aged bones, 
 
 O'erurought with symbols by the deepest groans 
 
 Of ambitious magic: every ocean form 
 
 Was woven in with black distinctness ; storm, 
 
 And calm, and whispering, and hideous roar 
 
 Were emblem'd in the woof; with every shape 
 
 That skims, or dives, or sleeps, 'twixt cape and cape. 
 
 Beside this old man lay a pearly wand, 
 
 And in his lap a book, the which he conn'd 
 
 So steadfastly, that the new denizen 
 
 Had time to keep him in amazed ken, 
 
 To mark these shado wings, and stand in awe. 
 
 The old man raised his hoary head, and saw 
 
 The 'wildered stranger. 
 
 'o s 
 
 And in a voice of solemn joy, that awed 
 Echo into oblivion, he said : 
 ' Thou art the man ! Now shall I lay my head 
 In peace upon my watery pillow : now 
 Sleep will come smoothly to my weary brow 
 O Jove ! I shall be young again, be young ! 
 O shell-borne Neptune, I am pierced and stung 
 With new-born life ! What shall I do ? Where go, 
 When I have cast this serpent-skin of woe?' 
 
A STUDY. 71 
 
 Endymion is terrified, dreading some deadly 
 fate. But a short time ago so happy in his 
 love, and now to perish? No! he cries to his 
 love, he feels her influence, he gains courage and 
 advances to the mysterious old man, and as he 
 does so his heart yearns over him. 
 
 Lo ! his heart 'gan warm 
 With pity, for the grey-hair'd creature wept. 
 Had he then wronged a heart where sorrow kept ? 
 
 It is Glaucus who pours out his sad story, 
 telling him how he had loved the maid Scylla, 
 but had been lured from his devotion by Circe, 
 whom he surprised at her orgies, and who in 
 her wrath laid upon him the fate of premature 
 
 age ; yet 
 
 not to go the way of aged men, 
 But live and wither, cripple and still breathe 
 Ten hundred years beneath the sea. 
 
 Her curse soon began to be accomplished. 
 As Glaucus breasted the water, 
 
 Upon a dead thing's face his hand was laid : 
 He look'd — 'twas Scylla ! Cursed, cursed Circe ! 
 
 Me has carried his dead love in his arms to a 
 crystalline temple and has laid her there, and he 
 has piously laid all lovers who have perished in 
 
72 JOHN KEATS 
 
 the sea beside her. For after years of misery, in 
 
 the 'gulfing' of a general wreck an old man's 
 
 dead hand held out a scroll on which his own 
 
 doom was described, and he also read the secret 
 
 which might break the spell. 
 
 A youth by heavenly power loved and led 
 Shall stand before him, whom he shall direct 
 How to consummate all. 
 
 Endymion is the promised deliverer. By the 
 
 magic which Glaucus has studied, by the power 
 
 in Endymion from his love, the spell may be 
 
 broken now. Eagerly Glaucus leads the stranger 
 
 to the shining temple, where, 
 
 In that crystal place, in silent rows, 
 
 Poor lovers lay at rest from joys and woes. 
 
 The stranger from the mountains, breathless, traced 
 
 Such thousands of shut eyes in order placed ; 
 
 Such ranges of white feet, and patient lips 
 
 All ruddy, — for here death no blossom nip's. 
 
 He marked their brows and foreheads ; saw their hair 
 
 Put sleekly on one side with nicest care ; 
 
 And each one's gentle wrists, with reverence, 
 
 Put cross-wise to its heart. 
 
 Glaucus and Endymion proceed together to 
 work a spell upon them, and restore them to life 
 and love. 
 
 Death fell a-weeping in his charnel house. 
 
A STUDY. 73 
 
 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. 
 
 And so these blue halls of Neptune, over which 
 
 The waters drew 
 Their doming curtains, high, magnificent, 
 
 are filled with joy ; and troops of happy spirits 
 led by Glaucus and Scylla pass through them, 
 while Endymion goes on his high employ, show- 
 ering those powerful fragments on the dead, and 
 rejoicing in their gladness. The joyous train 
 passes on into the halls of Neptune. 
 
 They stood in dreams 
 Till Triton blew his horn. The palace rang; 
 The Nereids danced ; the Syrens faintly sang ; 
 And the great Sea-king bowed his dripping head. 
 Then Love took wing, and from his pinions shed 
 On all the multitude a nectarous dew. 
 
 And Venus with kind words blesses Endy- 
 mion again, as she sees him among the throng of 
 
 those he has freed. 
 
 What, not yet 
 Escaped from dull mortality's harsh net ? 
 A little patience, youth, 'twill not be long. 
 
 The merriment goes on, and in a sudden lull a 
 
74 JOHN KEATS; 
 
 grand hymn to Neptune is sung, and then in the 
 dim melodious beauty of all that surrounds him 
 Endymion falls again into trance-like sleep, and 
 to his inward senses there gleam bright words, 
 
 Written in starlight on the dark above, 
 
 and giving him assurance that for her he loves 
 he has won immortal bliss, by his deed in the 
 water-depths, and that the time is not far off 
 when she will snatch him 'into endless heaven.' 
 When he wakes he is in a cool green forest 
 beside a placid lake. 
 
 BOOK IV. 
 
 And in this cool green forest Endymion finds 
 fresh love awaiting him. A sorrowful song 
 breaks upon his ear. It is a princess from be- 
 yond the Ganges who is pouring out her soul in 
 loneliness and despair. Endymion's sympathy 
 for all grief has been waked in the water-world, 
 and his love soon follows it. His ideal seems 
 distant from him ; he is wholly given up to the 
 present. The princess sings a roundelay to 
 sorrow, which is a subtle blending of grave and 
 gay, and weaves into the midst of it the picture 
 
A STUDY. 75 
 
 of Bacchus and Ariadne, which completes the 
 captivation of Endymion. 
 
 Endymion could not speak, but gazed on her, 
 And listen'd to the wind that now did stir 
 About the crisped oaks full drearily, 
 Yet with as sweet a softness as might be 
 Rcmembcr'd from its velvet summer song. 
 
 And when at last he breaks silence it is to 
 implore her love, having renounced every hope 
 and aspiration of his life but that. 
 
 Fair Melody ! kind Syren ! I've no choice ; 
 I must be thy sad servant evermore : 
 I cannot choose but kneel here and adore. 
 Alas, I must not think — by Phoebe, no ! 
 Let me not think, soft Angel ! 
 
 Mis dream of bliss is shaken by hearing 
 
 echoed dismally throughout the forest, 
 
 Woe ! 
 Woe ! woe to that Endymion ! where is he ? 
 
 But in another moment Mercury has sent his 
 black steeds with large dark-blue wings to them, 
 and Endymion and his new love mount among 
 cool clouds and winds. 
 
 Slowly they sail, slowly as icy isle 
 Upon a calm sea drifting. 
 
 And even here Endymion dreams of his ideal 
 
76 JOHN KEATS : 
 
 love once more. He seems to be with her in 
 heaven; he dreams of 'young Phoebe goldcn- 
 4 haired,' even by the side of his Indian love, and 
 urges their steeds forward into ' the dusk heavens 
 'silvery,' perplexed and bewildered by the 
 passions which he cannot reconcile. The moon- 
 light falls upon him. 
 
 Full facing their swift flight, from ebon streak, 
 
 The moon put forth a little diamond peak, 
 
 No bigger than an unobserved star, 
 
 Or tiny point of fairy scimetar ; 
 
 Bright signal that she only stoop'd to tie 
 
 Her silver sandals, ere deliriously 
 
 She bou'd into the heavens her timid head. 
 
 Slowly she rose, as though she would have fled, 
 
 While to his lady meek the Carian turn'd, 
 
 To mark if her dark eyes had yet discerned 
 
 This beauty in its birth. Despair ! despair ! 
 
 He saw her body fading gaunt and spare 
 
 In the cold moonshine. Straight he seized her wrist : 
 
 It melted from his grasp ; her hand he kiss'd, 
 
 And, horror ! kiss'd his own —he was alone. 
 
 Her steed a little higher soared, and then 
 
 Dropt hawk-wise to the earth. 
 
 Endymion enters a den of despair, and 
 there falls into that lethargy which constantly 
 overtakes those who have suffered a great loss 
 and have not yet received any mental impetus 
 from their changed circumstances. His eyes are 
 
A STUDY. 77 
 
 shut. He does not see 'the skyey mask, the 
 1 pinioned multitude so silver}- in its passing' 
 whom he hears chanting of Cynthia's wedding 
 — but there is a great calm in his soul, and he 
 touches earth again. 
 
 Down his steed him bore, 
 Prone to the green head of a misty hill. 
 Kis first touch of the earth went nigh to kill. 
 
 Here he recollects himself. 
 
 To him 
 
 Who lives beyond earth's boundary, grief is dim, 
 
 Sorrow is but a shadow : 
 
 But he must steadfastly face his sorrow and 
 
 see what it holds for him, and there in the 
 
 quietude he finds his lost love again. Surely he 
 
 will keep her now, he had but lost her for an ideal, 
 
 for something shadowy and intangible which can 
 
 never satisfy him. 
 
 I have clung 
 To nothing, loved a nothing, nothing seen 
 Or felt but a great dream. 
 
 There never lived a mortal man, who bent 
 
 His appetite beyond his natural sphere, 
 
 But starved and died. My sweetest Indian, here, 
 
 Here will I kneel, for thou redeemed hast 
 
 My life from too thin breathing : gone and past 
 
 Are cloudy phantasms. Caverns lone, farewell ! 
 
 And air of visions, and the monstrous swell 
 
73 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 Of visionar}' seas! No, never more 
 Shall airy voices cheat me to the shore 
 Of tangled wonder, breathless, and aghast. 
 Adieu, my daintiest Dream ! although so vast, 
 My love is still for thee. The hour may come 
 When we shall meet in pure Elysium. 
 
 He goes on to picture the earthly delights 
 he will gather together for his love, the honey 
 from the gnarled hive, the apples wan with 
 sweetness, the pipes fashioned of the Syrinx flag, 
 the streams turned from their courses to flow 
 through their dwelling, the honeysuckles trained 
 beside them. 
 
 Say is not bliss within our perfect seizure? 
 
 that I could not doubt ! 
 
 But they were fancies 'vain and crude.' He 
 knew their futility even as he uttered them ; 
 life had grown too real for such satisfaction, and 
 his princess answers him — 
 
 Ah ! bitter strife. 
 
 1 may not be thy love, I am forbidden. 
 
 He could answer her nothing. He knew in his 
 
 heart too well that her words were true, that if 
 
 he accepted life for himself such as he described 
 
 it, it would be but living death. 
 
 The Carian 
 No word returned : both lovelorn, silent, wan, 
 
A STUDY. 79 
 
 Into the valleys green together went. 
 Far wandering, they were perforce content 
 To sit beneath a fair lone bccchen tree : 
 Nor at each other gazed, but heavily 
 Pored on its hazel cirque of sheddcd leaves. 
 • • • » • • 
 
 He did not stir 
 His eyes from the dead leaves, or one small pulse 
 Of joy he might have felt. The spirit culls 
 Unfaded amaranth, when wild it strays 
 Through the old garden-ground of boyish days. 
 A little onward ran the very stream 
 By which he took his first soft poppy dream, 
 And on the very bark 'gainst which he leant 
 A crescent he had carved, and round it spent 
 His skill in little stars. The teeming tree 
 Had swoll'n and green'd the pious character)', 
 But not ta'en'out. Why, there was not a slope 
 Up which he had not fear'd the antelope ; 
 And not a tree, beneath whose rooty shade 
 He had not with his tamed leopards play'd ; 
 Nor could an arrow light, or javelin, 
 Fly in the air where his had never been — 
 And yet he knew it not. 
 
 And then Pcona appears once more, rallying 
 him on his sadness, rejoicing in his return, 
 relating the preparations for the hymning to 
 Cynthia which is about to take place. She 
 tells Endymion how he has been believed dead. 
 Many upon thy death have ditties made. 
 
 But he will be received with universal joy, if 
 
So JO I IX KEATS: 
 
 he will but banish the sadness from his brow and 
 
 forget his sorrows. 
 
 He could bear no more, and so 
 Bent his soul fiercely like a spiritual bow, 
 And twang'd it inwardly, and calmly said ; 
 ' I would have thee my only friend, sweet maid ! 
 My only visitor ! not ignorant though, 
 That those deceptions which for pleasure go 
 'Mong men, are pleasures real as real may be ; 
 But there are higher ones I may not see, 
 If impiously an earthly realm I take. 
 Since I saw thee, I have been wide awake 
 Night after night, and day by day, until. 
 Of the empyrean I have drunk my fill. 
 Let it content thee, sister, seeing me 
 More happy than betides mortality.' 
 
 Henceforth he will devote himself to ruling 
 
 his shepherd-realm from some retreat where 
 
 Peona alone should visit him. He docs not see 
 
 the gladness which is dawning in the face of his 
 
 love, he does not hear her whispered joy in him. 
 
 A mystic dreaminess falls on all three, 
 
 the spirit-blow 
 Was struck, and all were dreamers. 
 
 Endymion tries to say his farewell, but his 
 courage fails him, he implores them to meet him 
 once more for a final parting. In the silent 
 groves behind Dian's temple he will see them 
 
A STUDY, Sr 
 
 once more in the evening. Through the long 
 
 hours of the day he dreams, only lifting 
 
 His eyes abroad, to sec how shadows shifted 
 With the slow move of time. 
 
 Then when the shadows of the poplar-tops 
 
 have reached the river's brim, he rises and walks 
 
 towards the grove, lamenting. 
 
 ' 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 clown his summer-head below the west. 
 
 Now am I of breath, speech, and speed potest. 
 
 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 I shall die ; nor much it grieves 
 
 To die, when summer dies on the cold sward. 
 
 Why, I have been a butterfly, a lord 
 
 Of flowers, garlands, love-knots, silly posies, 
 
 Groves, meadows, melodies, and arbour-roses ; 
 
 My kingdom's at its death, and just it is 
 
 That I should die with it : so in all this 
 
 We miscall grief, bale, sorrow, heart-break, woe, 
 
 What is there to 'plain of? By Titan's foe 
 
 I am but rightly served.' So saying, he 
 
 Tripp'd lightly on, in sort of deathful glee, 
 
 Laughing at the clear stream and setting sun 
 
 As though they jests had been. 
 
 But his mood deepens as he enters the 
 wood. 
 
 Ci 
 
Sz JOILX KEATS: 
 
 1 1 did wed 
 Myself to things of light from infancy ; 
 And thus to be cist 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. 
 
 He docs not hear the choir of Cynthia that 
 
 is chanting the vesper hymn close to him, he 
 
 docs not see the smiles of the two maidens, 
 
 Wan as primroses gathered at midnight 
 
 By chilly- fingered spring. . . . 
 
 ' Endymion,' said Peona, 'we are here ! 
 
 What wouldst thou ere we all are laid on bier ? ' 
 
 Then he embraced her, and his lady's hand 
 
 Pressed, 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 1 and by the lily truth 
 
 Of my own breast thou shalt, beloved youth ! ' 
 
 And as she spake, into her face there came 
 
 Light, as reflected from a silver flame : 
 
 Her long black hair swell'd ampler, in display 
 
 Full golden ; in her eyes a brighter day 
 
 Dawn'd blue, and full of love. 
 
 It was her that he had sought for so long, 
 his first fair love, the vision of his life, and she 
 adds :— 
 
A STUDY. 83 
 
 'Twas fit that from this mortal state 
 Thou shouldst, my love, by some unlook'd-for change 
 Be spiritualised. 
 
 Then he knelt down before her in a blissful 
 swoon, and she gave her hands to him. 
 
 They vanished far away : Peona went 
 
 Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 JOHN KEATS 
 
 IV. 
 
