Q/Xneire/cca ouum Avmuir anM 'Mcle^ t/nia Ooo/cvd Hca on u/ncrrrt, you Cot?K: •L^nro/ca//^ ncaomoina ¥acAu.J(wA .yiru/ eA:/cen "6reat Mriters." EDITED BY PROFESSOR ERIC S. ROBERTSON, M.A. LIFE OF KEATS. LIFE OF JOHN KEATS. BY WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTL LONDON WALTER SCOTT 24 WARWICK LANE, PATERNOSTER ROW 1887 (Al/ rights reserved.) CONTENTS CHAPTER I. PAGE. Keats's grandfather Jennings ; his father and mother ; Keats bom in London, October 31, 1795 J his brothers and sister ; goes to the school of John Clarke at Enfield, and is tutored by Charles Cowden Clarke ; death of his parents ; is apprenticed to a surgeon, Hammond ; leaves Hammond, and studies surgery ; reads Spenser, and takes to poetry ; his literaiy acquaintances — Leigh Hunt, Haydon, J. Hamilton Reynolds, Dilke, &c. ; Keats's first volume, "Poems," 1817 II CHAPTER II. Keats begins "Endymion," May 1817; his health suffers in Oxford; finishes *' Endymion" in November; his friend, Charles Armitage Brown ; his brother George marries and emigrates to America ; Keats and Brown make a walking tour in Scotland and Ireland ; returns to Hamp- stead, owing to a sore throat ; death of his brother Tom ; his description of Miss Cox ("Charmian"), and of Miss Brawne, with whom he falls in love ; a difference with CONTENTS. PAGE Haydon ; visits Winchester ; George Keats returns for a short while from America, but goes away again with- out doing anything to relieve John Keats from straits in money matters 23 CHAPTER III. Keats's consumptive illness begins, February 1820 ; he rallies, but has a relapse in June ; he stays with Leigh Hunt, and leaves him suddenly; publication of his last volume, * ' Lamia " &c. ; returns to Hampstead before starting for Italy ; his love-letters to Miss Brawne — extracts; Haydon's last sight of him ; he sails for Italy with Joseph Severn ; letter to Brown ; Naples and Rome ; extracts from Severn's letters ; Keats dies in Rome, February 23, 1821 . 40 CHAPTER IV. Keats rhymes in infancy ; his first writings, the '* Imitation of Spenser," and some sonnets ; not precocious as a poet ; his sonnet on Chapman's Homer ; contents of his first volume, " Poems," 1817 ; Hunt's first sight of his poems in MS. ; "Sleep and Poetry," extract regarding poetry of the Pope school, &c. ; the publishers, Messrs. Oilier, give up the volume as a failure 64 CHAPTER V. *'Endymion"; Keats's classical predilections; extract (from *' I stood tiptoe " &c.) about Diana and Endymion ; details as to the composition of '* Endymion," 1817 ; preface to the poem ; the critique in The Quarterly Review ; attack in BlackiuoocTs Magazine ; question whether Keats broke down under hostile criticism ; evidence on this subject in his own letters, and by Shelley, Lord Houghton, Haydon, Byron, Hunt, George Keats, Cowden Clarke, Severn ; conclusion 73 CONTENTS, 7 CHAPTER VI. FACE Poems included in the "Lamia" volume, 1820; "Isabella"; "The Eve of St. Agnes"; "Hyperion"; "Lamia"; five odes; other poems — sonnet on "The Nile"; "The Eve of St. Mark," "Otho the Great," " La Belle Dame sans Merci," "The Cap and Bells," final sonnet, &c. ; prose writings 107 CHAPTER VII. Keats's grave in Rome ; projects of Brown and others for writing his Life ; his brother George, and his sister, Mrs. Llanos ; Miss Brawne ; discussion as to Hunt's friendship to Keats; other friends — Bailey, Haydon, Shelley . .118 CHAPTER VIII. Keats's appearance ; portraits ; difficulties in estimating his character ; his poetic ambition, and feeling on subjects of historical or public interest ; his intensity of thought ; moral tone ; question as to his strength of character — Haydon's opinion ; demeanour among friends ; studious resolves ; suspicious tendency ; his feeling toward women — poem quoted ; love of flowers and music ; politics ; irritation against Leigh Hunt ; his letters ; antagonism to science ; remarks on contemporary writers ; axioms on poetry ; self-analysis as to his perceptions as a poet ; feel- ings as to painting ; sense of humour, punning*, &c. ; in- difference in religious matters ; his sentiments as to the immortality of the soul ; fondness for wine and game ; summary ......... 124 CHAPTER IX. Influence of Spenser discussed ; flimsiness of Keats's first volume ; early sonnets ; " Endymion " ; Shelley's criti- cisms of this poem ; detailed argument of the poem ; esti- CONTENTS. PAGE. mate of " Endymion " as to invention and execution; estimate of *' Isabella " ; of " The Eve of St. Agnes " ; of *' The Eve of St. Mark " ; of " Hyperion " ; of " Otho the Great"; of "Lamia"; *'La Belle Dame sans Merci " quoted and estimated ; Keats's five great odes — extracts ; * * Beauty is truth, truth beauty " ; imagination in verbal form distinctive of Keats ; discussion of the term "fault- less " applied to Keats ; details of execution in the "Ode to a Nightingale " ; other odes, sonnets, and lyrics ; treat- ment of women in Keats's last volume ; his references to "swooning"; his sensuousness and its correlative senti- ment ; superiority of Shelley to Keats ; final remarks as to the quality of Keats's poetry 163 INDEX NOTE IN all important respects I leave this brief " Life of Keats " to speak for itself. There is only one point which I feel it needful to dwell upon. In the summer of 1886 I was invited to undertake a life of Keats for the present series, and I assented. Some while afterwards it was publicly announced that a life of Keats, which had been begun by Mr. Sidney Colvin long before for a different series, would be published at an early date. I read up my materials, began in March 1887 the writing of my book, finished it on June 3rd, and handed it over to the editor. On June loth Mr. Colvin's volume was published. I at once read it, and formed a high opinion of its merits, and I found in it some new details which could not properly be ignored by any succeeding bio- grapher of the poet. I therefore got my MS. back, and inserted here and there such items of fresh information as were really needful for the true presentment of my subject-matter. In justice both to Mr. Colvin and to myself I drew upon his pages for only a minimum, not a maximum, of the facts which they embody ; and in all matters of opinion and criticism I left my MS. exactly as it stood. The reader will thus understand that the present " Life of Keats " is, in planning, structure, execu- tion, and estimate, entirely independent of Mr. Colvin's ; but that I have ultimately had the advantage of consult- ing Mr. Colvin's book as one of my various sources of information — the latest and within its own lines the com- pletest of all. LIFE OF KEATS. CHAPTER I. A TRUISM must do duty as my first sentence There are long lives, and there are eventful lives : there are also short lives, and uneventful ones. Keats's life was both short and uneventful. To the differing classes of lives different modes of treatment may pro- perly be applied by the biographer. In the case of a writer whose life was both long and eventful, I might feel disposed to carry the whole narrative forward pari passu, and to exhibit in one panorama the outward and the inward career, the incidents and the product, the doings .and environment, and the writings, acting and re-acting upon one another. In the instance of Keats this does not appear to me to be the most fitting method. It may be more appropriate to apportion his Life into two sec- tions : and to treat firstly of his general course from the cradle to the grave, and secondly of his performances in literature. The two things will necessarily overlap to some extent, but I shall keep them apart so far as may be convenient. When we have seen what he did and what he wrote, we shall be prepared to enter upon some analysis of his character and personality. This will form 12 LIFE OF my third section ; and in a fourth I shall endeavour to estimate the quality and value of his writings, in particu- lar and in general. Thus I address myself in the first instance to a narrative of the outer facts of his life. John Keats came of undistinguished parentage. No biographer carries his pedigree further than his maternal grandfather, or alleges that there was any trace, however faint or remote, of ancestral eminence. The maternal grandfather was a Mr. Jennings, who kept a large livery- stable, called the Swan and Hoop, in the Pavement, Moorfields, London, opposite the entrance to Finsbury Circus. The principal stableman or assistant in the busi- ness was named Thomas Keats, of Devonshire or Cornish parentage. He was a well-conducted, sensible, good- looking little man, and won the favour of Jennings's daughter, named Frances or Fanny : they married, and this rather considerable rise in his fortunes left Keats unassuming and manly as before. He appears to have been a natural gentleman. Jennings was a prosperous tradesman, and might have died rich (his death took place in 1805) but for easy-going good-nature tending to the gullible. Mrs. Keats seems to have been in charac- ter less uniform and single-minded than her husband. She is described as passionately fond of amusement,, prodigal, dotingly attached to her children, more especially John, much beloved by them in return, sensible, and at the same time saturnine in demeanour : a personable tall w^oman with a large oval face. Her pleasure-seeking tendency probably led her into some imprudences, for her first baby, John, was a seven months' child. KEATS. 13 John Keats was born at the Moorfields place of busi- ness on the 31st of October 1795. This date of birth is estabhshed by the register of baptisms at St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate : the date usually assigned, the 29th of October, appears to be inaccurate, though Keats himself, and others of the family, believed in it. There were three other children of the marriage — or four if we reckon a a son who died in infancy : George, Thomas, and lastly Fanny, born in March 1803. An anecdote is told of John when in the fifth year of his age, purporting to show forth the depth of his childish affection for his mother. It is said that she then lay seriously ill ; and John stood sentinel at her chamber-door, holding an old sword which he had picked up about the premises, and he remained there for hours to prevent her being disturbed. One may fear, however, that this anecdote has taken an ideal ■colouring through the lens of a partial biographer. The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon — who, as we shall see in the sequel, was extremely well acquainted with John Keats, and who heard the story from his brother Thomas — records it thus : " He was, when an infant, a most violent and ungovernable child. At five years of age or thereabouts he once got hold of a naked sword, and, shutting the door, swore nobody should go out. His mother wanted to do so; but he threatened her so furiously she began to cry, and was obliged to wait till somebody, through the window, saw her position, and •came to her rescue." It can scarcely be supposed that there were two different occasions when the quinquennial John Keats superintended his mother and her belongings with a naked sword — once in ardent