 HAVING seen that 'Endymion' is a consecutive 
 whole with a distinct development, and very few- 
 digressions from its regular sequence, the next 
 question we ask is, whether there is any under- 
 lying meaning in it ? The story, exquisite as it 
 is, is not of sufficient strength to stand on its ' 
 merits as a story alone, and its very entangle- 
 ments point to the supposition that its leading 
 thoughts do not lie on the surface, and must be 
 looked for deeper. 
 
 Many passages in the poem would lead us 
 to believe that Keats was consciously expressing 
 a vast idea in it, but genius is not of necessity 
 conscious of what its inspirations convey to 
 other minds, its varied capabilities of interpre- 
 tation are one of the most distinctive signs of 
 its prophetic power. 
 
 Perhaps the first interpretation and the most 
 obvious which occurs to us is that Endymion 
 
A STUDY. 85 
 
 himself is the Imagination in all time searching 
 for the spirit of Beauty ; that Cynthia, the en- 
 lightened side of the moon, represents the beauty 
 of a bygone age, when the world was young ; and 
 the dark side, the Indian Princess, shows the 
 newer phases on which Imagination has entered ; 
 Imagination at last discovering the eternal Unity 
 of all Beauty, and becoming one with it forever. 
 This theory would be quite borne out by the 
 poem, but there are parts of it which seem to 
 point to a larger meaning still, a meaning of 
 more widely human interest and therefore more 
 abiding, and among the many interpretations 
 which will be given to every work of genius, it 
 may be worth suggesting this one. Let us take 
 'Endymion' as a story of the Spirit of Man, the 
 spirit which sleeps till wakened by higher 
 spiritual power. Peona may represent the 
 physical, or first developed side of man's nature, 
 mechanically nursing and watching over the 
 slumbering spirit, and aware that it possesses 
 qualities beyond its own. 
 
 Brother, 'tis vain to hide 
 That thou dost know of things mysterious, 
 Immortal, starry ; such alone could thus 
 
S6 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 Weigh down thy nature. Hast thou sinned in aught 
 Offensive to the heavenly powers ? 
 
 Endymion, touched with a higher knowledge, 
 stands among his forest peers as one in a dream. 
 He listens to their hopes and their beliefs, but 
 they could not understand his if he expressed 
 them. The spirit that has touched him is Love, 
 but it is Love in the ' completed form of all 
 'completeness.* It is Love in its perfection. It 
 is a vision which once seen makes it impossible 
 that the spirit of man should ever be at rest 
 again apart from its ideal. When it vanished 
 the wind seemed to bring 
 
 Faint fare-thee-wells and sigh-shrilled adieus, 
 
 as if its manifestation was far away from the 
 unrest of the present. But Endymion must 
 henceforth search for ever, the happy forest days 
 are over. The spirit's life once stirred may 
 sleep, indeed, but never unconsciously ; it 
 dreams, and its dreams are of its own existence. 
 However much it tries to content itself with its 
 former joys, it must for ever fail, for the fair 
 shrine gleams before it, and the past holds no- 
 thing of the power which is drawing it on. 
 
A STUDY. S7 
 
 Its 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. 
 
 Canwebe wrong inbelievingthat, consciously 
 or unconsciously, the thought which was in 
 Kcats's mind was of that refining fire through 
 which the soul of man must pass ? — that the 
 purification from self, the beatitude of complete 
 self-abnegation, is the hope which 
 
 Is of too wide, too rainbow-large a scope, 
 To fret at myriads of earthly wrecks ? x 
 
 1 It is to be noted that these lines, which seem to have con- 
 centrated in themselves so much of the leading thought of 
 ' Endymion,' were an amendment on the original — as if Keats 
 would himself have made this part of the poem emphatic. In a 
 letter dated January 30, 1S1S, he writes : — 
 
 1 My dear Taylor, — These lines, as they now stand, about 
 "happiness," have rung in my ears like "a chime a mending." 
 See here : « Behold 
 
 Wherein lies happiness, Peona ? fold," &c. 
 
 It appears to me the very contrary of "blessed." I hope 
 this will appear to you more eligible : 
 
 "Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks 
 
 Our ready minds to fellowship divine 
 
SS JOHN KEATS; 
 
 From henceforth the true life of the spirit is 
 
 hidden, but it is a waking reality, it is more than 
 
 the sleep that is ended. 
 
 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 ! 
 
 It is a life of action, though of sadness — of 
 
 undying hope, though steeped in suffering. The 
 
 wakened spirit can neither* love its life nor hate.' 
 
 I'll smile no more, Peona ; nor will wed 
 Sorrow, the way to death ; but patiently 
 Bear up against it : so farewell, sad sigh ; 
 And come instead demurest meditation, 
 To occupy me wholly, and to fashion 
 
 A fellowship with essence, till we shine 
 Full alchemized and free of space. Behold 
 The clear religion of heaven — Peona ! fold," &c. 
 
 You must indulge me by putting this in ; for, setting aside 
 the badness of the other, such a preface is neces.ary to the 
 subject. The whole thing must, I think, have appeared to you, 
 who are a consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere words. 
 "But I assure you that, when I wrote it, it was a regular stepping 
 of the imagination towards a truth. My having written that 
 argument will perhaps be of the greatest service to me of any- 
 thing I ever did. It set before me the gradations of happiness 
 even like a kind of pleasure-thermometer, and is my first step 
 towards the chief attempt in the drama — the playing of different 
 natures with joy and sorrow. 
 
 * Do me this favour, and believe me, 
 
 1 Your sincere friend, 
 
 'J. Keats.' 
 
A STUDY. 89 
 
 My pilgrimage for the world's dusky brink. 
 No more will I count over, link by link, 
 My chain of grief : no longer strive to find 
 A half-forgetfulness in mountain wind, 
 Blustering about my cars ; ay, thou shalt see, 
 Dearest of sisters, what my life shall be : 
 What a calm round of hours shall make my days. 
 There is a paly flame of hope that plays 
 Where'er I look. 
 
 But Endymion docs not expect to be under- 
 stood. He knows that the revelation he has 
 had has made him alone for ever, as far as all 
 former companionship is concerned, and he 
 accepts his fate. 
 
 At first he is lured by the golden butterfly of 
 pleasure, which changes, even when he seems to 
 have tracked it home, into the nymph who says 
 
 I am but as a child 
 To gladden thee, and all I dare to say 
 Is that I pity thee. . . . 
 
 Thou must wander far 
 In other regions, past the scanty bar 
 To mortal steps, before thou canst; be ta'en 
 From every wasting sigh, from every pain, 
 Into the gentle bosom of thy love. 
 Why it is thus one knows in heaven above. 
 
 Thus the light and early hours of the spirit's 
 search begin with pleasure which promises 
 
 « 
 
90 JOHN KEATS 
 
 greatly, and seems even in its passing to be sorry 
 for the soul it leaves ; and then life deepens, and 
 the spirit passes from the cool mossy well and 
 rose-trees to the city, with its feverish life, its 
 restless hearts, its unresting days and nights. 
 
 The war, the deeds, 
 The disappointments, the anxiety, 
 Imagination's struggle, far and nigh 
 All human, bearing in themselves this good 
 That they are still the air, the subtle food 
 To make us feel existence, and to show 
 How quiet death is. 
 
 And the spirit, in the suffering of this new 
 birth, wearies. 
 
 I can see 
 Naught earthly worth my compassing, so stand 
 Upon a misty jutting head of land 
 Alone. 
 
 For what desolation is greater than that which 
 is felt when for the first time the agony of the 
 world is borne in upon the soul ? It stands 
 alone in a mist upon a promontory, the waves 
 of that sorrow of which it has become conscious 
 breaking forlornly around it, its individual aims 
 and hopes seeming for the time worthless. 
 
 Then hope revives with faith in the vision 
 
A STUDY. 9I 
 
 which shall yet harmonise the discords of this 
 sorrow, and moments of wild and rapturous 
 joy succeed to grief in thinking of the glimpse 
 of beauty which has waked it to consciousness. 
 
 As each stage of life developls its power 
 and rouses more fully the spiritual nature, the 
 longing for the eternal beauty becomes more 
 intense. 
 
 I'd rather stand upon this misty peak, 
 With not a thing to sigh for or to seek, 
 But the soft shadow of my thrice-seen love, 
 Than be I know not what. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 I do think the bars 
 That kept my spirit in are burst — that I" 
 Am sailing with thee through the dizzy sky ! 
 How beautiful thou art ! The world how deep ! 
 
 But it is even at the moments when it has 
 attained greatest altitude that the spirit is com- 
 pelled to descend to the lowest depths, to look for 
 the beauty which is hidden there. It was his 
 highest dream which was interrupted by the 
 voice which bade Endymion 
 
 descend where alleys bend 
 Into the sparry hollows of the world. 
 
92 JOHN KEATS : 
 
 He ne'er is crowned 
 With immortality who fears to follow 
 Where airy voices lead ; so through the hollow, 
 The silent mysteries of forth descend. 
 
 Before all true ascending of the spirit there is 
 descending too: there is aland of silent mystery 
 which the soul must encounter alone, there are 
 sorrows it must know, there are sufferings it 
 must endure and sec, before it can find that 
 oneness of all beauty which is its eternal 
 prize. 
 
 'Twas far too strange and wonderful for sadness, 
 
 Dark nor light 
 
 The region : nor bright nor sombre wholly, 
 
 But mingled up, a gleaming melancholy, 
 
 A dusky empire, and its diadems, 
 
 One faint eternal eventide of gems. 
 
 It is by an irresistible impulse that the spirit 
 
 is now led. Through winding passages, through 
 
 giant ranges of sapphire columns, over bridges 
 
 athwart a crystal flood, over jagged rocks and 
 
 jutting ledges that overhang the deep abyss, 
 
 on ridges so narrow that there seems to be no 
 
 foothold, it makes its way, until, wearied, it rests 
 
 at last before 
 
 A wide outlet, fathomless and dim, 
 To wild uncertainty and shadows grim. 
 
A STUDY. 93 
 
 And all this time it is alone, and its solitude 
 
 magnifies the shadows. 
 
 And thoughts of self came on, how crude and sore 
 
 The journey homeward to habitual self '/ 
 
 What misery most drowningly doth sing, 
 
 In lone Endymion's ear, now he has caught 
 
 The goal of consciousness ? Ah ! 'tis the thought, 
 
 The deadly feel of solitude : for lo, 
 
 He cannot see the heavens, nor the flow 
 
 Of rivers, nor hill flowers running wild 
 
 In pink and purple chequer, nor, up-piled, 
 
 The cloudy rack slow journeying in the west, 
 
 Like herded elephants : nor felt nor prest 
 
 Cool grass, nor tasted the fresh slumbrous air, 
 
 But far from such companionship to wear 
 
 An unknown time surcharged with grief away, 
 
 Was now his lot. 
 
 This self-absorbmcnt is destruction, the spirit 
 
 must go deeper still, it must not rest, it cannot 
 
 rest in itself in its own sorrow or even its own 
 
 terror. There is no help for it and no hope for 
 
 it while it remains alone. 
 
 Passing gulf and dell 
 And torrents, and ten thousand jutting shapes 
 Half seen through deepest gloom and grisly gapes 
 Blackening on every side, and overhead 
 A vaulted dome like heaven's far bespread 
 With starlike gems : ay, all so huge and strange, 
 The solitary felt a hurried change 
 Working within him into something dreary, 
 Vex'd like a morning eagle lost and weary 
 
94 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 And purblind amid foggy midnight wolds. 
 
 But he revives at once : for who beholds 
 
 New sudden things, nor casts his mental slough f 
 
 Wherefore delay, 
 Young traveller, in such a mournful place ? 
 Art thou wayworn, or canst not further trace 
 The diamond path ? And does it indeed end 
 Abrupt in middle air? 
 
 Not seldom is the spirit tempted to think that 
 
 it has reached the utmost limit possible, that 
 
 there is neither light nor hope beyond, its path 
 
 breaks off — 
 
 he was indeed wayworn, 
 Abrupt in middle air, his way was lost, 
 
 But here in the depths of its lonely sorrow 
 the spirit is given another vision of the beauty 
 which is to be, of the love which is the eternal 
 truth though interpreted through the medium 
 of its own passion. It was in his eagle descent 
 through unknown things that Endymion found 
 his jasmine bower, and saw once more the ideal 
 whom he loved. Not yet can she raise him ' to 
 ' starry eminence,' but she will ' tell him stories 
 ' of the sky,' and his words, when she again 
 vanishes from him, arc the cry of every soul 
 that has been touched with the larger love and 
 eternal beauty. 
 
A STUDY. 95 
 
 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 fertilise my earthly root, 
 And make my branches lift a golden fruit 
 Into the bloom of heaven. Other light 
 ... is dark. 
 
 It is now for the first time that Endymion 
 emerges from himself and is touched with a 
 sense of the sorrows of others. The sadness of 
 Arethusa wakes pity in him, and breathing a 
 prayer for her, he finds himself in the lowest 
 depth of all, at the bottom of the sea of this 
 world's sorrow. And it is here in the lowest 
 depth, having sounded grief with its own 
 plummet line, that the spirit begins to gain its 
 truest life. It is moved with pity, and it labours 
 to bring its own glad vision of love to hearts and 
 lips that are cold and have grown weary of 
 waiting. No sorrow is foreign to it, the suffering 
 of others is its own, it believes in eternal love 
 even here. Was there not a bright ray from 
 Cynthia shining in ' that deep deep water 
 1 world ' ? Was not the presence of him who 
 believed in her as new life to those who had 
 been living in darkness ? 
 
96 JOHN KEATS : 
 
 But first a little patience, first undo 
 
 This tangled thread and wind it to a clue. 
 
 Ah, gentle ! 'tis as weak as spiders' skein ; 
 
 And shouldst thou break it— What, is it done so clean ? 
 
 A power overshadows thee ! oh brave ! 
 
 The spite of hell is tumbling to its grave. 
 
 It was the might of the power of a strong be- 
 lief — faith in eternal love — by which Endymion 
 touched those cold dead hearts which seemed 
 as if even love could not move them, and the 
 fast-closed eyes that were shut to the beauty 
 which Cynthia revealed to him. 
 
 And the spirit of man, when it goes into the 
 depths of trouble and suffering, must go strong 
 in this strong belief. It must lay the spell of its 
 trust in eternal love and eternal beauty on the 
 cold dead hearts and shut eyes of its brothers 
 and sisters whom it finds there, and then shall 
 be heard the noise of harmony, and those shall 
 spring to each other whose love has not been 
 dead but sleeping. For man too there shall 
 be a writing in the starlight, for his heaven 
 will be nearer and his completeness closer to 
 its completed form. 
 
 And now the poem passes into a phase of 
 mysterious vagueness. It necessarily must do 
 
A STUDY. 97 
 
 so. The poet himself has come 'to the burthen 
 ' of the mystery ; ' he can speak but vaguely of 
 what he has found there. The spirit is led 
 from the depths to the light of ordinary day 
 with a new inspiration. 
 Through the dark. earth and through the wondrous sea 
 
 it passes to ' a new woe.' 
 
 The sad princess is represented as self- 
 absorbed and full of sorrow. In loving her, 
 Endymion loses sight of his ideal, and contents 
 himself with a limited apprehension of real 
 Beauty. For the time he becomes blind to 
 all else. The mind that is wholly occupied with 
 one side of an object \ must necessarily become 
 untrue to its eager aspirations, and a great 
 unrest and bewildering fdls the soul. The 
 poet represents Endymion in the fourth book 
 as entering upon this phase of temptation. 
 The world is darker, sadder than of old : 
 sorrow is everywhere. Tan is dead, and the 
 golden age is past. One fleeting dream of it 
 comes back in the pageant of Bacchus and his 
 crew, and streams with sunset light across the 
 
 H 
 
9 S JOHN KEATS: 
 
 present, then fades, leaving only the night to 
 come, and the soul despairs. 
 
 I have clung 
 To nothing, loved a nothing, nothing seen 
 Or felt but a great dream. 
 
 And such despair must paralyse all hope. 
 
 I must be thy sad servant evermore. 
 
 Endymion will at last 'wed sorrow' — he will 
 give up all attempts to reconcile his life and 
 his aspirations, he will accept his fate, and, worse 
 still, will joy in it. 
 
 The world is growing old, and there is nothing 
 beyond it : he will content himself with that 
 which is now and here. He will have no more 
 of dreaming. The present is his; the present 
 shall suffice him. 
 
 Woe! 
 
 Woe! Woe to that Endymion ! Where is he? 
 
 If he contents himself with life as it is he is 
 lost. Was it for this that he had passed from 
 the well and the rose-trees — that he had stood 
 alone on the misty headland : that he had 
 mastered his fate among the precipices, that he 
 had sounded the depths of the ocean world — 
 that his sorrow and his pity and his love should 
 
• A STUDY. 9 g 
 
 bring him to despair and the acceptance of a 
 destiny which could never content him ? 
 
 Woe ! 
 
 Woe ! Woe to that Endymion ! Where is he ? 
 Even these words went echoing dismally- 
 Through the wide forest — a most fearful tone, 
 Like one repenting in his latest moan. 
 
 It is the spirit's hour of keenest trial. It is 
 
 undone for ever if it accepts inertly things as 
 
 they are. The cry of its hopelessness is then — 
 
 There never lived a mortal man who bent 
 His appetite beyond his natural sphere, 
 But starved and died. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 Caverns lone, farewell ! 
 
 And air of visions, and the monstrous swell 
 Of visionary seas! No never more 
 Shall airy voices cheat me to the shore 
 Of tangled wonder. 
 
 But the soul has yet to learn its deepest 
 
 spiritual lesson, that no love is true which does 
 
 not realise itself as part of a greater whole — that 
 
 all that is beautiful is One. The limited, sensuous 
 
 love melts even in Endymion's grasp, leaving 
 
 him unsatisfied and longing. 
 
 By Nemesis ! I see my spirit flit 
 Alone about the dark. 
 
 And then he enters the wondrous cave. 
 
 U 3 
 
JOHN KEATS 
 
 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 grief the spirit sees, but scarce 
 One hour doth linger weeping, for the pierce 
 Of new-born woe it feels more inly smart : 
 And in these regions many a venom'd dart 
 At random flies : they are the proper home 
 Of every ill ; the man is yet to come 
 Who hath not journey'd 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. 
 Beset with painful gusts, within ye hear 
 No sound so loud as when on curtain'd bier 
 The death-watch tick is stifled. Enter none 
 Who strive therefor : on the sudden it is won. 
 Just when the sufferer begins to burn 
 Then it is free to him : and from an urn 
 Still fed by melting ice, he takes a draught — 
 Young Semele such richness never quaffed 
 In her maternal longing. Happy gloom ! 
 Dark Paradise ! where pale becomes the bloom 
 Of health by due : where silence dreariest 
 Is most articulate : where hopes infest : 
 Where th< e eyes are the brightest far that keep 
 Their lids .-.V,it longest in a dreamless sleep. 
 O happy* spirit-home ! O wondrous soul : 
 Pregnant with such a den to save the whole 
 
A STUDY. 101 
 
 In thine own depth. Hail, gentle Carian ! 
 For never since thy griefs and woes began 
 Hast thou felt so content : a grievous feud 
 Hath led thee to this Cave of Quietude. 
 Ay, his lull'd soul was there, although upborne 
 With dangerous speed : and so he did not mourn, 
 Because he knew not whither he was going. 
 
 There could not be a truer description of 
 apathy. But in touching earth again the earthly 
 love is found, and the temptation once more 
 asserts itself in all its strength. Yet 
 
 I may not be thy love, 
 I am forbidden, 
 
 says the sad princess, and Endymion knows it 
 
 to be true, and h roused once more to higher 
 
 aspirations. 
 
 Not ignorant though 
 That those deceptions which for pleasure go 
 'Mong men, are pleasures real as pleasures may be ; 
 But there are higher ones I may not see 
 If impiously an earthly realm I take. 
 
 And the end of the story seems to slip from 
 our grasp, shadowy, intangible, yet a glorious 
 vision, with ' more of the music, and less of the 
 * words.' 
 
 It is only when Endymion has gained a 
 wider power of vision, when he has learnt that 
 
102 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 true freedom is freedom from his own indivi- 
 dual and limited desires and aims, and when he 
 wishes thus to command his fate, that the If" ui 
 princess turns upon him with the face of his oV \ 
 beloved, and he knows that all love and beauty \^ 
 is one, that the truth of V^c finite is the truth of 
 
 the infinite, that the fitful and dimly realised 
 beauty in common . life and the beauty gained 
 through suffering is one with the beauty of 
 light and of joy, and that it was necessary some 
 change should spiritualise him into this belief. 
 Being made one with eternal and universal 
 love, the spirit is at rest for ever. 
 
A STUDY. 103 
 
 V. 
 
 IN ' Hyperion ' Keats took for his theme the 
 fall of the Titans, the dethronement by Jupiter 
 of Saturn the son of Ccelus and Terra, a myth 
 which may have represented the passing away 
 of the elemental worship of the Greeks and the 
 change to the worship of the Olympian deities. 
 It was a vast subject, and one in which the com- 
 plex mind of Keats would specially luxuriate. 
 Deeply imbued as he was by this time with the 
 true spirit of nature, he entered as few could 
 have done into the pathos of the transition from 
 the worship of the Titanic forces of nature to 
 the newer dynasty in which the personification 
 of human qualities was represented, and at the 
 same time the growing intensity of his poetic 
 vision and his increasing power of philosophic 
 thought made him see the hope that linked all 
 change with the progress of mankind. 
 
io4 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 \We cannot tell what was to have been the plan 
 of the. great poem, for only two complete books 
 and a broken fragment of a third remain to us ; 
 but it is probable that it grew from the sequence 
 of thought in ' Endymion/ and that the idea 
 underlying * Hyperion ' is the unity of all exist- 
 ence, just as ' Endymion ' seems to illustrate 
 the reconcilement of the various elements of 
 the individual soul. 
 
 In its stately power, its dignified strength, 
 and solemn melody, ' Hyperion ' fitly represents 
 the eternal music of the world's progress, and it 
 is not the less suggestive from being broken oft" 
 abruptly. 
 
 Two versions of ' Hyperion ' were com- 
 menced, and by comparing them, and remem- 
 bering the influences which surrounded the poet, 
 and the increasing maturity of his thought, we 
 are able to gather the vast idea which underlies 
 the grand Greek myth in his mind. The work- 
 manship in itself shows an immense advance 
 upon ' Endymion,' though it lacks something of 
 its freshness and originality, and is more ob 
 viously formed on models. Keats said himself 
 
A STUDY. 105 
 
 that lie had been studying Dryden before he 
 wrote it, and Spenser and Milton had long been 
 his masters. 
 
 'Hyperion' is a more classical production 
 than 'Endymion.' It contains no digressions or 
 reflections, its great scenes and its great thoughts 
 are expressed with simple force, and follow one 
 another with purpose and meditated strength. 
 All the words are weighed and musically ap- 
 praised, they fall with fitness into their places, 
 and seem under complete mastery, so that the 
 effect is severe and almost unimpassioned. 
 
 From the vastness of its leading thoughts 
 it is more removed from human interest than 
 'Endymion,' but it expresses entirely the subject 
 of which it treats, for there is in it a calm and 
 patient regret for the past mingled with the 
 shining hope of the future. 
 
 The Titans have fallen, Saturn is deposed, 
 the golden age is over, the ' large utterance of 
 1 the early gods ' is heard no more ; but through 
 all the changes of the many 'the One remains,' 
 linking the Present with the Past, and both with 
 the unknown Future. 
 
io6 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, 
 A power more strong in beauty, born of us, 
 And fated to excel us as we pass, 
 In glory that old Darkness. 
 
 Such is surely the great prophecy of e Hype- 
 1 rion,' following upon the sweet secret of ' Endy- 
 1 mion,' and in the time which elapsed between 
 the composition of the two, the mind of the poet 
 has passed from the vague moonlight, with its 
 intangible hopefulness, into the strong sunlight, 
 
 Pervading all the beetling gloomy steeps, 
 All the sad spaces of oblivion, 
 And every gulf and every chasm old, 
 And every height and every sullen depth. 
 
 It is the great vision of him who loves his 
 race, the poet, whose guerdon for the suffering 
 of the present is the large hope of the future 
 and the belief in the final triumph of light 
 over darkness. 
 
 There is a remarkable passage in the rejected 
 version of ' Hyperion ' which shows how strongly 
 both the love of humanity and the burden of the 
 poet's vocation began to weigh upon the heart 
 of Keats. This early version of the poem is 
 called ' A Vision,' and the poet speaks in it in 
 
A STUDY. 107 
 
 his own person, which he does not do in the 
 second version. 
 
 In his dream he approaches a temple, and 
 such a numbness creeps over him' that he seems 
 near death. He drags himself with suffering 
 to the lowest step near the shrine, but as he 
 touches it new life is given to him, and he 
 springs up joyously to where the veiled shadow 
 is awaiting him. 
 
 ' High Prophetess,' said I, * purge off, 
 ' Benign if so it please thee, my mind's film.' 
 ' None can usurp this height,' returned that shade, 
 ' But those to whom the miseries 0/ the world 
 Are misery ', a?td will not let them rest. 7 
 
 'Are there not thousands in the world,' said I, 
 'Who love their fellows even to the death, 
 Who feel the giant agony of the world, 
 And more, like slaves to poor humanity, 
 Labour for mortal good? I sure should see 
 Other men here, but I am here alone.' 
 
 And in her reply the shadow draws a dis- 
 tinction between those who can give practical 
 help in the world, and those whose genius 
 compels them only to see and to suffer. The 
 shrine to which the poet has come is the shrine 
 of genius, and genius is compelled to suffering 
 
10S JOHN KEATS: 
 
 by reason of its union with the many : it is the 
 dreamer of dreams, the prophet and the seer. 
 
 'Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries,' 
 Rejoin'd that voice ; l they are no dreamers weak, 
 They seek no wonder but the human face, 
 No music but a happy noted voice.' 
 
 Such are they who, with single hearts and 
 loving, ready hands, can help their brother men ; 
 seeing but one object at a time, ready always for 
 the duty which lies nearest to them, with limited 
 vision which fulfils itself. These are ' the willing 
 'slaves to poor humanity/ and labour for mortal 
 good ; but they do not know the shrine to 
 which genius has aspired. Genius has an ele- 
 ment of weakness in it ; it does not render its 
 sons more happy or more helpful ; on the 
 contrary, it increases infinitely the capacity for 
 suffering, and by its overwhelming scope of 
 vision paralyses ready action. The happy, 
 hopeful workers may be thankful that it is not 
 their lot. 
 
 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. 
 
A STUDY. 109 
 
 What bliss even in hope is there for thee ? 
 What haven ? Every creature hath its home, 
 Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, 
 Whether his labours be sublime or low, 
 The pain alone, the joy alone distinct. 
 Only the dreamer venoms all his days, 
 Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. 
 
 It is the poet's doom which he has found, 
 
 the prophetic vision which cannot but be 
 
 dimmed with tears for what is and shall be, 
 
 the larger heart which suffers in proportion to 
 
 its power of joy, the finer ear which is filled with 
 
 the minor wail of a suffering world while it 
 
 awaits the final harmony. She who speaks to 
 
 the poet is Moneta, the sister of the deposed 
 
 Saturn, and the description given of her in the 
 
 rejected version is full of beauty. 
 
 Then saw I a wan face 
 Not pined by human sorrows, but bright blanched 
 By an immortal sickness which kills not. 
 It works a constant change, which happy death 
 Can put no end to ; deathward progressing 
 To no death was that visage ; it had past 
 The lily and the snow : and beyond these 
 I must not think now, though I saw that face. 
 
 With the exception of these quotations, most 
 of what was best in the first version of Hyperion' 
 is merged in the second, which gained immca- 
 
no JOHN KEATS: 
 
 surably by its reconstruction in condensation of 
 language and expansion of thought. 
 
 How familiar the music of the opening lines 
 of the second version has grown to us. 
 
 Deep in the shady sadness of a vale 
 
 Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, 
 
 Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star, 
 
 Sat grey-hair' d Saturn, quiet as a stone, 
 
 Still as the silence round about his lair : 
 
 Forest on forest hung about his head, 
 
 Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, 
 
 Not so much life as on a summer's day 
 
 Robs not one light seed from the feathcr'd grass, 
 
 But where the dead leaf fell there did it rest. 
 
 A stream went voiceless by, still deaden'd more 
 
 By reason of his fallen divinity, 
 
 Spreading a shade : the Naiad 'mid her reeds 
 
 Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips. 
 
 Along the margin sand large footmarks went 
 
 No further than to where his feet had stray'd, 
 
 And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground 
 
 His old right hand lay, nerveless, listless, dead, 
 
 Unsceptred : and his realmless eyes were closed, 
 
 While his bow'd head seem'd listening to the earth, 
 
 His ancient mother, for some comfort yet. 
 
 And to Saturn in his sorrowing sleep there 
 comes his sister Thea, ' a goddess of the infant 
 ' world/ and the ' tender spouse of gold Hy- 
 'perion.' 
 
A STUDY. in 
 
 How beautiful if sorrow had not made 
 Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self; 
 
 for in her face there is a ' listening fear.' She 
 seems to see the darkness of the time to come, 
 with no light beyond it, and one hand is pressed 
 
 upon that aching spot 
 Where beats the human heart, as if just there, 
 Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain. 
 
 But though she has no comfort she has the 
 unlimited sympathy of a goddess to give, and 
 she has brought it to the old king. Words of 
 mourning and pity come from her parted lips 
 ' in solemn tenor, and deep organ tone.* 
 
 I have no comfort for thee, no, not one. 
 I cannot say O wherefore slcepcst thou ? 
 For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth 
 Knows thee not thus afflicted for a god. 
 And ocean too, with all its solemn noise, 
 ftas from thy sceptre pass'd : and all the air 
 Is emptied of thine hoary majesty. 
 Thy thunder, conscious of the new command, 
 Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house, 
 And thy sharp lightning in unpractised hands 
 Scorches and burns our once serene domain. 
 O aching time ! O moments big as years ! 
 All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth 
 And press it so upon our weary griefs, 
 
112 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 That unbelief has not a space to breathe. 
 Saturn, sleep on ; 
 
 We seem to hear ' the large utterance ' of that 
 solemn voice like the one gradual solitary gust 
 which comes upon the silence ; we see the sad 
 goddess weeping by the frozen god, 
 
 Until at length old Saturn lifted up 
 His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone, 
 And all the gloom and sorrow of the place, 
 And that fair kneeling goddess, and then spake. 
 
 In her pitying gaze he reads his doom, she 
 must make him sure of his own identity, for can 
 it be that he is still Saturn who has been wor- 
 shipped ? What power was it that had been 
 strong enough to make him desolate, and bring 
 him away from exercising his godlike powers 
 
 Of admonitions 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 ? 
 
 Let Thea search all space, and tell him if 
 she did not feel there was some power coming 
 which should repossess him. It could not be that 
 his kingdom was past for ever : there should yet 
 
A STUDY. 113 
 
 be battle and victory, and the old state o( 
 things revived, and triumph calm, and 
 
 Beautiful things made new for the surprise 
 Of the sky-children. 
 
 He would give command, but where was 
 
 he? 'This passion lifted him upon his feet.' 
 