and self-obHvious 14 LIFE OF affection, and once in petulant and froward excite- ment. The parents would have liked to send John to Harrow- school : but, this being finally deemed too expensive, he was placed in the Rev. John Clarke's school at Enfield, then in high repute, and his brothers followed him thither. The Enfield schoolhouse was a fine red-brick building of the early eighteenth century, said to have been erected by a retired West India merchant; the materials ''moulded into designs decorating the front with garlands of flowers and pomegranates, together with heads of cherubim over two niches in the centre of the building." This central part of the fagade was eventually purchased for the South Kensington Museum, and figures there as a screen in the structural division. The schoolroom was forty feet long; the playground was a spacious courtyard between the schoolroom and the house itself; a garden, a hundred yards in length, stretched beyond the playground, suc- ceeded by a sweep of greensward, with a "lake" or well- sized pond : there was also a two-acre field with a couple of cows. In this commodious seat of sound learning, well cared for and well instructed so far as his school course extended, John Keats remained for some years. He came under the particular observation of the head- master's son, Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke, not very many years his senior. He was born in 1787, fostered Keats's interest in literature, became himself an industrious writer of some standing, and died in 1877. Keats at school did not show any exceptional talent, but he was, according to Mr. Cowden Clarke's phrase, " a very orderly scholar,'' and got easily through his tasks. In the last eighteen KEATS, 15 months of his schooling he took a new lease of assiduity : he read a vast deal, and would keep to his book even during meals. For two or three successive half-years he obtained the first prize for voluntary work ; and was to be found early and late attending to some translation from the Latin or the French, to which he would, when allowed his own way, sacrifice his recreation-time. He was particularly fond of Lempribre's " Classical Diction- ary," Tooke's ** Pantheon," and Spence's " Polymetis " : a line of reading presageful of his own afterwork in the region of Greek mythology. Of the Grecian language, however, he learned nothing : in Latin he proceeded as far as the ^neid, and of his own accord translated much of that epic in writing. Two of his favourite books were " Robinson Crusoe " and Marmontel's " Incas of Peru." He must also have made some acquaintance with Shake- speare, as he told a younger schoolfellow that he thought no one durst read " Macbeth " alone in the house at two in the morning. Not indeed that these bookish leanings formed the whole of his personality as a schoolboy. He was noticeable for beauty of face and expression^ active and energetic, intensely pugnacious, and even quarrel- some. He was very apt to get into a fight with boys much bigger than himself. Nor was his younger brother George exempted : John would fight fiercely with George, and this (if we may trust George's testimony) was always owing to John's own unmanageable temper. The two brothers were none the less greatly attached, both at school and afterwards. The youngest brother, Thomas (always called Tom in family records), is reported to have been as pugilistic as John ; whereas George, when 16 LIFE OF allowed his own w^ay, was pacific, albeit resolute. The ideal of all the three boys was a maternal uncle, a naval officer of very stalwart presence, who had been in Admiral Duncan's ship in the famous action off Camper- down ; where he had distinguished himself not only by signal gallantry, but by not getting shot, though his tall form was a continual mark for hostile guns. While still a schoolboy at Enfield, John Keats lost both his parents. The father died on the 1 6th of April 1 804, in returning from a visit to the school : a detail which serves to show us (for I do not find it otherwise affirmed) that John could at the utmost have been only in the ninth year of his age, possibly even younger, when his schooling began. On leaving Enfield, the father dined at Southgate, and, going late homewards, his horse fell in the City Road, and the rider's skull was fractured. He was found about one o'clock in the mornmg speechless, and expired towards eight, aged thirty-six. The mother suffered from rheumatism, and later on from consumption ; of which she died in February 18 10. "John," so writes Haydon, *'satup whole nights with her in a great chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine or even cook her food but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease." She had been an easily consoled widow, for, within a year from the decease of her first husband, she married an- other, William Rawlings, who had probably succeeded to the management of the business. She soon, however, separated from Rawlings, and lived with her mother at Edmonton. After her death Keats hid himself for some days in a nook under his master's desk, passionately in- consolable. The four children, who inherited from their grandparents (chiefly from their grandmother) a moderate KEATS. 17 fortune of nearly ;^8,ooo altogether, in which the daugh- ter had the largest share, were then left under the guardian- ship of Mr. Abbey, a city merchant residing at Waltham- stow. At the age of fifteen, or at some date before the close of 1810, John quitted his school. A little stave of doggrel which Keats wrote to his sister, probably in July 181 8, gives a glimpse of what he was like at the time when he and his brothers were living with their grandmother. " There was a naughty boy, And a naughty boy was he : He kept little fishes In washing-tubs three, In spite Of the might Of the maid, Nor afraid Of his granny good. He often would Hurly-burly Get up early And go By hook or crook To the brook, And bring home Miller's-thumb, Tittlebat, Not over fat, Minnows small As the stall Of a glove, Not above The size Of a nice Little baby's Little fingers." 18 LIFE OF He was fond of " goldfinches, tomtits, minnows, mice, ticklebacks, dace, cock-salmons, and all the whole tribe of the bushes and the brooks." A career in life was promptly marked out for the youth. While still aged fifteen, he was apprenticed, with a pre- mium of ;^2io, to Mr. Hammond, a surgeon of some repute at Edmonton. Mr. Cowden Clarke says that this arrangement evidently gave Keats satisfaction : apparently he refers rather to the convenient vicinity of Edmonton to Enfield than to the surgical profession itself. The indenture was to have lasted five years ; but, for some reason which is not wholly apparent, Keats left Hammond before the close of his apprenticeship.^ If Haydon was rightly informed (presumably by Keats himself), the reason was that the youth resented surgery as the antago- nist of a possible poetic vocation, and "at last his master, weary of his disgust, gave him up his time." He then took to walking St. Thomas's Hospital ; and, after a short * A small point here may deserve a note. A letter from John Keats to his brother George, under date of September 21st, 1819, contains the following words : *' Our bodies, every seven years, are completely fresh-materialed : seven years ago it was not this hand that clenched itself against Hammond." Another version of the same letter (the true wording of which is matter of some dispute) substitutes : "Mine is not the same hand I clenched at Hammond's." Mr. Buxton Forman, who gives the former phrase as the genuine one, thinks that " this phrase points to a serious rupture as the cause of his quitting his apprenticeship to Hammond." My own inclina- tion is to surmise that the accurate reading may be — " It was not this hand that clenched itself against Hammond's " ; indicating, not any quarrel, but the friendly habitual clasp of hand against hand. ** Seven years ago " would reach back to September 1812 ; whereas Keats did not part from Hammond until 18 14. KEATS. 19 ■stay at No. 8 Dean Street, Borough, and next in St. Thomas's Street, he resided along with his two brothers — who were at the time clerks in Mr. Abbey's office — in the Poultry, Cheapside, over the passage which led to the -Queen's Arms Tavern. Two of his surgical companions were Mr. Henry Stephens, who afterwards introduced •creosote into medical practice, and Mr. George Wilson Mackereth. Keats attended the usual lectures, and made •careful annotations in a book still preserved. Mr. Stephens relates that Keats was fond of scribbling rhyme •of a sort among professional notes, especially those of a fellow-student, and he sometimes showed graver verses to his associates. Finally, in July 1815, he passed the ex- amination at Apothecaries' Hall with considerable credit — more than his familiars had counted upon ; and in March 181 6 he was appointed a dresser at Guy's under Mr. Lucas. Cowden Clarke once inquired how far Keats liked his studies at the hospital. The youth re- plied that he did not relish anatomy : " The other day, for instance, during the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray, and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland." Readers of Keats's poetry will have no difficulty in believing that, ever since his first introduction into a professional life, surgery and literature had claimed a divided allegiance from him. When at Edmonton with Mr. Hammond, he kept up his connection with the Clarke family, especially with Charles Cowden Clarke. He was perpetually borrowing books ; and at last, about the beginning of 1812, he asked for Spenser's 20 LIFE OF " Faery Queen," rather to the surprise of the family, who had no idea that that particular book could be at all in his line. The effect, however, was very noticeable. Keats walked to Enfield at least once a week, for the purpose of talking over Spenser with Cowden Clarke. "He ramped through the scenes of the romance," said Clarke, "like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." A fine touch of description or of imagery, or energetic epithets such as "the sea-shouldering whale," would light up his face with ecstasy. His leisure had already been given to reading and translation, including the completion of his rendering of the ^neid. A literary craving was now at fever -heat, and he took to writing verses as well as reading them. Soon surgery and letters were to conflict no longer — the latter ob- taining, contrary to the liking of Mr. Abbey, the absolute and permanent mastery. Keats indeed always denied that he abandoned surgery for the express purpose of taking to poetry : he alleged that his motive had been the dread of doing some mischief in his surgical opera- tions. His last operation consisted in opening a temporal artery ; he was entirely successful in it, but the success appeared to himself like a miracle, the recurrence of which was not to be reckoned on. While surgery was waning with Keats, and finally dying out — an upshot for which the exact date is not assigned, nor perhaps assignable — he was making, at first through his intimacy with Cowden Clarke, some good literary acquaintances. The brothers John and Leigh Hunt were the centre of the circle to which Keats was thus admitted. John was the publisher, and Leigh the KEATS. 