 He would create another universe. ' Where is 
 
 ' another chaos ? where?' It was no wonder that 
 
 that cry should cause ' the rebel three ' to quake 
 
 when it reached Olympus. Jupiter's heaven, 
 
 Neptune's ocean, and Pluto's hell might be safe 
 
 as long as Saturn was in captivity ; but if he 
 
 founded a new kingdom outside of these, what 
 
 then ? There was hope in his words, and Thea 
 
 caught its spark. Saturn must come with her 
 
 to where the fallen Titans are assembled, and 
 
 cheer them with this new creative thought, and 
 
 she leads him away. 
 
 Meanwhile in other realms big tears were shed, 
 More sorrow like to this and such like woe, 
 Too huge for mortal tongue or pen of scribe. 
 The Titans fierce, self-hid, or prison-bound, 
 Groan'd for the old allegiance once more, 
 And listen'd in sharp pain for Saturn's voice. 
 
 Blazing Hyperion alone among the Titan 
 race had kept his sovereignty and rule, but even 
 
 I 
 
H4 JOHN KEATS 
 
 he in his bright palace felt insecure, for wonderful 
 changes were passing over his glorious courts. 
 
 While sometimes eagles' wings, 
 Unseen before by gods or wondering men, 
 Darkened the place, and neighing steeds were heard, 
 Not heard before by gods or wondering men. 
 
 For is not all progress wrought by mysterious 
 and subtle changes, often terrible in their action, 
 and did not the strength of the Sun-God lie in 
 his recognition of change as advancement, and 
 not decay ? But the immediate effect was wrath 
 and doubt, and Hyperion entered his palace, when 
 his day's work was done, in anger and sadness. 
 
 1 Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall ? 
 Am I to leave this haven of my rest ? 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 Fall ! — No, by Tellus and her briny robes ! 
 
 Over the fiery frontier of my realms 
 
 I will advance a terrible right arm, 
 
 Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove, 
 
 And bid old Saturn take his throne again.' 
 
 Then at the eastern gates of the dawn he 
 waits through the dewy hours of the night, till 
 the moment when he may scatter the darkness. 
 In godlike patience he waits, for he may not 
 hurry it, 
 
 * v 
 
A STUDY. 115 
 
 He might not: No ! though a primeval god, 
 The sacred seasons might not be disturbed. 
 
 And the bright Titan, frenzied with new woes, 
 Unused to bend, by hard compulsion bent 
 His spirit to the sorrow of the time. 
 
 Like Saturn, he suffers, but not, like Saturn, 
 hopelessly. There is a pathetic significance in 
 the way in which Saturn turns to ' the earth, his 
 'ancient mother,' for the comfort which comes 
 not ; but it is the eternal heavens which look 
 down to pity and strengthen Hyperion. 
 
 And all along a dismal rack of clouds 
 Upon the boundaries of day and night 
 He stretch'd himself in grief and radiance faint. 
 There, as he lay, the heaven with its stars 
 Look'd down on him with pity, and the voice 
 Of Ccelus, from the universal space, 
 Thus whisper'd low and solemn in his ear, 
 ' O brightest of my children dear, earth-born 
 And sky-engender'd — son of mysteries.' 
 
 Then after bewailing the fall of Saturn, and 
 
 the actions of rage and passion wrought amongst 
 
 his sons the high gods, even as he saw them 
 
 wrought among mortals, Ccelus adds : — 
 
 Yet do thou strive ; as thou art capable, 
 As thou canst move a&out, an evident go J, 
 And canst oppose to each malignant hour 
 Ethereal presence. I am but a voice, 
 1 2 
 
n6 JOHN KEATS : 
 
 My life is but the life of wind and tides, 
 No more than winds and tides can I avail, 
 But thou canst. 
 
 In these lines there seems to flash upon us as 
 in a lightning gleam the plan and unity of the 
 poem. 1 Iyperion should live, conquering all and 
 uniting all, his ethereal presence passing into other 
 forms and living eternally, though heaven and 
 earth might pass away. And Hyperion rose at 
 the whisper of his great father. 
 
 And on the stars 
 Lifted his curved lids and kept them wide 
 Until it ceased : and still he kept them wide, 
 And still they were the same bright patient stars. 
 Then with a slow incline of his broad breast, 
 Like to a diver in the pearly seas, 
 Forward he stoop'd over the airy shore, 
 And plunged all noiseless into the deep night. 
 
 The second book opens with a marvellous 
 picture, one which brings to us a truer realisa- 
 tion of the vast power of Keats than almost any- 
 thing else he has done. 
 
 Just at the selfsame beat of Time's wide wings 
 Hyperion slid into the rustled air, 
 And Saturn gain'd with Thea that sad place 
 
 Where Cybele and the bruised Titans mourn'd. 
 
 There is a solemn sadness about the presence 
 
A STUDY. 117 
 
 of all the feminine Titanic powers. Sad Moneta, 
 
 with her cold lips, her planetary eyes, her voice 
 
 of sadness ; Thca, ' in her sorrow nearer woman's 
 
 ' tears ' — she who would have taken Achilles by 
 
 the hair and bent his neck, or ' with a finder 
 
 'stayed Ix ion's wheel;' Asia, in whose expression 
 
 there was ' more thought than woe ; ' Mnemosyne, 
 
 with ■ the wondrous lesson in her silent face ; ' 
 
 Clymcnc sobbing 'among her tangled hair;' and 
 
 Cybele, whom we remember in ' Endymion,' 
 
 Alone, alone 
 In sombre chariot, dark foldings thrown 
 About her majesty, and front death-pale. 
 
 It is a significant touch of gloom in the great 
 picture that this Cybele, wife of Saturn, Ops, the 
 Titan queen, is mentioned first of all the Titan 
 group who were gathered in ■ the den where no 
 ' insulting light could glimmer on their tears' — 
 the rock-covered nest of woe, where the very 
 eroanine was not heard amid the thunderous 
 roar of the waterfalls. Few of the great band 
 were absent. * Mnemosyne was straying in the 
 ' world,' but most were gathered in this ' covert 
 ' drear.' 
 
 Scarce images of life, one here, one there, 
 Lay vast and edgeways ; like a dismal cirque 
 
nS JOHN KEATS; 
 
 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. 
 
 And the poet in enumerating the classic group 
 grasps every point of mythological picturcsque- 
 ncss with his marvellous apprehension. Creiis 
 with his iron mace, and the shattered rib of rock 
 beside him ; Iapctus, with the serpent's neck in 
 his clenched hand ; the many-headed Cottus ; 
 Asia, dreaming of future glory, as she leans 
 upon an elephant's tusk, with visions in her 
 mind of 
 
 Palm-shaded temples and high rival fanes 
 By Oxus or in Ganges' sacred isle. 
 
 Shadowed Enccladus raised upon his elbow, 'tiger- 
 ' passioned, lion-thoughted/ plotting how to hurl 
 mountains in the second war ; Atlas and Phorcus 
 not far away ; and ' neighboured close ' Oceanus. 
 
 And Tethys, in whose lap 
 Sobb'd Clymene among her tangled hair. 
 In midst of all lay Themis, at the feet 
 Of Ops, the queen, all clouded round from sight. 
 
 To this sad group there enters Saturn and 
 Thea, and the great king is yet more sad for the 
 sadness of those he approaches, and would have 
 
A STUDY. n 9 
 
 sunk among them, but is hailed by Enceladus, 
 whose mightiness came to him like an inspira- 
 tion, and who shouts : 
 
 1 Titans, behold your god ! ' at which some groan'd, 
 
 Some started on their feet, some also shouted ; 
 
 Some wept, some wail'd — all bow'd with reverence, 
 
 And Ops, uplifting her black folded veil, 
 
 Showed her pale cheeks, and all her forehead wan, 
 
 Her eyebrows thin and jet, and hollow eyes. 
 
 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 thoughts, 
 
 With thunder and with music and with pomp : 
 
 Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines, 
 
 Which, when it ceases in this mountain'd world, 
 
 No other sound succeeds ; but ceasing here, 
 
 Among these fallen, Saturn's voice therefrom 
 
 Grew up like organ, that begins anew 
 
 Its strain, when other harmonies, stopt short, 
 
 Leave the dinn'd air vibrating silverly. 
 
 And Saturn cries aloud to his brethren to 
 tell him why they desponded. When had they 
 found their doom in the spirit-leaved book 
 which has been his firm-based footstool ? What 
 magical portent of the elements has foretold 
 such a fate that they, the divinities, ' the first-born 
 1 of all shaped and palpable gods,' should be cow- 
 ering there ? 
 
120 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 Yet ye are here, 
 O'erwhelm'd and spurred and battcr'd, ye are here ! 
 O Titans, shall I say arise ? — Ye groan. 
 Shall I say Crouch ? Ye groan. What can I then? 
 O Heaven wide ! O unseen parent dear ! 
 What can I ? 
 
 In the face of Oceanus he sees 'the severe 
 ' content which comes of thought and musing, 
 and from him he demands help. And the 
 answer of Oceanus, god of the sea, sophist and 
 sage, is no incitement to war, it is a teaching of 
 content- — it is the great underlying thought of 
 the poem again coming out, the law of progress. 
 
 Yet listen ye who will, whilst I bring proof 
 How ye, perforce, must be content to stoop, 
 And in the proof much comfort will I give 
 If ye will take that comfort in its truth. 
 We fall by course of Nature's law, not force 
 Of thunder, or of Jove. 
 
 He reminds Saturn how thoroughly he has 
 sifted the atom universe, yet because he washing, 
 and blind from sheer supremacy, one avenue has 
 been shaded from his eyes, 
 
 Through which I wandered to eternal truth. 
 And first, as thou wast not the first of powers, 
 So art thou not the last ; it cannot be, 
 Thou art not the beginning, nor the end. 
 
A STUDY. 121 
 
 The fallen king must remember how Heaven 
 and Earth, his parents, had been born of Chaos 
 and Darkness, and thus the Titan rule of the 
 present had already come through change. 
 
 From chaos and parental darkness came 
 
 Light, the first-fruits of that intestine broil, 
 
 That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends 
 
 Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came, 
 
 And with it light, and light engendering 
 
 Upon its own producer, forthwith touch'd 
 
 The whole enormous matter into life. 
 
 Upon that very hour, our parentage, 
 
 The Heavens and the Earth, were manifest. 
 
 Then thou first-born, and we the giant-race, 
 
 Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms. 
 
 Nozv cones the Pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain ; 
 
 O folly / for to bear all naked I rut lis, 
 
 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 chief; 
 
 And as we show beyond that heaven and earth, 
 
 In form and shape compact and beautiful, 
 
 In will, in action free, companionship, 
 
 And thousand other signs of purer life : 
 
 So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, 
 
 A power more strong in beauty, born of us, 
 
 And fated to excel us, as we pass 
 
 In glory that old darkness ; nor are we 
 
 Thereby more conquer'd than by us the rule 
 
 Of shapeless chaos. Say, doth the dull soil 
 
 Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed, 
 
122 yOHX KEATS: 
 
 And feedcth still, more comely than itself? 
 Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves? 
 Or shall the tree be envious of the dove 
 Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings 
 To wander wherewithal and find its joys ? 
 We are such forest trees, and our fair boughs 
 Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves, 
 But eagles golden-feathcr'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. 
 Yea, by that law, another race may drive 
 Our conquerors to mourn as we do now. 
 Have ye beheld the young God of the Seas, 
 My disposscssor ? Have ye seen his face ? 
 - Have ye beheld his chariot, foam'd along 
 Ly noble winged creatures he hath made ? 
 I saw him on the calmed waters scud, 
 With such a glow of beauty in his eyes 
 That it enforced me to bid sad farewell 
 To all my empire : farewell sad I took, 
 And hither came, to see how dolorous fate 
 Had wrought upon ye; and how I might best 
 Give consolation in this woe extreme. 
 Receive the truth , and let it be your bain:. 
 
 There was silence when Occanus had ceased 
 speaking, and no one heeded when Clymene 
 sobbed forth her story of the pleasant shore 
 upon which she had sat, and poured out her 
 grief until the flood of melody came upon her 
 which made her cast away the shell into which 
 she had breathed the music of their woes. 
 
A STUDY. 123 
 
 A voice came sweeter, sweeter than all tune, 
 And still it cried Apollo ! young Apollo ! 
 The morning bright Apollo ! young Apollo ! 
 
 And then she knew that change had come, 
 that this was the ' fresh perfection,' that the 
 Titanic supremacy was over, that ' the power 
 1 more strong in beauty ' had overtaken them, 
 and that they were already of the past. 
 
 Then spoke the huge Enceladus, with the 
 
 voice 
 
 like sullen waves 
 In the half-glutted hollows of reef rocks, 
 
 the very incarnation of the spirit of a self-centered 
 present, which looks neither to the teaching of 
 the past nor the hope of the future, but will work 
 for itself now. Why should they listen to the 
 over-wise Occanus or the over-foolish Clymene ? 
 He will rouse them to action which knows no 
 content with fate. Have they forgotten the 
 blows, the buffets vile of Jupiter? O joy ! he 
 sees he has roused their wrath once more. 
 
 O joy ! for now I see ye are not lost. 
 O joy ! for now I see a thousand eyes 
 Wide glaring for revenge. 
 
 He rises to his feet. They are flames. He 
 will teach them how to burn, and Jove shall feel 
 
124 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 them. Not that he too has not his moments of 
 regret for the calm existence of long ago, 
 
 That was before we knew the wineed thins:, 
 Victory, might be lost, or might be won. 
 
 But there was one whom they had forgotten 
 
 — there was hope for them yet — there was still 
 
 Hyperion. 
 
 And be ye mindful that Hyperion, 
 
 Our brightest brother, still is undisgraced — 
 
 Hyperion, lo ! his radiance is here. 
 
 And while they gazed upon the face of 
 
 Enceladus it was lit up with a pallid gleam as 
 
 the name of Hyperion crossed his lips, and he, 
 
 in his turn looking upon them, saw a gleam of 
 
 light on eveiy- face, 
 
 But splendider in Saturn's whose hoar locks, 
 Shone like the bubbling foam about a keel 
 When the prow sweeps into a midnight cove. 
 
 And then it had come, the everlasting light 
 which touched all sorrows and which linked all 
 times, the strong Sun-God invincible. 
 
 In pale and silver silence they remain'd, 
 Till suddenly a splendour, like the morn, 
 Pervaded all the beetling gloomy steeps, 
 All the sad spaces of oblivion, 
 And every gulf and every chasm old, 
 And every height, and ever}' sullen depth 
 
A STUDY. 125 
 
 Voiceless or hoarse with loud tormented streams ; 
 
 And all the everlasting cataracts, 
 
 And all the headlong torrents far and near, 
 
 Mantled before in darkness and huge shade, 
 
 Now saw the light and made it terrible. 
 
 It was Hyperion :— a granite peak 
 
 His bright feet touch'd, and then he staid to view 
 
 The misery his brilliance had betray'd, 
 
 To the most hateful seeing of itself. 
 
 It was the light which streams across the 
 ages, the light of hope and progress which binds 
 into one all mystery and worship, all beauty and 
 all love. 
 
 But as yet Hyperion had only a dim fore- 
 shadowing that hope and life were hidden in 
 the ' death and darkness' around him, or that lie 
 should still rise, still live in the kingdom that 
 was coming, and that change was not decay, but 
 growth. He stood there ' the dejected King of 
 
 1 Day.' 
 
 A vast shade 
 In midst of his own brightness, like the bulk 
 Of Memnon's image at the set of sun, 
 To one who travels from the dusking East. 
 Sighs too, as mournful as that Memnon's harp, 
 He utter'd, while his hands contemplative 
 He press'd together, and in silence stood. 
 
 Then when the Titans raised the cry of 
 
126 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 * Saturn/ Hyperion answered them from the 
 
 peak, but 
 
 Saturn sat near the mother of the gods, 
 
 In whose face was no joy, though all the gods 
 
 Gave from their hollow throats the name of Saturn. 
 
 From 'the tumults dire' of the Titans, 
 Keats turns with an evident relief in the third 
 book to the glorious coming of Apollo, the son 
 of Jupiter, the father of all poetry. 
 
 Thus in alternate uproar and sad peace 
 
 Amazed were those Titans utterly. 
 
 O leave them Muse ! O leave them to their woes, 
 
 For thou art weak to sing such tumults dire. 
 
 A solitary sorrow best befits 
 
 Thy lips, and antheming a lonely grief. 
 
 Leave them, O Muse, for thou anon wilt find 
 
 Many a fallen old divinity 
 
 Wandering in vain about bewilder'd shores. 
 
 But this is the time for rejoicing. The whole- 
 world shall rejoice, for ' Apollo is once more the 
 'golden theme.' 
 
 Where was he, when the Giant of the Sun 
 Stood bright, amid the sorrow of his peers? 
 
 It was that early dawn which had waked his 
 new life, it was the strength of Hyperion which 
 had passed into him, for in the morning twi- 
 
A STUDY. 127 
 
 light he had wandered out among the osiers of 
 the rivulet, ankle deep in lilies, and his soul had 
 gathered the beauty of the morning of the world 
 into itself until he had wept. 
 
 Then through the cumbrous boughs 
 With solemn step an awful goddess came, 
 
 and he asked of her melodiously, 
 
 How earnest thou over the unfootcd sea ? 
 
 Or hath that antique mien and robed form 
 
 Moved in these vales invisible till now ? 
 
 Sure I have heard those vestments sweeping o'er 
 
 The fallen leaves, when I have snte alone 
 
 In cool mid-forest. Surely I have traced 
 
 The rustic of those ample skirts about 
 
 These grassy solitudes, and seen the flowers 
 
 Lift up their heads, as still the whisper pass'd, 
 
 Goddess ! I have beheld those eyes before 
 
 And their eternal calm, and all that face, 
 
 Or I have dream'd. ' Yes,' said the supreme shape, 
 
 'Thou hast dream'd of me ; and awaking up, 
 
 Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side, 
 
 Whose strings touch'd by thy fingers, all the vast 
 
 Unwearied ear of the whole universe 
 
 Listen'd in pain and pleasure at the birth 
 
 Of such new tuneful wonder.' 
 
 It was Mnemosyne, sister of Saturn, who had 
 been watching over Apollo since his birth. 
 More intent on the new beauty which should 
 
128 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 flood the world, than on the passing power of 
 her micrhtv kindred, she had 
 
 forsaken old and sacred thrones 
 For prophecies of him, and for the sake 
 Of loveliness new-born. 
 
 And her words wake the soul of Apollo 
 within him. 
 
 With sudden scrutiny and gloomless eyes 
 he feels the dawning of his power. His first con- 
 sciousness is to recognise numbness, then the 
 new tide of life takes possession of him, earth 
 cannot bound his longing. 
 
 Are there not other regions than this isle ? 
 What are the stars ? There is the sun, the sun ! 
 And the most patient brilliance of the moon ! 
 .And stars by thousands ! Point me out the way 
 To any one particular beauteous star, 
 And I will flit into it with my lyre, 
 And make its silvery splendour pant with bliss. 
 
 He questions eagerly, of the powers that are 
 and have been, what divinity commands the 
 
 elements, 
 
 While I here idle listen on the shores, 
 In fearless, yet in aching ignorance. 
 
 But there is no answer from Mnemosyne. He 
 can but read 'the wondrous lesson in her silent 
 
A STUDY. 129 
 
 'face,' for the new knowledge must come to him- 
 self, and the new life must be ushered in with 
 suffering. 
 
 Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush 
 
 All the immortal fairness of his limbs, 
 
 Most like the struggle at the gate of death, 
 
 Or liker still to one who should take leave 
 
 Of pale immortal death, and with a pang 
 
 &s hot as death's is chill, with fierce convulse 
 
 Die into life : so young Apollo anguish'd ; 
 
 His very hair, his golden tresses famed, 
 
 Kept undulation round his eager neck. 
 
 During the pain Mnemosyne upheld 
 
 Her arms as one who prophesied. — At length 
 
 Apollo shrieked ; — and lo ! from all his limbs 
 
 Celestial . . . 
 
 And with this death into new life the won- 
 drous fragment breaks off. It was a fit ending. 
 We long to have known the whole story, but we 
 have to rest content that it leaves Apollo born 
 for the world and Hyperion still unconquercd ; 
 progress triumphant, even through disastrous 
 change and keenest suffering, and unity 
 eternal. 
 
130 JOHN KEATS 
 
 VI. 
 
 It is like coming down from mountain heights 
 to carefully cultured gardens when we pass from 
 1 Hyperion' to the two poems which appear almost 
 as if in contrast to each other in the last volume 
 which Keats published — the story of love and 
 despair in ' Isabella/ and of love and joy in the 
 * Eve of St. Agnes.' 
 
 The first named is taken from Boccaccio, 
 and it required the magic and rare grace of a 
 Keats to lift the hideous details of the story 
 from the region of simple horror to that of 
 tragedy. 
 
 The stoiy is one from which in its natural 
 dress the mind revolts. Isabella and Lorenzo 
 love each other, but Isabella's brothers would 
 have their sister marry a wealthier suitor, that 
 their own gains may be increased. They there- 
 fore murder Lorenzo, and hide him in a 
 
A STUDY. 131 
 
 wood. Through a vision Isabella is led to dis- 
 cover his hidden body, and, with her own hands 
 severing the head from the trunk of the corpse, 
 she brings it home, hides it in a flower-pot, and 
 plants sweet basil over it. The plant flourishes 
 as by magic, but the brothers discover the hideous 
 secret which lies at the root of it, and remove it; 
 The effect of the horror is so great upon them 
 that they fly to other lands, and, having lost her 
 sole comfort, Isabella dies. Such are the ugly 
 details, but in the hands of Keats they have been 
 wrought into a story, so human, so thrilling, so 
 full of pathos and of melody, that we forget its 
 ugliness. 
 
 In the opening description of how Isabella 
 and Lorenzo first know that they love, wc feel 
 that the poet has been touched with some new 
 and profoundly human knowledge himself. 
 
 They could not sit at meals but feci how well 
 li soothed each to be the other by. 
 
 He knew whose gentle hand was at the latch, 
 liefore the door had given her to his eyes. 
 
 And to his heart he inwardly did pray 
 
 For power to speak ; but still the ruddy tide 
 
 Stifled his voice and pulsed resolve away, 
 
 K 2 
 
1 3 2 JOHX KEATS : 
 
 Fever'd his high conceit of such a bride, 
 Yet brought him to the meekness of a child : 
 Alas ! when passion is both meek and wild. 
 
 This is a truer description of passion than 
 anything in 'Endymion.' And how wonderfully 
 in a few words the money-loving, griping spirit 
 of the two brothers, the 'men of ancestral mer- 
 chandise,' is put before us, and what an insight 
 the same words give us into the growing sym- 
 pathy of Keats with mankind, a sympathy which 
 had he lived could not have failed to have 
 wrought some deliverance. It was a wondrous 
 insight which recognised the half-ignorance with 
 which the rich permit the agonising of the poor 
 who toil to enrich them, — ' the evil wrought by 
 ' want of thought.' 
 
 For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, 
 And went all naked to the hungry shark ; 
 
 For them his cars gush'd blood : for them in death 
 The seal on the cold ice, with piteous bark, 
 
 Lay full of darts ; for them alone did seethe 
 A thousand men in troubles tuide and dark ; 
 
 Half -ignorant) they iurnd an easy wheel, 
 
 That set sharp racks at work to pinch and peel. 
 
 Why where they proud ? Because their marble founts 
 Gush'd with more pride than do a wretch's tears ? 
 
 Why were they proud ? Because fair orange-mounts 
 Were of more soft ascent than lazar stairs ? 
 
JJ 
 
 A STUDY. 
 
 Whv were they proud? Because red-lined accounts 
 
 Were richer than the songs of Grecian years. 
 Why were they proud ? Again we ask aloud, 
 Why, in the name of glory, were they proud ? 
 
 And when Lorenzo says his unconscious 
 farewell, what utter pathos is condensed in 
 Isabella's ignorance of coming sorrow. 
 And as he went, she chanted merrily. 
 
 With that farewell Lorenzo's life ended ; the 
 few hours of existence left to him were nothing, 
 with the parting from Isabella his true life was 
 over. This is the significance of the words : — 
 
 So the two brothers and their murdered man 
 Rode past fair Florence. 
 
 A few more hours and he was dead. 
 
 There in the forest did his great love cease. 
 
 No one perhaps except Shakespeare among 
 our poets has brought more of the supernatural 
 and ghostly clement into words than these two 
 stanzas in Isabella's vision of the murdered man 
 contain : — 
 
 I am a shadow now, alas ! alas ! 
 
 Upon the skirts of human nature dwelling 
 Alone : I chant alone the holy mass, 
 
 While little sounds of life are round me knelling, 
 
134 yOILY KEATS: 
 
 And glossy bees at noon do field ward pass, 
 
 And many a chapel bell the hour is telling, 
 Paining me through : those sounds grow strange to me, 
 And thou art distant in Humanity. 
 
 I know what was, I feel full well what is, 
 And 1 should rage if spirits could go mad; 
 
 Though I forget the taste of earthly bliss, 
 
 That paleness warms my grave, as though I had 
 
 A seraph chosen from the bright abyss 
 
 To be my spouse : thy paleness makes me glad : 
 
 Thy beauty grows upon me, and I feel 
 
 A greater love through all my essence steal. 
 
 And then the girl who had thought 'the worst 
 1 was simple misery ' wakes to the knowledge that 
 life contained even a harder fate, and rouses her- 
 self to the horrible task. But the story grows 
 too ghastly in its ' wormy circumstance,' the poet 
 himself quails before it, his voice falters, we feel 
 him shudder as he bids us go and read it in 
 Boccaccio for ourselves. With the bringing back 
 of the hideous burden the fierceness of Isabella's 
 madness is past, she has sunk into a quiet me- 
 lancholy, which has found comfort in the worship 
 of the external symbol of her love. 
 
 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. 
 
A STUDY. 135 
 
 She had no knowledge when the day was done, 
 
 And the new moon she saw not : but in peace 
 Hung over her sweet basil evermore, 
 And moisten'd it with tears unto the core. 
 
 When the brothers suspect her secret, and 
 steal away the basit pot, she is left to die a 
 death ' too lone and incomplete* 
 
 For simple pathos in its narration and effect 
 'Isabella' is hardly equalled, but the poem has 
 not the finest elements of tragedy. It represents 
 facts with an accurate appreciation of their ten- 
 derness, of their pathos, and of their horror, but 
 it deals with none of the wider scope of tragedy. 
 The action of mind upon mind, that subtle spiri- 
 tual influence which moulds fact and masters cir- 
 cumstance, is absent : it is a story skilfully told 
 of the broader features of passion, malice, and 
 madness, but there is nothing in it which would 
 lead us to believe that Keats could have made 
 it a tragic drama, with the consequent effect upon 
 numbers who can be influenced through sym- 
 pathy with dramatic art, where mere narration 
 however perfect fails to move them. The story 
 is essentially one of tragical fact, but not of 
 tragedy in its highest form. 
 
136 . JOHN KEATS: 
 
 The 'Eve of Saint Agnes' forms a remarkable 
 pendant to it, published in the same volume, 
 and written probably about the same time. It 
 is in Spenserian metre, and in its completeness 
 of expression, and perfect mastery of words, 
 metaphor, and fancy, is not unworthy to be 
 linked in thought with the work of the ' poet's 
 ' poet.' The story is told with a richness of 
 detail, an exquisite poise of imagination, a re- 
 ticence which controls its enthusiastic expansion, 
 and a grace and purity and calm which modulate 
 its passion. It is one of the best known of 
 the poems of Keats, and rightly, for it appeals 
 strongly to our human feeling, though it lacks, 
 because it does not need, the prophetic element 
 of 'Endymion'and 'Hyperion.' It deals with the 
 broad facts of love and life and the present, and 
 questions none of the larger issues of the past or 
 future. It is complete, fulfilling itself entirely 
 within its own limits, and is therefore a more 
 accurate test of the poet's power than the less 
 defined thoughts of greater magnitude and weight 
 which were battling for expression in his longer 
 poems. 
 
 * Endymion ' and ' Hyperion ' tell with a mighty 
 
A STUDY. 137 
 
 voice what Keats might have been. 'St. Agnes' 
 ' Eve' and some of the Odes tell what he was, and 
 the actual degree of perfection to which lie had 
 attained. 
 
 The ■ Eve of St. Agnes' is the most pictur- 
 esque of all the poems of Keats, its descriptions 
 by far the most artistic. lie creates an atmo- 
 sphere first, he passes on to the creation of facts 
 and circumstance and every sensuous detail 
 which can promote reality ; and then, when his 
 world is read}-, he puts into it his man and 
 woman, living, breathing, and one with us. 
 
 How completely we are made to feel the 
 effect of that atmosphere in the opening lines. 
 
 St. Agnes' Eve. — Ah ! bitter chill it was, . 
 The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold, 
 The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass, 
 And silent was the flock in woolly fold : 
 Numb were the beadsman's fingers while he told 
 His rosary, and while his frosted breath, 
 Like pious incense from a censer old, 
 SeenVd taking flight for heaven without a death, 
 Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith. 
 
 And what a wonderful contrast is that old 
 shivering beadsman, the patient holy man who 
 has passed by the joys and sorrows of his 
 
138 JO HX KEATS; 
 
 human life, and has only a prayer left for others 
 since nothing can touch or alter his own fate, 
 to .the fairy power that is abroad, which has 
 been in the mind of the young Madeline through 
 that long day preceding the vigil. 
 
 The music, yearning like a god in pain, 
 She scarcely heard ; 
 
 for her heart is full of visions oC delight which 
 that very night may hold if she lies down 
 supperless, looking neither behind nor sideways, 
 but only upwards to heaven. Shall she not 
 see him whom she loves ? And thinking upon 
 this as the charmed hour draws near, how can 
 she do anything but 'dance along with vague 
 ' regardless eyes ? ' Meanwhile her lover, young 
 Porphyro, unknown to her has come across the 
 moors, not indeed to be admitted to the dance, 
 but raging with jealousy outside against the 
 barbarian hordes admitted to the privileges 
 denied to him. 
 
 Beside the portal doors, 
 Buttress'd from moonlight, stands he, and implores 
 All saints to give him sight of Madeline. 
 
 He has but one friend who cares for his 
 success, an old beldame weak in body and in 
 
A STUDY. 139 
 
 soul. By her he is found behind the broad hall 
 pillar, and, terrified for his fate, she implores him 
 to fly, enumerating the lovers of Madeline who 
 are assembled, and may do him an injury. Her 
 fears increase with every moment. He vainly 
 endeavours to extract from her any of that 
 knowledge which he craves. She beckons him 
 away from his danger through the ' lowly arched 
 * way ' to the little moonlit room, where they arc 
 safe from prying eyes. It is the Eve of St. 
 Agnes ? Yes, but what of that ? It is in vain for 
 him to remind her of it, for men will murder 
 upon holy days. His foolhardiness even makes 
 the old crone laugh as she goes on to tell him 
 the purpose and hope of Madeline about the 
 rites of that evening. Will she dream of him ? 
 A wild thought crosses him, which shapes itself 
 into purpose with that readiness which sudden 
 thoughts often have for prompt action. If he 
 were but near, her visions must surely be 
 influenced by his unseen presence. 
 
 The old woman is quickly persuaded. Por- 
 phyro, whom she prays for morning and evening, 
 can do no wrong. She will hide him in the 
 closet of Madeline's room, where he may sec her 
 
140 yOJIX KEATS : 
 
 without being seen, and possibly influence her 
 dreams on this auspicious night. 
 