21 editor, of The Examiner. They had both been lately fined, and imprisoned for two years, for a libel on the Prince Regent, George IV. \ it was perhaps legally a libel, and was certainly a castigation laid on with no indulgent hand. Leigh Hunt (born in 1784, and there- fore Keats's senior by some eleven years) is known to us all as a fresh and airy essayist, a fresh and airy poet, a liberal thinker in the morals both of society and of politics (hardly a politician in the stricter sense of the term), a charming companion, a too-constant cracker of genial jocosities and of puns. He understood good literature both instinctively and critically ; but was too full of tricksy mannerisms, and of petted byways in thought and style, to be an altogether safe associate for a youthful literary aspirant, whether as model or as Mentor. Leigh Hunt first saw Keats in the spring of 181 6, not at his residence in Hampstead as has generally been supposed, but at No. 8 York Buildings, New Road.^ The earliest meeting of Keats with Haydon was in November 181 6, at Hunt's house ; Haydon born in 1786, the zealous and impatient champion of high art, wide-minded and com- bative, too much absorbed in his love for art to be with- out a considerable measure of self-seeking for art's apostle, himself. He painted into his large picture of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem the head of Keats, along with those of Wordsworth and others. Another acquain- tance was Mr. Charles Oilier, the publisher, who wrote verse and prose of his own. The OUier firm in the early spring of 181 7 became the publishers of Keats's first ' This is Hunt's own express statement. It has been disputed, but I am not prepared to reject it. 22 LIFE OF KEATS. volume of poems, of which more anon. Still earlier than the Hunts, Haydon, and Oilier, Keats had known John Hamilton Reynolds, his junior by a year, a poetical writer of some mark, now too nearly forgotten, author of "The Garden of Florence," "The Fancy," and the prose tale, " Miserrimus "; he was the son of the writing-master at Christ Hospital, and Keats became intimate with the w^hole family, though not invariably well pleased with them all. One of the sisters married Thomas Hood. Through Reynolds Keats made acquaintance with Mr. Benjamin Bailey, born towards 1794, then a student at Oxford reading for the Church, afterwards Archdeacoa of Colombo in Ceylon. Charles Wentworth Dilke, born in 1789, the critic, and eventually editor of The Athenmiin,, was another intimate ; and in course of time Keats knew Charles Wells, seven years younger than himself, the author of the dramatic poem "Joseph and his Brethren," and of the prose " Stories after Nature." Other friends- will receive mention as we progress. I have for the present said enough to indicate what was the particular niche in the mansion of English literary life in which Keats found himself housed at the opening of his career.. CHAPTER II. WE have now reached the year 1 8 1 7 and the month of May, when Keats was in the twenty-second year of his age. He then wrote that he had " forgotten all surgery," and was beginning at Margate his romantic epic of " Endymion," reading and writing about eight hours a day. Keats had previously been at Carisbrooke in the Isle of Wight, but had run away from there, finding that the locality, while it charmed, also depressed him. He had left London for the island, apparently with the view of having greater leisure for study and composition. His brother Tom was with him at Carisbrooke and at Margate. He was already provided with a firm of pub- lishers, Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, willing to undertake the risk of " Endymion," and they advanced him a sum sufficient for continuing at work on it with comfort. In September he went with Mr. Benjamin Bailey to Oxford : they made an excursion to Stratford-on-Avon, and Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of the month. It would appear that in Oxford Keats, in the heat of youth- ful blood, committed an indiscretion of which we do not know the details, nor need we give them if we knew them ; for on the 8th of October he wrote to Bailey in 24 LIFE OF these terms : " The little mercury I have taken has cor rected the poison and improved my health,^ though I feel, from my employment, that I shall never again be secure in robustness." The residence of Keats and his brother Tom in Hampstead, a first-floor lodging, was in Well Walk, No. i, next to the Wells Tavern, which was then called the Green Man. The reader who has a head for localities should bear this point well in mind, should carefully discriminate the house in Well Walk from another house, Wentworth Place, afterwards tenanted by Keats and others at Hampstead, and, every time that the question occurs to his thought, should pass a mental vote of thanks to Mr. Buxton Forman for the great pains which he took to settle the point, and the lucid and pleasant account which he has given of it. Keats was at Leatherhead in November; finished the first draft of ■" Endymion " at Burford Bridge, near Dorking, on the ^ Biographers have been reticent on this subject. Keats's state- ment however speaks for itself, and a high medical authority, Dr. Richardson, writing in The Asdepiad {ot April 1884, and reviewing the whole subject of the poet's constitutional and other ailments, says that Keats in Oxford " runs loose, and pays a forfeit for his indiscretion which ever afterwards physically and morally embarrasses Jiim." He pronounces that Keats's early death was "expedited, perhaps excited, by his own imprudence," but was substantially due to hereditary disease. His mother, as we have already seen, had died of the malady which killed the poet, consumption. It is not clear to me what Keats meant by saying that "from his employment " his health would be insecure. One might suppose that he was thinking of the long and haphazard working hours of a young surgeon or medical man ; in which case, this seems to be the latest instance in which he spoke of himself as still belonging to that profession. KEATS. 25 28th of that month, and returned to Hampstead for the ivinter. Two anecdotes which have often been repeated belong apparently to about this date. One of them purports that Keats gave a sound drubbing in Hampstead to a butcher, or a butcher's boy, who was ill-treating a small boy, or else a cat. Hunt simply says that the butcher " had been insolent," — by implication, to Keats himself. The '.' butcher's boy " has obtained traditional currency ; but, according to George Keats, the offender was ** a scoundrel in livery," the locality " a blind alley at Hampstead." Clarke says that the stand-up fight lasted nearly an hour. Keats was an undersized man, in fact he was not far removed from the dwarfish, being barely more than five feet high, and this small feat of stubborn gallantry deserves to be appraised and praised accordingly. The other anecdote is that Coleridge met Keats along with Leigh Hunt in a lane near Highgate, "a loose, slack, not well-dressed youth," and after shaking hands with Keats, he said aside to Hunt, "There is death in that hand." Nothing is extant to show that at so early a date as this, or even for some considerable while after, any of -Keats's immediate friends shared the ominous prevision of Coleridge. In March 18 18 Keats joined his brothers at Teign- mouth in Devonshire, and in April " Endymion " was pubhshed. In June he set off on a pedestrian tour of some extent with a friend whose name will frequently recur from this point forwards, Charles Armitage Brown. One is generally inclined to get some idea of what a man was like ; if one knows what he was tmlike much the 5ame purpose is served. In April 1819 Keats wrote 26 LIFE OF some bantering verses about Brown, which are under- stood to go mainly by contraries : we therefore infer Brown to have presented a physical and moral aspect the reverse of the following — *' He is to meet a melancholy carle, Thin in the waist, with bushy head of hair, As hath the seeded thistle when a parle It holds with Zephyr ere it sendeth fair Its light balloons into the summer air. Thereto his beard had not begun to bloom ; No brush had touched his chin, or razor sheer ; No care had touched his cheek with mortal doom. But new he was and bright as scarf from Persian loom. " Ne cared he for wine or half-and-half, Ne cared he for fish or flesh or fowl, And sauces held he worthless as the chaff; He 'sdained the swine-head at the wassail bowl. Ne with lewd ribalds sat he cheek by jowl, Ne with sly lemans in the scorner's chair ; But after water-brooks this pilgrim's soul Panted, and all his food was woodland air, Though he would oft-times feast on gillyflowers rare. *' The slang of cities in no wise he knew ; ' Tipping the wink ' to him was heathen Greek. He sipped no olden Tom or ruin blue, Or Nantz or cherry-brandy, drank full meek By many a damsel brave and rouge of cheek. Nor did he know each aged watchman's beat ; Nor in obscured purlieus would he seek For curled Jewesses with ankles neat, Who, as they walk abroad, make tinkling with their feet." Mr. Brown, son of a London stockbroker from Scotland, was a man several years older than Keats, born in 1786, KEATS. 27 He was a Russia merchant retired from business, of much culture and instinctive sympathy with genius, and he enjoyed assisting the efforts of young men of promise. He had produced the Hbretto of an opera, " Narensky," and he eventually published a book on the Sonnets of Shakespeare. From the date we have now reached, the summer of 1818, which was more than a year following their first introduction, Brown may be regarded as the most intimate of all Keats's friends, Dilke coming next to him. The pedestrian tour with Brown was the sequel of a family leave-taking at Liverpool. George Keats, finding in himself no vocation for trade, with its smug compli- ances and sleek assiduities (and John agreed with him in these views), had determined to emigrate to America, and rough it in a new settlement for a living, perhaps for fortune ; and, as a preliminary step, he had married Miss Georgiana Augusta Wylie, a girl of sixteen, daughter of a deceased naval officer. The sonnet '* Nymph of the downward smile " &c. was addressed to her. John Keats and Brown, therefore, accompanied George and his bride to Liverpool, and saw them off. They then started as pedestrians into the Lake country, the land of Burns, Belfast, and the Western Highlands. Before starting on the trip Keats had often been in such a state of health as to make it prudent that he should not hazard exposure to night air ; but in his excursion he seems to have acted like a man of sound and rather hardy physique, walking from day to day about twenty miles, and some- times more, and his various records of the trip have nothing of a morbid or invaliding tone. This was not. 28 LIFE OF however, to last long ; the Isle of Mull proved too much for him. On the 23rd of July, writing to his brother Tom, he describes the expedition thus : " The road through the island, or rather track, is the most dreary you can think of; between dreary mountains, over bog and rock and river, with our breeches tucked up and our stockings in hand. . . . We had a most wretched walk of thirty-seven miles across the island of Mull, and then we crossed to lona." In another letter he says : " Walked up to my knees in bog ; got a sore throat ; gone to see Icolmkill and Staffa." From this time forward the men- tion of the sore throat occurs again and again ; sometimes it is subsiding, or as good as gone ; at other times it has returned, and causes more or less inconvenience. Brown wrote of it as *' a violent cold and ulcerated throat." The latest reference to it comes in December 1819, only two months preceding the final and alarming break-down in the young poet's health. In Scotland, at any rate, amid the exposure and exertion of the walking tour, the sore throat was not to be staved off ; so, having got as far as Inverness, Keats, under medical advice, reluctantly cut his journey short, parted from Brown, and went on board the smack from Cromarty. A nine days' passage brought him to London Bridge, and on the i8th of August he presented himself to the rather dismayed eyes of Mrs. Dilke. "John Keats," she wrote, ''arrived here last night, as brown and as shabby as you can imagine : scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn at the back, a fur cap, a great plaid, and his knapsack. I cannot tell what he looked like." More ought to be said here of the details of Keats's Scottish and Irish trip ; but such KEATS. 29^ details, not being of essential importance as incidents in his life, could only be given satisfactorily in the form of copious extracts from his letters, and for these — readable- and picturesque as they are — I have not adequate space. He preferred, on the whole, the Scotch people to the little which he saw of the Irish. Just as Keats was leaving Scotland, because of his own ailments, he had been summoned away thence on account of the more visibly grave malady of his brother Tom, who was in an advanced stage of consumption ; but it appears that the letter did not reach his hands at the time. The next three months were passed by Keats along with Tom at their Hampstead lodgings. Anxiety and affection — warm affection, deep anxiety — were of no avail. Tom died at the beginning of December, aged just twenty, and was buried on the 7th of that month. The words in *' King Lear," " Poor Tom," remain underlined by the surviving brother. John Keats was now solitary in the world. Tom was- dead, George and his bride in America, Fanny, his girlish sister, a permanent inmate of the household of Mr. and Mrs. Abbey at Walthamstow. In December he quitted his lodgings at Hampstead, and set up house along with Mr. Brown in what was then called Wentworth Place, Hampstead, now Lawn Bank ; Brown being rightly the tenant, and Keats a paying resident with Brown. Went- worth Place consisted of only two houses. One of them, was thus inhabited by Brown and Keats, the other by the Dilkes. In the first of these houses, when Brown and Keats were away, and afterwards in the second, there was also a well-to-do family of the name of Brawne, — a so LIFE OF mother, with a son and two daughters. Lawn Bank is the penultimate house on the right of John Street, next to Wentworth House : Dr. Sharpey passed some of his later years in it. This is, beyond all others, the dwelhng which remains permanently linked with the memory of Keats. While Tom was still lingering out the days of his brief life, Keats made the acquaintance of two young ladies. He has left us a description of both of them. His por- traiture of the first. Miss Jane Cox, is written in a tone which might seem the preliminary to a grande passion ; but this did not prove so ; she rapidly passed out of his existence and out of his memory. His portraiture of the second. Miss Fanny Brawne, does not suggest anything beyond a tepid liking which might perhaps merge into a definite antipathy ; this also was delusive, for he was from the first smitten with Miss Brawne, and soon pro- foundly in love with her — I might say desperately in love, for indeed desperation, which became despair, was the main ingredient in his passion, in all but its earliest stages. I shall here extract these two passages, for both of them are of exceptional importance for our biography — one as acquainting us with Keats's general range of feeling in relation to women, and the other as introducing the most serious and absorbing sentiment of the last two years of his hfe. On October 29, 1818, he wrote as follows to his brother George and his wife in America : — "The Misses Reynolds are very kind to me. ... On my return, the first day I called [this was probably to- wards the 20th of September], they were in a sort of KEATS. 31 taking or bustle about a cousin of theirs, Miss Cox, who, having fallen out with her grandpapa in a serious manner, was invited by Mrs. Reynolds to take asylum in her house. She is an East Indian, and ought to be her grandfather's heir. . . . From what I hear she is not without faults of a real kind ; but she has others which are more apt to make women of inferior claims hate her. She is not a Cleopatra, but is at least a Charmian ; she has a rich Eastern look ; she has fine eyes and fine man- ners. When she comes into the room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her ; from habit she thinks that nothing particular. I always find myself more at ease with such a woman ; the picture before me always gives me a hie and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble ; I forget myself entirely, because I live in her. You will by this time think I am in love with her ; so, before I go any further, I will tell you I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very yes and no of whose lips ^ is to me a banquet. I don't cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like her, and her like, because one has no sensatiojis ; what we both are is taken for granted. You will suppose I have by ^ Hitherto printed "life" ; it seems to me clear that " lips" is the right word. 32 LIFE OF this time had much talk with her. No such thing ; there are the Misses Reynolds on the look out. They think I don't admire her because I don't stare at her ; they call her a flirt to me — what a want of knowledge ! She walks, across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn to her with a magnetic power; this they call flirting ! They do not know things; they do not know what a woman is. I believe, though, she has faults, the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet she is a fine thing,, speaking in a worldly way; for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things : — the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical ; and the unearthly, spiritual,, and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron,, and this Charmian, hold the first place in our mind ; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquer- ing feelings. As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian ; as an eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me." So much for Miss Cox, the Charmian whom Keats was. not in love with. This is not absolutely the sole mention of her in his letters, but it is the only one of importance. We now turn to Miss Brawne, the young lady with whom he had fallen very much in love at a date even preceding that to which the present description must belong. The description comes from a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, written probably towards the middle of December 1818. It is true that the name Brawne does not appear in the printed version of the letter, but the " very positive KEATS. 33 conviction " expressed by Mr. Forman that that name really does stand in the MS., a conviction "shared by members of her family," may safely be adopted by all my readers. I therefore insert the name where a blank had heretofore appeared in print, " Perhaps, as you are fond of giving me sketches of characters, you may like a little picnic of scandal, even across the Atlantic. Shall I give you Miss Brawne ? She is about my height, with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort. She wants sentiment in every feature. She manages to make her hair look well j her nostrils are very fine, though a little painful ; her mouth is bad, and good ; her profile is better than her full face, which indeed is not 'full,' but pale and thin, without showing any bone ; her shape is very graceful, and so are her movements ; her arms are good, her hands bad-ish, her feet tolerable. She is not seventeen [Keats, if he really wrote ' not seventeen,' was wrong here ; ' not nine- teen' would have been correct, as she was born on August 9, 1800.] But she is ignorant, monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions ; calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term * minx.' This is, I think, from no innate vice, but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am, however, tired of such style, and shall decline any more of it. She had a friend to visit her lately. You have known plenty such. She plays the music, but without one sensation but the feel of the ivory at her fingers. She is a downright Miss, without one set-off. We hated her ["We" would apparently be Keats, Brown, and the 3 34 LIFE OF Dilkes], and smoked her, and baited her, and I think drove her away. Miss Brawne thinks her a paragon of fashion, and says she is the only woman in the world she would change persons with. What a stupe ! She is as superior as a rose to a dandelion." At the time w^hen Keats wrote these words he had known Miss Brawne for a couple of months, more or less, having first seen her in October or November at the house of the Dilkes. It might seem that he was about this time in a state of feehng propense to love. Some woman was required to fill the void in his heart. The woman might have been Miss Cox, whom he met in September. As the event turned out, it was not she, but it was Miss Brawne, whom he met in October or November. Fanny Brawne was the elder daughter of a gentleman of independent means, who died while she was still a child ; he left another daughter and a son with their mother ; and the whole family, as already mentioned, lived at times in the same house which the Dilkes occupied in Wentworth-place, Hampstead, and at other times in the adjoining house, while not tenanted by Brown and Keats. Miss Brawne (I quote here from Mr. Forman) " had much natural pride and buoyancy, and was quite capable of affecting higher spirits and less concern than she really felt. But, as to the genuineness of her attachment to Keats, some of those who knew her personally have no doubt whatever." ^ If so — or indeed ^ In Medwin's " Life of Shelley," vol. ii. pp. 89 to 92, are some interesting remarks upon Keats's character and demeanour, written in a warm and sympathetic tone. Some of them were certainly KEATS. 