 No touch is wanting in the portrait of old 
 Angela. We can hear her as she hobbles off 
 to get the dainty cates with which to store 
 that closet, as though to please children and to 
 fulfil the rites of this sacred eve. We sec the 
 aged eyes aghast ' from fright of dim espial ' and 
 the whispered summons to Porphyro to follow 
 her to the chamber, ' silken, hush'd, and chaste.' 
 And leaving the lover hidden, we follow the 
 poor old terrified woman as she feels tremblingly 
 for the stair, till Madeline suddenly rises before 
 her, like a missioned spirit, in the light of the 
 silver taper she is carrying, and guides her 
 faltering footsteps with pious care to the safe 
 level matting. 
 
 And then with Madeline we enter the hushed 
 maiden chamber — the taper going out in the 
 pallid moonshine as the door is opened. With 
 the closing of the door the awe of the spell- 
 bound night falls upon us. There is no backward 
 glance, no word spoken by the young girl, but 
 'to her heart, her heart was voluble.' And what 
 a picture is before us in the next two stanzas. 
 
A STUDY. 141 
 
 The room might be of Spenser's describing, and 
 the ladyone of Shakespeare's ; indeed, we might 
 almost believe that Keats had 'a thing ensky'd 
 
 ' and sainted ' in his mind. 
 
 A casement high and triple-arch'd there was, 
 All garlanded with carven imageries 
 Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass : 
 And diamonded with panes of quaint device, 
 Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes 
 As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings : 
 And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries 
 And twilight saints and dim cmbbzonings, 
 A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and 
 kings. 
 
 Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, 
 And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast, 
 As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon ; 
 Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest, 
 And on her silver cross soft amethyst, 
 And on her hair a glory like a saint : 
 She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest, 
 Save wings, for heaven : 1'orphyro grew faint : 
 She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. 
 
 We can almost hear the breathing of these 
 two, as Madeline sleeps and Porphyro steals 
 from his hiding-place, ' noiseless as fear in a wide 
 ' wilderness,' to look upon her, gazing in passing 
 on her empty dress, listening to make sure she 
 still breathed, then softly parting the curtains to 
 see her, 
 
142 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, 
 As though a rose should shut and be a bud again. 
 
 Far off comes the sound of the music below, 
 in that common world which knows nothing of 
 his joy, the boisterous midnight festive clarion 
 breaking rudely upon his holy vision. He is 
 thankful when the hall door is shut for the last 
 time, and the noise is all over. 
 
 There is something of almost childish 
 minuteness in the way in which the feast which 
 Porphyro spreads is described. We can under- 
 stand that it had a certain charm for the poet 
 who described his liking for claret and peaches. 
 But how completely is the description 'lifted out 
 of commonplace by the magical atmosphere 
 which is made to surround the cates, with allu- 
 sion to the places from which they came. 
 
 Manna and dates, in argosy transferred 
 From Fez : and spiced dainties every one, 
 From silken Samarcand to cedard Lebanon. 
 
 Instantly the golden glowing East breaks 
 upon us and mingles with the mediaeval room, 
 adding its glory in a word or two to the moonlit 
 scene. But Madeline sleeps on. Porphyro takes 
 her lute and plays, to wake her, the old Pro- 
 
A STUDY. J 43 
 
 venial song, ' La belle dame sans merci,' and 
 then she is roused, and he is frightened at what 
 he has done, and kneels, pale as ' smooth- 
 sculptured stone.' 
 
 And so the spell proves true. She has 
 dreamed of him, of her own lover, whom she 
 had heard singing in her sleep. Why does he- 
 look so sadly now ? What ? It is he himself! 
 1 Into her dream he melted.' She is won. The 
 storm may rave, the sleet may patter against 
 the window pane, but her joy is no dream. 
 Should he even forsake her after this she can 
 only say, 
 
 I curse not, for my heait is lost in thine. 
 
 The loud gusts rave and beat outside, con- 
 trasting weirdly with the joy within, and Por- 
 phyro will have it that it is an elfin storm from 
 faery land to help their flight. The moon of St. 
 Agnes has set, it is near morning, he has ' a 
 * home waiting for her far o'er the southern moors,' 
 and the sleepy wassailers will not hear them as 
 they fly. Noiselessly like phantoms they steal 
 into the hall and to the iron porch, past the 
 sleeping porter and more watchful bloodhound, 
 
144 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 who recognises Madeline, and allows her to go 
 
 quietly. The key turns, the door groans on its 
 
 hinges, 
 
 And they are gone : ay, ages long "ago 
 These lovers tied away into the storm. 
 
 Bridging all time, old and yet ever new, the 
 story melts away like the glowing vision of a 
 charmed and spellbound night. 
 
 Widely different from the pathos and horror 
 of ' Isabella/ and the passionate joy of ' St. 
 'Agnes' Eve/ is the story of ' Lamia/ and even 
 further does it seem removed from the idealism 
 of 'Endymion/ It has been described by Lord 
 Houghton as ' quite the perfection of narrative 
 'poetry/ but beyond this it is the expression of 
 a new phase of feeling in Keats himself. It is 
 contemporary with his love for Fanny Brawnc, 
 and illustrates the conflict of a mind with its own 
 contradictory elements. ' Endymion ' has repre- 
 sented the realisation of an ideal love, 'Lamia' 
 represents the struggle between an overmaster- 
 ing passion and philosophy. In one of the 
 letters to Fanny Brawnc, written in July 1819, 
 the poet says : ' Forgive me if I wander a little 
 ' this evening, for I have been all day employed in 
 
A STUDY. 145 
 
 *a very abstract poem, and I am deep in love 
 1 with you/ And writing to Mr. Reynolds a few 
 days before, we find him saying, ' I have pro- 
 ceeded pretty well with " Lamia," finishing the 
 1 first part, which consists of about 400 lines.' It 
 is presumable, therefore, that the ' very abstract 
 ' poem ' was * Lamia,' which represented far more 
 truly what was passing in the mind of Keats 
 than his letters did. It is hardly conceivable 
 that he should at such a time have written such 
 a poem, had it not been a relief to the feverish 
 restlessness of his heart, occupied as it was with 
 a passion which absorbed but could not satisfy 
 him. The story is from Burton's ' Anatomy of 
 * Melancholy,' of the wondrous serpent-woman 
 who fascinated the Corinthian youth Lycius to 
 his doom, and the weird subject is a curious 
 contrast to the careful and restrained compo- 
 sition which was influenced by the study of 
 Dryden. 
 
 It is noticeable how much the thought of the 
 changes in the beliefs of the world was dominant 
 with Keats at this time. The great thought of 
 1 Hyperion ' appears in a lesser form in the open- 
 ing lines of ' Lamia,' the date of the story being 
 
 L 
 
i 4 6 JOHN KEATS : 
 
 fixed before ' the faery broods had driven away 
 'the nymph and satyr/ before Obcron and his 
 train had displaced the dryads and fauns. 
 Keats's intuitive sense of the unity of all times is 
 one of the most remarkable proofs of his genius. 
 Time and space to him were no fettering limita- 
 tions, they defined without narrowing the realms 
 he peopled by his imagination. 
 
 It was in the far off elemental age that 
 Hermes, in search of a nymph to whom 'all 
 1 hoofed satyrs knelt/ heard the voice which in 
 a gentle heart destroys ' all pain but pity/ and 
 found the palpitating snake bewailing its cruel 
 doom. 
 
 She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, 
 Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue ; 
 Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, 
 Eyed like a pearock, and all crimson barr'd, 
 And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, 
 Dissolved, or brighter shone, or intenvreathed 
 Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries ; 
 ■ So rainbow-sided, touch'd with miseries, 
 She seem'd at once some penanced lady elf, 
 Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self. 
 Upon her crest she bore a warmish fire, 
 Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne's tiar ; 
 Her head was serpent, but, ah, bitter sweet ! 
 She had a woman's mouth with all its pearls complete ; 
 And for her eyes, what could such eyes do there 
 
A STUDY. 147 
 
 But weep, and weep that they were born so fair ? 
 As Proserpine still weeps for her Sicilian air. 
 Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake 
 Came, as through bubbling honey, for love's sake. 
 
 A subtle, curious picture of a complex nature, 
 repelling and alluring at the same time, represent- 
 ing the fascinations of changing and sparkling 
 beauty, and all the bewildering power possessed 
 by such beauty for sensuous and receptive 
 natures. And Hermes swears to this 
 
 Beauteous wreath, with melancholy eyes, 
 
 that she shall have whatever she wishes for, if 
 she will but tell him what he wants to know. 
 His oath runs through her cars, 
 
 Warm, tremulous, devout, psalterian, 
 
 and she consents, if she may have once more her 
 
 woman's form. She loves a youth in Corinth, 
 
 and she would be where he is. She breathes 
 
 upon the eyes of the god, that he may see his 
 
 love, and the 'guarded nymph' he has sought is 
 
 'near — smiling on the green.' 
 
 It was no dream, or say a dream it was, 
 
 Real are the dreams of gods, and smoothly pass 
 
 Their pleasures in a long immortal dream. 
 
 Then, true to his word, Hermes puts to proof 
 
 L 2 
 
I4S JOHN KEATS: 
 
 'the lithe Caduccan charm' with the serpent 
 wand given him by Apollo in exchange for the 
 lyre. Keats wrote few more marvellous des- 
 criptions than that of the transformation wrought 
 in the swooning serpent as it passes through the 
 horrible stages of its change to beauty- -the 
 foaming mouth, the grass withering around it, 
 the hot glazed eyes with no tears to cool them, 
 the convulsing of scarlet pain, the waning, and 
 final dissolution of the serpent, and the sweet 
 new voice of the woman which melts away with 
 the mists around the mountain as she cries upon 
 Lycius. And what a vision is this new-born 
 Lamia as she rests at the foot of those wild hills 
 between Corinth and Cenchreas' shore ! 
 
 There she stood, 
 About a young bird's flutter from a wood, 
 Fair on a sloping green of mossy tread, 
 By a clear pool, wherein she passioned 
 To see herself escaped from so sore ills, 
 While her robes flaunted with the daffodils. 
 
 The poet is happy now. His sun is shining : 
 he has shaken himself free from the serpent-charm 
 at present : it is the woman only who is clear to 
 his vision, the woman in all her beauty and her 
 undoubted love. 
 
A STUDY. 149 
 
 In the lore 
 Oflove deep learned to the red-heart's core : 
 Not one hour old, yet of sciential brain, 
 To unpcrplcx bliss from its neighbour pain : 
 Define their pettish limits, and estrange 
 Their points of contact, and swift counterchange ; 
 Intrigue with the specious chaos, and dispart 
 Its most ambiguous atoms with sure art ; 
 As though in Cupid's college she had spent 
 Sweet days a lovely graduate, still unshent, 
 And kept his rosy terms in idle languishment 
 
 In her serpent days she had had a power of 
 seeing and understanding human life, and once, 
 dreaming among mortals, she had seen this 
 Corinthian Lycius, 
 
 Like a young Jove with calm uncager face, 
 
 and had loved him ever since for the very con- 
 trast which that calm presented to her own 
 complexity. Therefore she will wait for him on 
 the solitary hills, for she knows that he has been 
 to Egina isle, to sacrifice to Jove, and 
 
 4 
 
 On the moth-time of that evening dim 
 He would return that way. 
 
 He was wearied of the Corinth talk of his 
 
IS o JOHN KEATS: 
 
 companions, and is coming over the hills by 
 himself, thoughtless at first, then lost 
 
 In the calm'd twilight of Platonic shades, 
 
 and so passes Lamia. 
 
 In indifference drear 
 His silent sandals swept the mossy green. 
 
 But she speaks, and the magic of her voice is 
 enough. He is lost to philosophy for ever from 
 that moment. 
 
 ' Lycius, look back, and be some pity shown ! ' 
 
 He did, not with cold wonder, fearingly, 
 
 But Orpheus-like at an Eurydice, 
 
 For so delicious were the words she sung, 
 
 It seenvd he had loved them a whole summer long. 
 
 And soon his eyes had 
 
 drunk her beauty up, 
 Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup, 
 And still the cup was full. 
 
 Then having made him secure in her chain, 
 she can be coy and confident. Where will he 
 take her ? He is a scholar : he must know ' that 
 ' finer spirits cannot breathe below.' What 
 1 serener palaces ' has he ready for her, ' where 
 * she may all her many senses please ? ' She 
 
A STUDY. 151 
 
 makes a feint of leaving him, only rendering his 
 
 captivity more complete, and then, as he passes 
 from trance to trance, she sings to him — 
 
 Happy in beauty, life, and love, and everything. 
 
 Lycius is enthralled, he knows nothing more 
 than the presence of Lamia, and leads her back 
 to Corinth. As they pass through the crowded 
 streets he presses hard the beautiful hand he 
 holds, for one draws near 
 
 With curl'd grey beard, sharp eyes, and smooth bald crow n, 
 Slow-stepp'd, and robed in philosophic gown. 
 
 Lamia shudders, for passion shuns philosophy. 
 She perceives how Lycius tries to avoid those 
 searching eyes, and demands the name of the old 
 man. It is only Apollonius, his sage instructor, 
 he answers. And then the lovers pass within the 
 mystic, rich-portalled door, into that palace 
 invisible to all but lovers' eyes, where for a time 
 they are happy r . 
 
 But at length the spirit of Lycius is waked 
 
 once more as with a trumpet-blast, and Lamia 
 
 knows that he is no longer content. 
 
 She began to moan and sigh, 
 Because he mused beyond her, knowing well 
 That but a moment's thought is passion's passing belL 
 
152 yOHN KEATS: 
 
 For the man's mind is roused, and sympa- 
 thies with the outer world come back to him. 
 Why should not his new joy be linked to hislarger 
 life ? Kc would show his bride to the world, and 
 be a man once more among men. And she in 
 her woe says nothing, 
 
 but, pale and meek, 
 Arose and knelt before him, wept a rain 
 . Of sorrow at his words. 
 
 But power is a new sensation, a promise of 
 
 returning strength, and he uses it to compel her 
 
 to his will. There shall be a nuptial gathering : 
 
 has she any kin whom she would call ? She 
 
 answeis none — her name is unknown in Corinth. 
 
 Her one request, urged strongly and resist- 
 
 lessly, is that Apollonius shall not be a bidden 
 
 guest. And so Lycius goes forth to invite his 
 
 kindred, and Lamia is left to her own sad 
 
 musings. 
 
 She set herself, high-thoughted, how to dress 
 The misery in fit magnificence. 
 
 The preparation of that gorgeous pageant by 
 
 elfin skill is rendered pitiful in these few last 
 
 words. Who were the ' subtle servitors ' that 
 
 came at her bidding ? What magic raised that 
 
 palace of delight ? The palms and plantains 
 
A STUDY. 153 
 
 arching over head, the haunting music which 
 seemed the sole support of the fairy roof, the 
 stream of lamps, the untasted feast teeming 
 with odours, and Lamia, regal dressed, adding 
 final touches of beauty — where could we find a 
 more exquisite description of the magical ban- 
 quet of love ? And at last the hour has come, 
 and the 'gossip rout' have gathered. How 
 subtle is the thought which represents their va- 
 cant surprise at this high-built fair demesne. 
 
 They knew the street, 
 Remember'd it from childhood, all complete 
 Without a gap, yet ne'er before had seen 
 That royal porch. 
 
 •Thus docs the common herd marvel at the 
 palace of Love whenever it is seen. The faces 
 and the street are familiar, but what is the 
 magical change and difference? It is the expe- 
 rience of every day that the glamour is wrought, 
 and the world resents its own ignorance, and 
 hurries in at the royal porch, mazed, curious, 
 and keen as the guests of Lycius. 
 
 But one guest comes unbidden to the feast. 
 Among the fifty censers of myrrh and spiced 
 wood, among the twelve sphered tables with 
 
154 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 their silken seats upraised on libbards' paws, the 
 heavy gold of cups and goblets, and the merry 
 shining wine ; among 
 
 the gorgeous dyes, 
 The space, the splendour of the draperies ; 
 
 and the ' ncctarous cheer,' there enters Apol- 
 
 lonius. 
 
 Do not all charms fly 
 At the mere touch of cold philosophy ? 
 There was an awful rainbow once in heaven : 
 We know her woof, her texture : she is given 
 In the dull catalogue of common things. 
 Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, 
 Conquer all mysteries by rule and line. 
 
 Even while Lycius would pledge him, the old 
 philosopher's eyes are fixed upon Lamia. The 
 bride's hand lying in her husband's grows cold, 
 then feverishly hot once more, and to the mad- 
 dened appeal of Lycius she returns no answer. 
 She is fading, she knows him no longer, the 
 music is hushed. 
 
 By faint degrees, voice, lute, and pleasure ceased, 
 
 A deadly silence step by step increased, 
 
 Until it seem'd a horrid presence there, 
 
 And not a man but felt the terror in his hair. 
 
 ' Lamia ! ' he shriek'd, and nothing but the shriek, 
 
 With its sad echo, did the silence break. 
 
 In vain he cries to her, in vain he reviles 
 
A STUDY. kc 
 
 .->.-> 
 
 Apollonius. From Lamia there is no answer, 
 and the sage's voice is gruff with contempt as 
 
 he cries, Fool ! 
 
 From every ill 
 Of life have I preserved thee to this day, 
 And shall I sec thee made a serpent's prey ? 
 Then Lamia breathed death-breath : the sophist's eye, 
 Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly, 
 Keen, cruel, perccant, stinging : she, as well 
 As her weak hand would any meaning tell, 
 Motion'd him to be silent : vainly so : 
 He look'd and look'd again a level— No ! 
 'A serpent ! ' echoed he : no sooner said, 
 Than, with a frightful scream, she vanish'd; 
 And Lycius' arms were empty of delight, 
 As were his limbs of life, from that same night. 
 
 • On the high couch he lay — his friends came round, 
 Supported him, no pulse of breath they found, 
 And in its marriage robe the heavy body wound. 
 
 The poem of 'Lamia' illustrates the dis- 
 cordance arising from a limited apprehension 
 of love, as 'Endymion' represents the harmony 
 to be gained from extended vision ; and it is 
 not difficult to see the stage in life to which 
 Keats had come when it was written. It was 
 much more truly the time of which he had pro- 
 phesied when 'the soul is in a ferment, the 
 'character undecided, the way of life uncertain, 
 the ambition thick-sighted,' the time which was 
 
156 JO HA KEATS: 
 
 expressed in 'Otho the Great' as 'yeasting 
 * youth;' when philosophy is at strife with the 
 enthralmcnt of the passions, the mind not 
 having recognised the true unity of life, and 
 the man being partially conscious of that which 
 is strength in him and that which is weakness, 
 yet aware too that the glamour around him has 
 beauty of its own which has claims upon him as 
 strong as those of philosophy. 
 
 It is a truth that the sophist's eye destroys 
 the beautiful vision, but it is not the less sad for 
 being true, nor does it save the heart of Lycius 
 from breaking. 
 
A STUDY. 157 
 
 VII. 
 
 The consideration of the elements of human 
 interest in the poems of Keats would not be 
 materially influenced by closer investigation of 
 the tragedy of ' Otho the Great ' or the unfinished 
 fragment of 'The Cap and Bells.' 
 
 The tragedy of Otho is so obviously not the 
 spontaneous work of Keats, that we can gather 
 nothing of his individuality from it, though every 
 here and there some flash of illuminated thought 
 makes us recognise the young master hand. 1 
 
 1 As, for instance, when Ludolph says of Auranthe : — 
 
 ' Long have I loved thee, yet till now not loved, 
 Remembering, as I do, hard-hearted times, 
 When I had heard e'en of thy death perhaps, 
 And thoughtless, — suffered thee to pass alone 
 Into Elysium ! Now I follow thee, 
 A substance or a shadow, wheresoe'er 
 Thou leadest me— whether thy white feet press, 
 With pleasant weight, the amorous aching earth, 
 Or through the air thou pioneerest me, 
 A shade.' 
 Or, again, when he has killed the deceiver, Albert. 
 1 There goes a spotted soul 
 Howling in vain along the hollow night.' 
 
153 JOHN KEATS : 
 
 The story is one of the sudden revelation of 
 treachery changing love into overmastering re- 
 venge, and it is heavy in its incident, and not 
 specially original in its circumstance. It is a 
 drama without true dramatic inspiration, and 
 contains none of the finer points of contact in 
 character and none of the subtle delineations of 
 personality which give the drama its strongest 
 power over the imagination. The situations are 
 startling, but not picturesque or graphic, and the 
 dialogue is too often explanatory without being 
 interesting. Yet we cannot help looking on it 
 tenderly, for it has beautiful touches of Keats in 
 it here and there, and it was the first dramatic 
 work attempted by the man who desired above 
 all things to be a dramatist, who said his ambition 
 was 'to make as great a revolution in modern 
 'dramatic writing as Kcan had done in acting,' 
 and who felt Shakespeare every day become a 
 greater wonder to him. 
 
 There is far more of the power which might 
 have made Keats a dramatist shown in the 
 wonderful ballad called ' La Belle Dame sans 
 'Merci,' than in either of his premeditated 
 attempts at dramatic writing. When the knight 
 
A STUDY. 159 
 
 tells the story of 'the latest dream he ever 
 1 dreamed/ every line is a dramatic incident, 
 every word is strongly and carefully chosen. 
 The story so simply related reveals itself as 
 tragedy, which the scenery of ' the cold hill side/ 
 'the lake where no birds sing,' and the horrors 
 of the elfin cave skilfully heightens. We leave 
 the poem with a longing that Keats had been 
 able to enrich our literature with many more 
 ballads of the same terse power. 
 
 In 'The Cap and Bells ' Keats seems to have 
 been writing partly for recreation and partly in 
 scornful accordance with the public taste, which 
 claimed to be amused by the poets of the day. 
 It was commenced under the influence of the 
 study of Ariosto, and it flows over with fairy fun, 
 the jokes of Lilliput, the mimic loves of Elfinan 
 and Bertha, the mimic dignities of Hum and 
 Crafticant. It is full of clever allusions and 
 description, and is written with a freedom, ease, 
 and mastery of words which make it a worthy 
 study of composition, though it is unfinished and 
 uncorrected, and does not seem thoroughly char- 
 acteristic of its writer, 
 v But to gain the truest insight into the human 
 
160 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 development of this wondrously rich nature, we 
 must be familiar with the Odes and Sonnets, for 
 the genius of Keats is, perhaps, most fully ex- 
 pressed in the varying chords which they strike, 
 the vibrations they create, the sympathies they 
 awaken, and each life which they touch will in- 
 terpret them for itself, and even a cursory 
 glance at the circumstances under which some 
 of them were written can help us to realise 
 something of the life and personality of Keats. 
 
 The work of most poets might be divided 
 into that which is the result of purpose and that 
 which is the result of circumstance. The result 
 of purpose is generally the outcome of the 
 poet's life of inner thought, that which he has 
 individually won for himself out of all the in- 
 fluences of his time, and this is his maturest 
 work, his most deliberate expression. Such was 
 Shelley's ' Prometheus/ Wordsworth's ' Excur- 
 * sion/ and such would also have been the 
 ' Hyperion ' of Keats. 
 
 But the poetry whose inspiration comes sud- 
 denly from a quickly generated sympathy with 
 passing circumstance has a value of its own ex- 
 ceeding in some ways that of more premeditated 
 
A STUDY. 161 
 
 work, for it pictures to us more vividly the 
 human life of the writer. The actual life of 
 Keats (as moved or touched by human circum- 
 stance), which is revealed in the Odes and Son- 
 nets, makes clearer to us the underlying human 
 truths of ' Endymion ' and ' Hyperion.' Such a 
 poem as the 'Ode to a Nightingale' (written on 
 scraps of paper and thrust away as waste behind 
 some books) is a spontaneous expression of the 
 life the poet was then living. The nightingale 
 sang in the plum-tree at Wentworth Place, and 
 Keats sat and listened to it, and wrote one of 
 the saddest and sweetest poems in our language. 
 It was written in the same year and nearly at 
 the same time as ' Lamia,' when the shadow of 
 his approaching doom seemed to be stealing over 
 him, when his brother Tom, whom he had loved 
 so well, had lately died, when he was waking to 
 consciousness of the love that was his fate. 
 There is noticeable all through the poem that 
 languor and failure of the springs of life which 
 marks the first approach of death, however dis- 
 tant the event may be, and that remarkably 
 quickened sympathy with all natural life which 
 is so often to be seen in those who are doomed 
 
 M 
 
l62 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 to die. It was this sympathy which made 
 Keats write a few months later,; How astonish- 
 • ingly does the chance of leaving the world im- 
 1 press a sense of its natural beauties upon us! 
 
 'The simple flowers of our spring are what I 
 
 ' want to see again.' ' 
 
 It was therefore no mere poetic wish, but the 
 
 expression of a real sadness, which prompted the 
 
 londng 'to fade away into the forest dim' with 
 
 the nightingale. 
 
 Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget 
 
 What thou'among the leaves hast never known, 
 The weariness, the fever, and the fret, 
 
 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan : 
 Where palsy shakes a few sad last grey hairs, 
 
 Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies ; 
 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 
 And leaden-eyed despairs ; 
 
 Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, 
 Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 
 
 We can imagine, too, how his thoughts were 
 haunted by the suffering of his brother's last 
 weeks, when he wrote of being ' half in love with 
 « easeful death ;' and how true it is in that passion- 
 
 • Tennyson has touched on this sympathy of dying life in 
 one of the most beautiful lines of the May Queen. 
 
 < I only wish to live till the snowdrops come again.' 
 
A STUDY. 163 
 
 ately loving nature, which loved even its brothers 
 with more than the love of women, that think- 
 ing of Tom in his new-made grave, and of 
 George faraway in America, John Keats should 
 write from his heart, 
 
 Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell, 
 To toll me back from thee to my sole self. 
 
 The whole of this magical ode seems to 
 make life vocal for us as we read it, but it also 
 brings us very close to the wearied young heart 
 that was nearing death. 
 
 A few months later it was the quiet Sunday 
 walk through the stubble fields near Winchester 
 which won for us the 'Ode to Autumn,' a walk 
 of which Keats writes : 'I never liked stubble 
 'fields as much as now; ay, better than the 
 1 chilly green of spring. Somehow a stubble plain 
 1 looks warm in the way some pictures look warm. 
 'This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk 
 ' that I composed upon it.' And who is there that 
 has not realised the charm of that English land- 
 scape described in the 
 
 Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 
 
 M 2 
 

 164 JOHN KEATS : 
 
 and docs not feci the autumnal glory which had 
 touched the poet when he wrote : — 
 
 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. 
 
 Of the ( Ode to Psyche ' Keats says in a letter 
 written to his brother in America,' in March 
 1819: — 'The following poem, the last I have 
 4 written, is the first and only one with which I 
 4 have taken even moderate pains. I have for 
 
 * the most part dashed off my lines in a hurry : 
 
 * this one I have done leisurely. I think it reads 
 4 the more richly for it, and it will, I hope, en- 
 
 * courage me to write other things in even a 
 4 more peaceable and healthy spirit. You must 
 4 recollect that Psyche was not embodied as a 
 4 goddess before the time of Apulcius the Plato- 
 4 nist, who lived after the Augustan age, and 
 4 consequently the goddess was never worshipped 
 ' or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour, 
 4 and perhaps never thought of in the old reli- 
 4 gion. I am more orthodox than to let a 
 4 heathen goddess be so neglected.' 
 
 This note explains the careful work which 
 

 A STUDY. 165 
 
 resulted in the condensation of beauty in this 
 Ode, the wonderful music of its progress, and 
 the exquisite spirituality of its thoughts. It is a 
 link between ' Hyperion ' and the other poems, 
 for Psyche is 
 
 The latest born and loveliest vision far 
 Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy, 
 
 though she has come to the world too late for 
 temple, shrine, or f palc-mouth'd prophet.' 
 
 O brightest ! though too late for antique vows, 
 Too, too late for the fond believing lyre, 
 
 When holy were the haunted forest boughs, 
 Holy the air, the water, and the fire. 
 
 Again we feel the wondrous power of realis- 
 ing the past and uniting it with the present and 
 the future, which was one of the peculiar inspir- 
 ations of the genius of Keats. This link with 
 the ' faint Olympians ' has in it the very prin- 
 ciple of continuity, the recognition of the grow- 
 ing soul of the ages. For that prophetic gaze, 
 drawing from the past the undying principle of 
 beauty, which it saw also in a distant future, 
 found a fitness in the absence of Psyche from 
 the deities of long ago. It is 'the latest born, 
 'the loveliest vision far;' it comes into the 
 
1 66 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 world unrecognised and as yet unworshipped 
 save by one here and there, ' who sees and sings 
 
 • by his own eyes inspired.' But such an one 
 will be its priest, and in ' some untrodden region 
 
 • of the mind ' its sanctuary shall be made, 
 
 Where branched thoughts, new-grown with pleasant pain, 
 Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind. 
 
 The 'Ode on Melancholy* seems to have 
 been partly influenced by the verses at the com- 
 mencement of Burton's 'Anatomy of Melan- 
 1 choly,' which suggest that fulfilled joy is 
 melancholy, and that the other side of every 
 pleasure is pain. But the thought of Keats 
 goes beyond this, he sees the sadness of all joy, 
 and that it is not the acknowledged grief of our 
 lives which is the secret of true melancholy, but 
 that our gladness should be what it is. It is 
 not the wolf's-bane, the night-shade, the yew 
 berries, the death-moth, that are the saddest 
 emblems; it is 'the morning rose/ 'the rainbow 
 1 of the salt sand-wave,' ' the wealth of globed 
 'peonies,' ' the peerless eyes 'of her that is loved. 
 The most sorrowful reality of melancholy is 
 that 
 
A STUDY. 167 
 
 She dwells with Beauty — "Beauty that must die, 
 And Joy whose hand is ever at his lips, 
 Bidding adieu. 
 
 A curious change was made in the original, 
 and Lord Houghton quotes an opening verse 
 of it which was suppressed as being dispropor- 
 tionately horrible to the rest. It is one of the 
 grimmest word-pictures Keats ever drew. 
 
 Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones, 
 
 And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, 
 Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans 
 
 To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast ; 
 Although your rudder be a dragon's tail 
 
 Long severed, yet still hard with agony, 
 Your cordage large uprootings from the skull 
 • Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail 
 To find the melancholy — whether she 
 
 Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull. 
 
 In the ' Ode on Indolence,' the passing and re- 
 passing of the shadowy figures of Love, Ambi- 
 tion, and Poetry, and the weariness with which 
 the poet looks at them and turns from them, 
 brings to us the same feeling as the ' Ode to the 
 * Nightingale,' the failure of vitality, the begin- 
 ning of the end, the appealing beauty of the 
 flower which is about to fall. It is a depth of 
 suffering loneliness that no human comfort could 
 
i6S JOHN KEATS: 
 
 reach or touch which speaks to us from the 
 
 words, 
 
 Farewell ! I yet have visions for the night, 
 And for the clay faint visions there is store. 
 
 Very different is the Ode which commences, 
 
 Bards of passion and of mirth, 
 Ye have left your souls on earth ; 
 Have ye souls in heaven too, 
 Double-lived in regions new ? 
 
 It is in a short monotonous metre, but is full 
 of fire and of human feeling, and its joyous 
 hopefulness contrasts with the sadness in most 
 of the other odes. 
 
 After imagining the joys on which the souls 
 of poets have entered, 
 
 Where the daisies are rose-scented, 
 And the rose herself has got 
 Perfume which on earth is not. 
 Where the nightingale doth sing, 
 Not a senseless tranced thing, 
 But divine melodious truth ; 
 
 it goes on to glory in the thought that in their 
 works these same souls are still living on earth, 
 and that those who arc able to receive them are 
 prepared by them for their further life of joy, so 
 that they are double lived. 
 