35 whether so or not — it is a pity that she was wont, after Keats's death, to speak of him (as has been averred) as " that fooHsh young poet who was in love with me." That Keats was a poet and a young poet is abundantly true ; but that he was a foolish one had even before his death, and especially very soon after it, been found out to be a gross delusion by a large number of people, and might just as well have been found out by his betrothed bride in addition. I know of only one portrait of Miss Brawne ; it is a silhouette by Edouart, engraved in two of Mr. Forman's publications. A silhouette is one of the least indicative forms of portraiture for enabling one to judge whether the sitter was handsome or not. This likeness shows a very profuse mass of hair, a tall, rather sloping, forehead, a long and prominent aquiline nose, a mouth and chin of the petite kind, a very well-developed throat, and a figure somewhat small in proportion to the head. The face is not of the sort which I should suppose to have ever been beautiful in an artist's eyes, or in a poet's either j and indeed Keats's description of Miss Brawne, which I have just cited, is qualified, chilly, and critical, wdth regard to beauty. Nevertheless, his love-letters to Miss Brawne, most of which have been preserved and published, speak of her beauty very emphatically. " The very first week I knew you I wrote myself your vassal ; " " I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for yoUj but beauty ;" "all I can bring you is a swooning penned by Miss Brawne (Mrs. Lindon), and possibly all of them. Mr. Colvin (p. 233 of his book) has called special attention to these remarks : I forbear from quoting them. A leading point is to vindicate Keats from the imputation of " violence of temper." 30 LIFE OF admiration of your beauty." It seems probable that Keats was the declared lover of Miss Brawne in April 1819 at the latest — more probably in February; and when his first published letter to her was written, July 1 8 19, he and she must certainly have been already engaged, or all but engaged, to marry. This was con- trary to Mrs. Brawne's liking. They appear to have con- templated — anything but willingly on the poet's part — a tolerably long engagement ; for he was a young man of twenty-three, with stinted means, no regular profession, and no occupation save that of producing verse derided in the high places of criticism. He spoke indeed of re-studying in Edinburgh for the medical profession : this was a vague notion, with which no practical begin- ning was made. An early marriage, followed by a year or so of pleasuring and of intellectual advancement in some such place as Rome or Zurich, was what Keats really longed for. We must now go back a httle — to December 18 18. Haydon was then still engaged upon his picture of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, and found his progress impeded by want of funds, and by a bad attack, from which he frequently suffered, of weakness of eyesight. On the 22nd of the month, Keats, with conspicuous generosity— and although he had already lent nearly ;^2oo to various friends — tendered him any money-aid which might be in his power ; asking merely that his friend would claim the fulfilment of his promise only in the last resort. On January 7, 18 19, Haydon definitely accepted his off'er ; and Keats wrote back, hoping to comply, and refusing to take any interest. His own KEATS. 37 money affairs were, however, at this time ahiiost at a dead- lock, controlled by lawyers and by his ex-guardian Mr. Abbey; and the amount which he had expected to command as coming to him after his brother Tom's death was not available. He had to explain as much in April 1819 to Haydon, who wrote with some urgency. Eventually he did make a small loan to the painter — j[^io ; but very shortly afterwards (June 17th) was compelled to ask for a reimbursement — "do borrow or beg some- how what you can for me." There was a chancery-suit of old standing, begun soon after the death of Mr. Jennings in 1 805, and it continued to obstruct Keats in his money affairs. The precise facts of these were also but ill- known to the poet, who had potentially at his disposal certain funds which remained perdu and unused until two years after his death. On September 20, 181 9, he wrote to his brother George in America that Haydon had been unable to make the repayment ; and he added, " He did not seem to care much about it, and let me go without my money with almost nonchalance, when he ought to have sold his drawings to supply me. I shall perhaps still be acquainted with him, but, for friendship, that is at an end." And in fact the hitherto very ardent cordiahty between the poet and the painter does seem to have been materially damped after this date ; Keats being somewhat reserved towards Haydon, and Haydon finding more to censure than to extol in the conduct of Keats. We can feel with both of them ; and, while we pronounce Keats blameless and even praiseworthy throughout, may infer Haydon to have been not greatly blameable. Towards the end of June 1819 Keats went to Shank- 38 LIFE OF lin ; his first companion there being an invalid but witty and cheerful friend, James Rice, a solicitor, and his second, Brown, who co-operated at this time with the poet in producing the drama " Otho the Great." Next,, the two friends went to Winchester, "chiefly," wrote Keats to his sister Fanny, " for the purpose of being near a tolerable library, which after all is not to be found in this place. However, we like it very much ; it is the pleasantest town I ever was in, and has the most recom- mendations of any.-" One of his letters from here (September 21) speaks of his being now almost as well acquainted with Italian as with French, and he adds, " I shall set myself to get complete in Latin, and there my learning must stop. I do not think of venturing upoa Greek." It is stated that he learned Italian with un- common quickness. Early in the winter which closed 1819 George Keats, came over for a short while from America, his main object being to receive his share of the money accruing^ from the decease of his brother Tom, to the cost of whose illness he had largely contributed. He had been in Cincinnati, and had engaged in business, but as yet without any success. In some lines which John Keats addressed to Miss Brawne in October there is an energetic and no doubt consciously overloaded denunciation of " that most hateful land, dungeoner of my friends, that monstrous region," &c., &c. John, it appears, con- cealed from George, during his English visit, the fact that he himself was then much embarrassed in money- matters, and almost wholly dependent upon his friends, for a subsistence meanwhile ; and George left England KEATS. 89 again without doing anything for his brother's relief or convenience. He took with him £,100^ some substantial part of which appears to have been the property of John, absolutely or contingently j and he undertook to remit shortly to his brother ^£'200, to be raised by the sale of a boat which he owned in America ; but months passed, and the ;^2oo never came, no purchaser for the boat being procurable. Out of the ;£'i,ioo which Tom Keats had left, George received £,\\o, John hardly more than ;!^2oo, George thus repaying himself some money which had been previously advanced for John's professional education. For all this he has been very severely censured, Mr. Brown being among his sternest and most persistent assailants. It must seemingly have been to George Keats, and yet not to him exclusively, that Colonel Finch referred in the letter which reached Shelley's eyes, saying that John had been '' infamously treated by the very persons whom his generosity had rescued from want and woe ; " and Shelley re-enforced this accusation in his preface to " Adonais " — '• hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care." From these painful charges George Keats eventually vindicated himself with warmth of feeling, and with so much solidity of demon- stration as availed to convince Mr. Dilke, and also Mr. Abbey. Who were the other offenders glanced at by Colonel Finch, as also in one of Severn's letters, I have no distinct idea. CHAPTER III. FROM this point forwards nothing but misery remains to be recorded of John Keats. The narrative becomes depressing to write and depressing to read. The sensation is like that of being confined in a dark vault at noonday. One knows, indeed, that the sun of the poet's genius is blazing outside, and that, on emerging from the vault, we shall be restored to light and warmth ; but the atmosphere within is not the less dark and laden, nor the shades the less murky. In tedious wretch- edness, racked and dogged with the pang of body and soul, exasperated and protesting, raging now, and now ground down into patience and acceptance, Keats gropes through the valley of the shadow of death. Before detaihng the facts, we must glance for a minute at the position. Keats had a passionate ambition and a passionate love — the ambition to be a poet, the love of Fanny Brawne. At the beginning of 1820, he was conscious of his authentic vocation as a poet, and con- scious also that this vocation, though recognized in a small and to some extent an influential circle, was publicly denied and ridiculed ; his portion was the hiss LIFE OF KEATS, 41 of the viper and the gander, the hooting of the impostor and the owl. His forthcoming volume was certain to share the same fate ; he knew its claims would be per- versely resisted and cruelly repudiated. If he could make no serious impression as a poet, not only was his leading ambition thwarted, but he would also be impeded in getting any other and more paying literary work to do — regular profession or employment he had none. He was at best a poor man, and, for the while, almost bereft of any command of funds. So long as this state of things, or anything like it, continued, he would be unable to marry the w^oman of his heart. While sickness kept him a prisoner, he was torn by ideas of her volatility and fickleness. Disease w^as sapping his vitals, pain wrung him. Death beckoned him with finger more and more imperative. Poetic fame became the vision of Tantalus, and love the clasp of Ixion. Such was the life, or such the incipient death, of Keats, in the last twelvemonth of his brief existence. For half a year prior to February 1820 he had been unrestful and cheerless. " Either that gloom overspread me," so he wrote to James Rice, "or I was suffering under 5ome passionate feeling, or, if I turned to versify, that ex- acerbated the poison of either sensation." He began taking laudanum at times, but was induced by Brown, towards the end of 1819, to promise to give up this insidious practice. Then came the crash : it was at Hampstead, on the night of the 3rd of February. " One night, about eleven o'clock," I quote the words of Lord Houghton, which have become classical, "Keats 4^ LIFE OF returned home^ in a state of strange physical excitement; it might have appeared, to those who did not know him^ one of fierce intoxication. He told his friend [Brown} he had been outside the stage-coach, had received a severe chill, was a little fevered ; but added : ' I don't feel it now.' He was easily persuaded to go to bed; and, as he leapt into the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and said : ' That is blood from my mouth. Bring me the candle : let me see this blood.' He gazed steadfastly some moments at the ruddy stain, and then, looking in his friend's face with an expression of sudden calmness never to be forgotten, said : ' I know the colour of that blood — it is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that colour. That drop is my death-warrant ; I must die.' " A surgeon arrived shortly, bled Keats, and pronounced the rupture to be unimportant, but the patient was not satisfied. He wrote to Miss Brawne some few days afterwards, "So violent a rush of blood came to my lungs that I felt nearly suffocated." By the 6th of the month, however, he was already better, and he then said ^ This passage is taken from Lord Houghton's "Life, cSrc, of Keats," first published in 1848, and by "home" he certainly means Wentworth Place, Hampstead. Yet in his Aldine Edition of Keats, his lordship says that the poet * * was at that time, very much against Mr. Brown's desire and advice, living alone in London." This latter statement may possibly be correct — I question it. The passage, as written by Lord Houghton, is condensed from the narrative of Brown. The latter is given verbatim in Mr. Colvin's "Keats," and is, of course, the more important and interesting of the two. I abstain from quoting it, solely out of regard to Mr. Colvin's rights of priority. KEATS. 43" in a letter to his sister : " From imprudently leaving off my great-coat in the thaw, I caught cold, which flew to my lungs." Later on he suffered from palpitation of the heart; but was so far recovered by the 25th of March as to be able to go to town to the exhibition of Haydon's picture, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, and early in April he could take a walk of five miles. In March he had written that he was then picking up flesh, and, if he could avoid inflammation for six weeks, might yet do well; in April his doctor assured him that his only malady was nervous irritability and general weakness, caused by anxiety and by the excitement of poetry. At an untoward time for his health, about the first week in May, Keats was obliged to quit his residence in Hamp- stead; as Brown was then leaving for Scotland, and, according to his wont, let the house. Keats accordingly went to live in Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town. A letter which he wrote just before his departure speaks of his uncertain outlook ; he might be off to South America, or, more likely, embarking as surgeon on a vessel trading to the East Indies. This latter idea had been in his mind for about a year past, off and on. What he could have con- templated doing in South America is by no means apparent. On the 7th of May Keats parted at Gravesend from Brown, and they never met again. The hand with which he grasped Brown's, and which he had of old "clenched against Hammond's," was now, according to his own words, " that of a man of fifty." Things had thus gone on pretty well with Keats's health since he first began to rally from the blood- spitting attack of the 3rd of February ; but this was not 44 LIFE OF to continue. On the 22nd of June he again broke a blood-vessel, and vomited blood morning and evening. Leigh Hunt thought it high time to intervene, and removed the patient to his house, No. 13 Mortimer Terrace, Kentish Town. By the 7th of July — ^just about the time when Keats's last volume was published, the one containing *' Lamia," "Hyperion," and all his best works — the physician had told him that he must not remain in England, but go to Italy. On the 12th, Mrs. •Gisborne, the friend of Godwin and of Shelley, saw him at Hunt's house, looking emaciated, and "under sen- tence of death from Dr. Lamb." Three days afterwards he wrote to Haydon " I am afraid I shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone." The stay at Leigh Hunt's house came to an end in a way which speaks volumes for the shattered nerves, and consequent morbid susceptibility, of Keats. On the loth of August a note for. him written by Miss Brawne, which "contained not a word of the least consequence," arrived at the house. Keats was then resting in his own room, and Mrs. Hunt, who was occupied, desired a female servant to give it to him. The servant quitted the household on the follow- ing day ; and, in leaving, she handed the letter to Thornton Hunt, then a mere child, asking him to reconsign it to his mother. When Thornton did this on the 12th, the letter was open; opened (one assumes) either by the servant through idle curiosity, or by Thornton through simple childishness. " Poor Keats was affected by this inconceivable circumstance beyond what can be imagined. He wept for several hours, and resolved, notwithstanding Hunt's entreaties, to leave the house. He went to KEATS. 45- Hampstead that same evening." In Hampstead he had at least the solace of being received into the dwelling occupied by the Brawne family, being the same dwelling (next door to that of Brown and Keats) which had been recently tenanted by the Dilkes ; yet the excitement ot feeling, consequent on the continual presence of Miss Brawne, was perhaps harmful to him. Here he remained until the time for journeying to Italy arrived. He was still, it seems, left in some uncertainty as to the precise nature and gravity of his disease, for on the 14th of August he wrote to his sister : " 'Tis not yet consump- tion, I believe ; but it would be, were I to remain in this climate all the winter." Anyhow, his expectations of recovery, or of marked benefit from the Italian sojourn, were but faint. Something may here be said of the love-letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne. They begin (as already stated) on the I St of July 1819, and end at some date between his leaving Hampstead, early in May 1820, and quitting Hunt's house in August. We may assume the loth July 1820, or thereabouts, as the date of the last letter. I cannot say that the character of Keats gains to my eyes from the perusal of this correspondence. Love-letters are not expected to be models of self-regulation and " the philo- sophic mind " ; they would be bad love-letters, or letters of a bad specimen of a lover, if they were so. Still, one wants a man to show himself, qu^ lover, at his highest in letters of this stamp ; one wants to find in them his noblest self, his steadiest as his most ardent aspirations, in one direction. Keats seems to me, throughout his love-letters, unbalanced, wayward, and profuse ; he ex- 46 LIFE OF hibits great fervour of temperament, and abundant caressingness, without the inner depth of tenderness and regard. He lives in his mistress, for himself. As the letters pass further and further into the harsh black •shadows of disease, he abandons all self-restraint, and Jashes out right and left ; he wills that his friends should have been disloyal to him, as the motive for his being disloyal to them. To make allowance for all this is possible, and even necessary ; but to treat it as not need- ing that any allowance should be made would seem to •me futile. In the earlier letters of the series we have to note a few points of biographic interest. He says that he believes Miss Brawne liked him for himself, not for his writings, and he loves her the more for it ; that, on first falling in love with her, he had written to declare himself, but he burned the letter, fancying that she had shown some dislike to him ; that he had all his life been indifferent to money matters, but must be chary of the resources of his friends; that he was afraid of her "being a httle inclined to the Cressid" — one of the various passages w^hich show that he chafed at her girlish liking for general society and diversions. On the loth of October 1819 he had had "a thousand kisses" from her, and was resolved not to dispense with the thousand and first. Early in June 1820 he speaks of her having "been in the habit of flirting with Brown," who "did not know he was doing me to death by inches." — It may be Tvell to give three of the letters as specimens : — KEATS. .47 "25 College Street. "[Postmark] 13 October iZ\(). "My dearest Girl, — This moment I have set my- self to copy some verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two, and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my mind for ever so short a time. Upon my soul I can think of nothing else. The time is past when I had power to advise and warn you against the unpromising morning of my life. My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you ; I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again ; my life seems to stop there — I see no further. You have absorbed me; I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving. I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you; I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it ? I have no limit now to my love. "Your note came in just here. I cannot be 'happier' away from you ; 'tis richer than an argosy of pearls. Do not threat me, even in jest. I have been astonished that •men could die martyrs for religion — I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more; I could be martyred for my religion. Love is my religion — I could die for that; I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its only tenet. You have ravished me away by a power I cannot jesist ; and yet I could resist till I saw you ; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often *to 48 LIFE OF reason against the reasons of my love.' I can do that no more, the pain would be too great. My love is- selfish j I cannot breathe without you." (II.) [Date uncertain — say towards June 15, 1820.] "My dearest Fanny, — My head is puzzled this- morning, and I scarce know what I shall say, though I am full of a hundred things. 'Tis certain I would rather be writing to you this morning, notwithstanding the alloy of grief in such an occupation, than enjoy any other pleasure, with health to boot, unconnected with you. Upon my soul I have loved you to the extreme. I wish you could know the tenderness with which I continually brood over your different aspects of countenance, action^ and dress. I see you come down in the morning ; I see you meet me at the window ; I see everything over again eternally that I ever have seen. If I get on the pleasant clue, I live in a sort of happy misery; if on the un- pleasant, 'tis miserable misery. " You complain of my ill-treating you in word, thought, and deed.^ I am sorry — at times I feel bitterly sorry that I ever made you unhappy. Ivly excuse is that those words have been wrung from me by the sharpness of my feelings. At all events, and in any case, I have been wrong : could I believe that I did it without any ^ Apparently Miss Brawne had remonstrated against the imputa- tion of "flirting with Brown," and much else to like effect in a recent letter from Keats. KEATS. 