A STUDY. 169 
 
 Thus ye live on high, and then 
 
 On the earth ye live again ; 
 
 And the souls ye left behind you 
 
 Teach us, here, the way to find 1, 
 
 Where your other souls are jo] 
 
 Never slumber'd, never cloyin 
 
 Here your earth-born souls stili speak 
 
 To mortals, of their little week ; 
 
 Of their sorrows and delights, 
 
 Of their passions and their spites, 
 
 Of their glory and their shame, 
 
 What doth strengthen and what maim. 
 
 Thus ye teach us every day 
 
 Wisdom, though fled far away. 
 
 The same idea is to be found in a less ele- 
 vated form in the lines on the Mermaid Tavern. 
 
 But the wide-reaching thought, the high 
 conception, and the repressed feeling of the ' Ode 
 'on a Grecian Urn' makes it perhaps the crown- 
 ing glory of the shorter poems. It is the inspira- 
 tion of one of those hours when the quiet of the 
 great past seems a more powerful influence than 
 the action of the present or purposes of the 
 future. It is not joyful, for its thought is too calm 
 for joy, and it is not sorrowful, for its calm is too 
 deep for sorrow. It has gathered from all time 
 the abiding principle of Beauty, and sees in 
 its undying power the true friend of man. 
 
i 7 o JO MX KEATS 
 
 ODE ON A GRECIAN URN 
 
 Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness ! 
 
 Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time, 
 Sylvan historian, who canst thus express 
 
 A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme ; 
 What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape 
 
 Of deities or mortals, or of both 
 In Tempo or the dales of Arcady? 
 What men or gods are these ? what maidens loath ? 
 
 What mad pursuit ? what struggle to escape ? 
 What pipes and timbrels ? what wild ecstasy ? 
 
 Heard melodies arc sweet, but those unheard 
 
 Are sweeter ; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on ; 
 Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, 
 
 Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone ; 
 Fair youth beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 
 
 Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare. 
 Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, 
 Though winning near the goal— yet, do not grieve ; 
 
 She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, 
 For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair ! 
 
 Ah, happy, happy boughs ! that cannot shed 
 
 Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu ; 
 And, happy melodist, unwearied, 
 
 For ever piping songs for ever new. 
 More happy love ! more happy, happy love ! 
 For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, 
 For ever panting and for ever young ; 
 All breathing human passion far above, 
 
 That leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloy'd, 
 A burning forehead and a parching tongue. 
 
A STUDY. 171 
 
 Who are these coming to the sacrifice? 
 
 To what green altar, O mysterious priest, 
 Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, 
 
 And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? 
 What little town by river or sea-shore, 
 
 Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, 
 Is emptied of its folk this pious morn ? 
 And, little town, thy streets for evermore 
 
 Will silent be ; and not a soul to tell 
 Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. 
 
 O Attic shape ! Fair attitude ! with brede 
 
 Of marble men and maidens overwrought, 
 With forest branches and the crodden weed ; 
 
 Thou silent form ! dost tease us out of thought 
 As doth eternity : cold pastoral ! 
 
 When old age shall this generation waste 
 Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 
 Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st 
 
 4 Beauty is truth, truth beauty* — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 
 
 The Past is made alive in these words, its 
 
 beauty has never died, and the very material in 
 
 which the Attic shape is wrought is infused with 
 
 life, the love of ' the happy melodist, unwearied,' 
 
 For ever piping songs for ever new ; 
 
 the sacrifice of the mysterious priest, ' the 
 1 little town by river or sea-shore,' from which 
 the folk have come ' this pious morn,' arc real 
 to us. 
 
172 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 The ' Ode to the Nightingale ' is full of a 
 pathos and regret which are quite absent here, 
 but the Grecian Urn represents a higher phase 
 of thought. There is a touch of bitterness 
 mingled with the poet's joy in the immortality 
 of the nightingale's music. 
 
 Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird, 
 No hungry generations tread thee dozen ; 
 
 The voice I hear this passing night was heard 
 In ancient days by emperor and clown. 
 
 But there is no bitterness in the quieted spirit 
 which has been so penetrated by the beauty of 
 a bygone age that it can joy to know of this 
 symbol of Greek calm. 
 
 When old age shall this generation waste, 
 Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 
 
 Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 
 * Beauty is truth, truth beauty ' — that is all 
 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 
 
 The Sonnets are much more unequal than 
 the Odes in composition, some of them rising to 
 an inspired completeness, but some of them also 
 containing only a few lines of abiding beauty. 
 
 Not even Wordsworth himself has entered 
 more reverently and selflessly into the world of 
 natural beauty than Keats, feeling its power 
 
A STUDY. 173 
 
 and part in that great whole to which man also 
 belongs, and in the Sonnets we have much of 
 the spontaneous expression of this sympathy. 
 In ' the alley where the fir-cone drops,' in the 
 
 new soft-fallen mask 
 Of snow upon the mountains and the moors ; 
 
 in the lone winter evening when the frost * has 
 1 wrought a silence ; ' in the ' fresh-blown musk 
 * rose ; ' in ' the blue of the forget-me-not ; ' in the 
 ripening of the autumn fruits and golden corn, 
 he found for us that ' the poetry of earth is never 
 1 dead.' 
 
 The sea had a special fascination for Keats. 
 We find its influence in the idealisation of cliff 
 scenery in ' Endymion ' and in the utterances of 
 the Titans in ' Hyperion,' which might have been 
 inspired by the noise of waves in rocky chasms 
 and hollow caves. One of the earliest sonnets 
 contains the lines so crude in expression, but so 
 pregnant with descriptive power : — 
 
 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. 
 
 A sonnet written in April 1S17 is inspired 
 
. 
 
 174 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 by the words in Lear, ' Hark, do you hear the 
 1 sea ? ' and is introduced by Keats in a letter 
 written from Carisbrooke to his friend Reynolds. 
 
 TO THE SEA. 
 
 It keeps eternal whisperings around 
 
 Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell 
 Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell 
 
 Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound. 
 
 Often 'tis in such gentle temper found, 
 That scarcely will the very smallest shell 
 Be moved for days from whence it sometime fell 
 
 When last the winds of heaven were unbound. 
 
 Oh ye ! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired, 
 Feast them upon the wideness of the sea. 
 
 Oh ye ! whose ears are dimm'd with uproar rude, 
 Or fed too much with cloying melody, 
 
 Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth, and brood 
 
 Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quired. 
 
 This was written at the time ' Endymion ' was 
 just begun, and to the last the thought of this 
 1 wideness of the sea ' was with Keats, and 
 associated always with comforting and restora- 
 tion. In the last sonnet of all we have a 
 wonderful parting thought of it. 
 
 Bright star ! would I were steadfast as thou art. 
 
 Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night 
 And watching, with eternal lids apart 
 
 Like Nature's patient sleepless eremite, 
 
A STUDY. 175 
 
 The moving waters at their priest-like 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, 
 
 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. 
 
 It is always our familiar English scenery 
 which is described by Keats, and given 'the con- 
 1 secration and the poet's dream,' for foreign 
 countries were unknown to him until his time 
 for writing was over, but this very consecration 
 of our common world is one of his strongest 
 claims upon our gratitude. Who that knows 
 his poems docs not now hear in the song of the 
 thrush the warning contained in the exquisite 
 unrhymed sonnet : — 
 
 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 ? 
 
 Who has not felt the thrill of life in the 
 
 words, 
 
 when the deer's swift leap 
 
 Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell ? 
 
176. JOHN KEATS : 
 
 or has not seemed to hear the cry of the sea 
 birds round Ailsa rock, which is ' dead asleep,' 
 or has failed to take into his soul the music of 
 these lines ? 
 
 After dark vapours have oppress'd our plains 
 For a long dreary season, comes a day 
 Born of the gent'e south, and clears away 
 
 From the sick heavens all unseemly stains. 
 
 The anxious mouth, relieved from its pains, 
 Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May. 
 The eyelids with the passing coolness play 
 
 Like rose-leaves with the drip of summer rains. 
 
 And'.calmest thoughts come round us, as of leaves 
 Budding, fruit ripening in stillness, autumn suns 
 
 Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves — . 
 
 Sweet Sappho's cheek, a sleeping infant's breath, 
 The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs, 
 
 A woodland rivulet, a poet's death. 
 
 1 I do not live in this world alone, but in a 
 1 thousand worlds,' Keats wrote most truly, and 
 truly too may the words which he spoke so re- 
 verently of Shakespeare's poetry be said of his 
 own ; — ' it knows no stop in its delight, but 
 * " goeth where it listeth," remaining, however, in 
 4 all men's hearts a perpetual and golden dream.' 
 
 But the Sonnets were also the expression of 
 some of Keats' s truest friendships, and the strong 
 personal love and appreciation enshrined in 
 
A STUDY. 177 
 
 many of them throw a clear light on the emo- 
 tional side of his character. Those addressed to 
 Leigh Hunt, to Reynolds, to George Keats, to 
 Kosciusko, to Haydon, arc full of warmth and 
 genuine sympathy ; while those to Homer, to 
 Spenser, to Chatterton, to Byron, and to Burns, 
 show a power of assimilation and of insight 
 which belongs only to minds of the rarest order. 
 And the Sonnets lead us even closer to the 
 personality of Keats when they touch his indi- 
 vidual life, and reveal to us the conflicting ele- 
 ments which were battling in that sensitive and 
 many-impulsed heart. The one written in 18 17, 
 which commences, 
 
 When I have fears that I may cease to be, 
 Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, 
 
 has now the pathos and sacredncss of a fulfilled 
 prophecy. Another, written in 18 19, has in it 
 much of the weariness and sorrow which are ex- 
 pressed in the 'Ode to the Nightingale' (the 
 actual words indeed repeat themselves in it, ' Vet 
 ' would I on this very midnight cease'), but it 
 goes beyond the Ode in its passionate intensity, 
 in its loosening hold of life, and realisation of 
 the infinity of death. 
 
 N 
 
1/8 JOHN KEATS: 
 
 Why did I laugh to-night ? No voice will tell, 
 
 No god, no demon of severe response 
 Deigns to reply from heaven or from hell. 
 
 Then to my human heart I turn at once. 
 Heart ! thou and I are here sad and alone ; 
 
 I say, why did I laugh ? O mortal pain ! 
 O darkness, darkness ; must I ever moan 
 
 To question heaven and hell and heart in vain, 
 Why did I laugh? I know this being's lease, 
 
 My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads : 
 Yet would 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. 
 
 In the sonnet commencing 
 
 I cry your mercy — pity — love — ay, love — 
 
 we get a glimpse of his feeling towards her 
 whom he loved as it has been the lot of few 
 women to be loved, a feeling too sacred to be 
 dragged into the light of common day by any 
 comment even from those who most reverence 
 John Keats. 
 
 And it is almost exclusively in the Sonnets 
 that we find direct allusion to that without 
 which no poet is closely linked to his fellow- 
 men — the emotion of religion. 
 
 There is a curious silence throughout the 
 poems on the subject oi religious belief. While 
 
A STUDY 179 
 
 Shelley crusaded against the accepted forms of 
 religion, while Byron in turn rejected and threw 
 new feeling into them, Keats simply 'ignored 
 them all. It would almost seem as though in 
 the rich and slow development of his mind he 
 had not reached to a consciousness of the reli- 
 gious aspirations of man ; as if the beauty of life- 
 had satisfied his imagination so fully, and so 
 wholly occupied it, that this part of his nature 
 still lay dormant, were it not that through 
 1 Endymion* and ' Hyperion 'there is a diffused 
 spirituality which gives us even more the im- 
 pression of a mind liberated from the desire of 
 definite religious expression because permeated 
 with its essence, while the subjects of the poems 
 would necessarily, by their mythological cha- 
 racter, exclude the religious beliefs of modern 
 times from being introduced. Our thoughts go 
 back to the expressive allusions in his early 
 poem, i Sleep and Poetry.' 
 
 Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things, 
 And die away in ardent mutterings. 
 
 No one who once the glorious sun has seen. 
 And all the clouds, and felt his bosom clean 
 For his great Maker's presence, but must know 
 iVhat 'tis I mean, and feel his being glow ; 
 
tSo JO II X KEATS : 
 
 but we look in vain among the shorter poems 
 and the Sonnets for any formal expression of 
 religious belief or controversy with it. We find 
 none, and in only two of the Sonnets is there 
 any marked allusion to it. One of these is the 
 ' Sonnet to Kosciusko/ which ends : — 
 
 . Thy name with Alfred's, and the great of yore, 
 Gently commingling, gives tremendous birth 
 To a loud hymn, that sounds far, far away, 
 To where the great God lives for evermore. 
 
 And the other is the • Sonnet on Ben Nevis.' 
 
 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 
 , Vaporous 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 tTie world of thought and mental might. 
 
 This might be taken as an expression of 
 the opinion that 'nothing is provable/ were it 
 not that there are one or two incidental com- 
 
A STUDY. i Si 
 
 mcnts in the letters which show us that, however 
 little formulated, there was some wider hope 
 underlying the religious consciousness of Keats. 
 In writing to tell his brother George of Tom's 
 death, he says : ' I have a firm belief in immor- 
 ' tality, and so had Tom The going on 
 
 * of the world makes me dizzy Sonie- 
 
 1 times I imagine an immense separation, and 
 ' sometimes, as at present, a direct communica- 
 1 tion of spirit with you. That will be one of the 
 4 grandeurs of immortality. There will be no 
 
 * space, and consequently the only commerce 
 1 between spirits will be. by their intelligence of 
 1 each other — when they will completely under- 
 
 * stand each other in different degrees. The 
 
 * higher the degree of good, so higher is our love 
 1 and friendship.' 
 
 Again in writing, in September 1S1S, to his 
 friend Mr. Bailey, he says : ' You know my ideas 
 1 about religion. I do not think myself more in 
 1 the right than other people, and that nothing in 
 ' this world is provable. I wish I could enter 
 
 * into all your feelings on the subject merely for 
 1 one short ten minutes, and give you a page or 
 1 two to your liking.' 
 
l82 JOIIX KEATS. 
 
 To the Christian religion he makes hardly 
 any allusion, though there is one passage in his 
 letters on 'the disinterested heart of Jesus.' 
 
 From all this we may fairly drawthe inference 
 that his nature, though essentially a spiritual one, 
 had not crystallised for itself or had transmitted 
 to it any distinct form of religious belief; that 
 he was reticent on the subject, and had not 
 formed any decided opinions ; and that, had he 
 lived to be older, his genius would have ex- 
 pressed whatever truth it might have grasped, 
 not within any circumscribed limits, but with that 
 far-reaching power and prophetic insight which 
 enable the spirit to embrace the need of an age 
 beyond its own. 
 
 Meanwhile John Keats has left to us the 
 stainless memory of a pure and loving heart, and 
 the fruit of a life which ' worshipped the prin- 
 * ciple of Beauty in all things,' making clearer for 
 us, by his vast and interpretative thought, the 
 enigmas of human change and joy and grief; 
 while he shows us that to love Beauty is to 
 love Truth, and that when we are spiritualised 
 enough to recognise them, both shall appear to 
 us as one.- It is 'the completed form of all 
 
A STUDY. 183 
 
 'completeness' for which- our spirits have been 
 searching, and we shall know it as Reality. 
 
 He is a portion of the loveliness 
 
 Which once he made more lovely. He cloth bear 
 His part, while the One Spirit's plastic stress 
 Sweeps through the dull dense world ; compelling there 
 
 All new successions to the forms they wear ; 
 Torturing the unwilling dross, that checks its flight 
 
 To its own likeness, as each mass may bear ; 
 And bursting in its beauty and its might 
 From trees and beasts and men into the heaven's light. 
 
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