49 cause, I should be the most sincere of penitents. I could give way to my repentant feelings now, I could recant all my suspicions, I could mingle with you heart and soul, though absent, were it not for some parts of your letters. Do you suppose it possible I could ever leave you ? You know what I think of myself, and what of you : you know that I should feel how much it was my loss, and how little yours. " * My friends laugh at you.' I know some of them : when I know them all, I shall never think of them again as friends, or even acquaintance. My friends have behaved well to me in every instance but one ; and there they have become tattlers, and inquisitors into my conduct — spying upon a secret I would rather die than share it with anybody's confidence. For this I cannot wish them well ; I care not to see any of them again. If I am the theme, I will not be the friend of idle gossips. Good gods, what a shame it is our loves should be so put into the microscope of a coterie ! Their laughs should not affect you — (I may perhaps give you reasons some day for these laughs, for I suspect a few people to hate me well enough, for reasons I knoiv of, who have pre- tended a great friendship for me) — when in competition with one who, if he never should see you again, would make you the saint of his memory. These laughers, who do not like you, who envy you for your beauty, who would have God-blessed me from you for ever, who Vv'ere plying me with discouragements with respect to you eternally ! People are revengeful : do not mind them. Do nothing but love me : if I knew that for certain, life and health will in such event be a heaven, and death 4 50 LIFE OF itself will be less painful. I long to believe in immor- tality : I shall never be able to bid you an entire farewell. If I am destined to be happy with you here, how short is the longest life ! I wish to believe in immortality — I wish to live with you for ever. Do not let my name ever pass between you and those laughers : if I have no other merit than the great love for you, that were sufficient to keep me sacred and unmentioned in such society. If I have been cruel and unjust, I swear my love has ever been greater than my cruelty — which lasts but a minute, whereas my love, come what will, shall last for ever. If concession to me has hurt your pride, God knows I have had little pride in my heart when thinking of you. Your name never passes my lips — do not let mine pass yours. Those people do not like me. " After reading my letter, you even then wish to see me. I am strong enough to walk over : but I dare not — I shall feel so much pain in parting with you again. My dearest love, I am afraid to see you : I am strong, but not strong enough to see you. Will my arm be ever round you again, and, if so, shall I be obliged to leave you again ? "My sweet love, I am happy whilst I believe your first letter. Let me be but certain that you are mine heart and soul, and I could die more happily than I could otherwise live. If you think me cruel, if you think I have slighted you, do muse it over again, and see into my heart. My love to you is ' true as truth's simplicity, and simpler than the infancy of truth ' — as I think I once said before. How could I slight you ? how threaten to leave you ? Not in the spirit of a threat to you — no, but KEATS. 51 in the spirit of wretchedness in myself. My fairest, my delicious, my angel Fanny, do not believe me such a vulgar fellow. I will be as patient in illness and as beheving in love as I am able." (III.) (This is the last letter of the series. Its date is un- certain ; but may, as already intimated, be towards July I o, 1820. It follows next after our No. 2.) " My dearest Girl, — I wish you could invent some means to make me at all happy without you. Every hour I am more and more concentrated in you ; every- thing else tastes like chaff in my mouth. I feel it almost impossible to go to Italy. The fact is, I cannot leave you, and shall never taste one minute's content until it pleases chance to let me live with you for good. But I will not go on at this rate. A person in health, as you are, can have no conception of the horrors that nerves and a temper like mine go through. " What island do your friends propose retiring to ? I should be happy to go with you there alone, but in company I should object to it : the backbitings and jealousies of new colonists, who have nothing else to amuse themselves, is unbearable. Mr. Dilke came to see me yesterday, and gave me a very great deal more pain than pleasure. I shall never be able any more to endure the society of any of those who used to meet at B2 LIFE OF Elm Cottage ^ and Wentworth Place. The last two years taste like brass upon my palate. If I cannot live with you, I will live alone. " I do not think my health will improve much while I am separated from you. For all this, I am averse to seeing you : I cannot bear flashes of light, and return into my glooms again. I am not so unhappy now as I should be if I had seen you yesterday. To be happy with you seems such an impossibility : it requires a luckier star than mine — it will never be. " I enclose a passage from one of your letters which I want you to alter a little : I want (if you will have it so) the matter expressed less coldly to me. " If my health would bear it, I could write a poem which I have in my head, which would be a consolation for people in such a situation as mine. I would show some one in love, as I am, with a person living in such liberty as you do.^ Shakespeare always sums up matters in the most sovereign manner. Hamlet's heart was full of such misery as mine is, when he said to Ophelia, ' Go to a nunnery, go, go ! ' Indeed, I should like to gw^ up the matter at once — I should like to die. I am sickened at the brute world you are smiling with. I hate men, and women more. I see nothing but thorns for the future : ^ I observe this name occurring once elsewhere in relation to Keats, but am not clear whose house it represents. ^ It has been suggested (by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as printed in Mr. Forman's edition of Keats) that the poem here referred to is "The Eve of St. Mark." Keats had begun it fully a year and a half before the date of this letter, but, not having continued it, he might have spoken of " having it in his head." KEATS. 53 wherever I may be next winter, in Italy or nowhere, Brown will be living near you, with his indecencies. I see no prospect of any rest. Suppose me in Rome. Well, I should there see you, as in a magic glass, going to and from town at all hours 1 wish I could infuse a little con- fidence of human nature into my heart : I cannot muster any. The world is too brutal for me. I am glad there is such a thing as the grave — I am sure I shall never have any rest till I get there. At any rate, I will indulge myself by never seeing any more Dilke or Brown or any of their friends. I wish I was either in your arms full of faith, or that a thunderbolt would strike me. — God bless you. "J. K." It is seldom one reads a letter (not to speak of a love- letter) more steeped than this in wretchedness and acri- mony j wretchedness for which the cause w^as but too real -and manifest ; acrimony for which no ground has been shown or is to be surmised. What Mr. Dilke had done, or could be supposed to have done, to merit the invalid's ire, is unapparent. Mr. Brown may be inferred, from the verses of Keats already quoted, to have had the general character and bearing of a bott vivant or^^loWy lation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity : he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women who are creatures of im- pulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute : the poet has none, no identity. He is cer- tainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more ? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops ? It is a wretched thing ta confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature. How can it when I have na nature ? When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me [so] that I am in a very little time annihilated. Not only among men; it would be the' same in a nursery of children." Elsewhere Keats says, November 1817 ; "Nothing. KEATS. 155 startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights ; or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel." For painting Keats had a good deal of taste, largely fostered, no doubt, by his intimacy with Haydon. This came to him gradually. Towards the beginning of i8iS he was, according to his own account, quite unable to appreciate Raphael's Cartoons, but afterwards gained ari insight into them through contrasting them with some maudlin saints by Guido. It is interesting to find him entering warmly into the beauties of the earlier Italian art, as indicated in a book of prints from some church in Milan (so he says, but perhaps it should rather be Pisa or Florence). *' I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare ; full of romance and the most tender feeling ; magnificence of drapery beyond every- thing I ever saw, not excepting Raphael's, but grotesque to a curious pitch — yet still making up a fine whole, even finer to me than more accomplished works, as there was left so much room for imagination.'* Here is a small trait of character, recorded by Keats in a letter to George, from Winchester, September 1819. " I feel I can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings neatly, and in fact adonize as if I were going out ; then, all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the greatest relief." Haydon, as we have seen, said that Keats had an exquisite sense of humour. There are few things more 156 LIFE OF difficult to analyse than the sense of humour ; few points as to which different people will vary more in opinion than the possession, by any particular man, of a sense of humour, or the account, good or bad, to which he turned this sense. Certainly there is a large amount of jocularity in the familiar writings of Keats — often a quick percep- tion of the ridiculous or the risible, sometimes a telling jest or jeiL d' esprit I confess, however, that to myself most of Keats's fun appears forced or inept, wanting in fineness of taste and manner, and tending towards the Yulgar; a jangling jingle of word and notion. Punning plays a large part in it, as it did in Leigh Hunt's familiar converse. Some specimens of Keats's funning or pun- ning seem to me a humiliating exhibition, as, for instance, a letter, January 1819, which Armitage Brown addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Dilke, with interpolations by Keats. No doubt both the friends were resolutely bent upon being silly on that occasion ; but to be silly is not fully tantamount to being *' a fellow of infinite jest," or having an exquisite sense of humour. There is some very ex- asperating writing also in a letter to Reynolds (May 18 1 8), about "making Wordsworth and Colman play at leap-frog, or keeping one of them down a whole half- holiday at fly-the-garter," &c., &c. A feeling for the inappropriate is perhaps one element of jocoseness ; if so, Keats may have been genuinely jocose when (as he wrote in his very last letter to Brown) he " at his worst, ■even in quarantine [in Naples Harbour], summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of his life." He had a good power of mimicry, as well as of dramatic recital. He did indisputably, KEATS. 157 towards September 1819, play off one practical joke — Brown was the victim — with eminent success ; pretend- ing that a certain Mr. Nathan Benjamin, who was then renting Brown's house at Hampstead, had written a letter complaining of illness — gravel, caused by some lime- tainted water on the premises. But the success depended upon a very singular coincidence, viz., that by mere chance Keats had happened to give the tenant's name correctly. The angry reply of Brown to the angry sup- posititious letter of Benjamin, and the astonishment of Benjamin upon receiving Brown's retort, are fertile of laughter. Keats does not appear to have ever made any pretence to defined religious belief of any sort, nor seriously to- have debated the subject, or troubled his mind about it one way or the other. He was certainly not a Christian. His early friend, Mr. Felton Mathew, speaks of him as " of the sceptical and republican school." On Christmas Eve, 1816, soon after he had come of age, he wrote the following sonnet — ** The church-bells toll a melancholy round. Calling the people to some other prayers, Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares, More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound. Surely the mind of man is closely bound In some black spell : seeing that each one tears Himself from fireside joys and Lydian airs, And converse high of those with glory crowned. Still, still they toll : and I should feel a damp, A chill as from a tomb, did I not know 153 LIFE OF That they are dying like an outbumt lamp, — That 'tis their sighing, wailing^ ere they go Into oblivion, — that fresh flowers will grow, And many glories of immortal stamp." His sonnet on Ben Nevis, 1818, is also an utterance of scepticism — speaking of heaven and hell as misty sur- mises, and of *'the world of thought and mental might" as a realm of nebulosity, A letter to Leigh Hunt, May 1817, contains a phrase arraigning the God of Christians. To the clerical student Bailey^ September 18 18, he spoke out : " You know my ideas about religion. I do not think myself more in the right than other people, and that nothing in this world is proveable." The latter clause appears to be carelessly elliptical in expression, the real meaning being " I think [not " I do not think "] that nothing in this world is proveable." To Fanny Brawne, towards May 1820, he appealed " by the blood of that Christ you believe in." Haydon tells a noticeable ancedote — the only one, I think, which exhibits Keats as an admirer of that anti-imaginative order of intellect of which Voltaire was a prototype — " He had a tending to religion when first I knew him [autumn of 1816], but Leigh Hunt soon forced it from liis mind. Never shall I forget Keats once rising from his chair, 'and approaching my last picture, Entry into Jerusalem. He went before the portrait of Voltaire, placed his hand on his heart, and, bowing low, * In reverence done, as to the power That dwelt within, whose presence had infused Into the plant sciential sap derived From nectar, drink of gods,' KEATS. 169 (as Milton says of Eve after she had eaten the apple), * That's the being to whom / bend,' said he ; alluding to the bending of the other figures in the picture, and con- trasting Voltaire with our Saviour, and his own adoration with that of the crowd." Notwithstanding the general vagueness or indiffer- ence of his mind in religious matters, Keats seems to have been at most times a believer in the immortality of the soul. Following that phrase of his already quoted (from a letter to Bailey, November 1817) "Oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts ! " he proceeds : " It is * a vision in the form of youth,' a shadow of reality to come. And this consideration has further convinced me — for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite specu- lation of mine — that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we call happiness on earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation, rather than hunger, as you do, after truth. Adam's dream will do here : and seems to be a conviction that imagination, and its empyreal re- flexion, is the same as human life, and its spiritual repetition." This allusion to " Adam's dream " refers back to a fine phrase which had occurred shortly before in the same letter — " Imagination may be com- pared to Adam's dream; he awoke, and found it truth." In a letter written to George Keats and his wife, shortly after the death of Tom, comes a very positive assertion — *' I have a firm belief in immortality, and so had Tom." This firm belief, however, must certainly have faltered later on; for, as we have already seen, one of Keats's IGO LIFE OF letters to Miss Brawne, written in 1820, contains the phrase " I long to believe in immortality." The reader may also refer to the letter to Armitage Brown, Septem- ber 1820, extracted in a previous page. Of superstitious feeling I observe only one instance in Keats. After Tom's death, a white rabbit appeared in the garden of Mr. Dilke, and was shot by him : Keats would have it that this rabbit was the spirit of Tom, and he persisted in the fancy with not a little earnestness. Of Keats's fondness for wine — his appreciation of it as a flavour grateful to the palate, and to the abstract sense of enjoyment — there are numerous traces throughout his writings. We all remember the famous lines in his *' Ode to a Nightingale "— " Oh for a draught of vintage that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, • • ', Oh for a beaker full of the warm South ! " &c. — lines which seem a little forced into their context, and of which the only tangible meaning there is that the luxury and dreamy inspiration of wine-drinking would relieve the poet's mind from the dull and painful realities of life, and assist his imagination into the dim vocal haunts of the nightingale. There is also in " Lamia" a conspicu- ous passage celebrating "The happy vintage — merry wine, sweet wine." On claret — as to which we have heard the evidence of Haydon — there is a long tirade in a letter addressed to George Keats and his wife in February 18 19. I give it in a condensed form:— - " I never drink above three glasses of wine, and never KEATS. ICl any spirits and water. , . . How I like claret ! When I can get claret, I must drink it. 'Tis the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in. . . . It fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness — then goes down cool and feverless : then you do not feel it quarrelling with one's liver. * < . Other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a man into a Silenus : this makes him a Hermes, and gives a woman the soul and immortality of an Ariadne. ... I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I have : I forgot game. I must plead guilty to the breast of a partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a pheasant, and a woodcock passim^ At a rather later date, October 1819, Keats had "left off animal food, that my brains may never henceforth be in a greater mist than is theirs by nature." But I pre- sume this form of abstinence did not last long. I have now gone through the principal points which appear to me to identify Keats as a man, and to throw light upon his character and habits. He entered on life high-spirited, ardent, impulsive, vehement; with plenty of self-confidence, ballasted with a large capacity (though he did not always exercise it to a practical result) for self-criticism ; longing to be a poet, and firmly believing that he could and would be one ; resolute to be a man — unselfish, kindly, and generous. But, though kindly, he was irritable ; though unselfish and generous, wilful and suspicious. An affront was what he would not bear ; and, when he found himself affronted in a form — that of press ridicule and detraction — which could not be resented in II 162 LIFE OF KEA TS. person, nor readily retaliated in any way, it is abundantly probable that the indignity preyed upon his mind and spirits, and contributed to embitter the days cut short by disease, the messenger of despair to that passionate love \Yhich had become the single intense interest of his life. The single intense interest, along with poetry — both of them hurrying without fruition to the grave. Keats seems to me to have been naturally a man of complex character, many-mooded, with a tendency to perverse self-conflict. The circumstances of his brief career — his poetic ambi- tion, his want of any definite employment, his association with men of Uterary occupation or taste whom he only half approved, the critical venom poured forth against him, his love thwarted by a mortal malady — all these things tended to bring out the unruly or morbid, and to deplete the many fine and solid, elements in his nature. With the personal character of Keats, as with his writings, we may perhaps deal most fairly by saying that his outburst and his reserve of faculty were such that, in the narrow space allotted to him, youth had not advanced far enough to disentangle the rich and various material. But his latest years, which enabled his poetry to find full and deathless voice, were so loaded with suffering and perturbation as to leave the character less lucidly and harmoniously developed than even in the days of adoles- cence. From " Endymion " to " Lamia " and the " Eve of St. Mark," we have, in poetry, advanced greatly to- wards the radiant meridian: in Hfe, from 1818 to 1821, we have receded to a baffling dusk. CHAPTER IX. WE have seen what John Keats did in the shifting scene of the world, and in the high arena of poesy ; we have seen what were the quaUties of character and of mind which enabled him to bear his part in each. His work as a poet is to us the thing of primary impor- tance : and it remains for us to consider what this poetic work amounts to in essence and in detail. The critic who is a critic — and not a Quarterly or a Blackwood reviewer or lampooner — is well aware of the dispropor- tion between his power of estimation, and the demand which such a genius as that of Keats, and such work as the maturest which he produced, make upon the esti- mating faculty. But this consideration cannot be allowed to operate beyond a certain point : the estimate has to be given — and given candidly and distinctly, however imperfectly. I shall therefore proceed to express my real opinion of Keats's poems, whether an admiring opinion or otherwise ; and shall write without reiterating — what I may nevertheless feel — a sense of the presumption in- volved in such a process. I shall in the main, as in previous chapters, follow the chronological order of the poems. 164 LIFE OF As we have seen, Keats began versifying chiefly under a Spenserean influence ; and it has been suggested that this influence remained puissant for harm as well as for good up to the close of his poetic career. I do not see much force in the suggestion : unless in this limited sense — that Spenser, like other Elizabethan and Jacobean poets his successors, allowed himself very considerable latitude in saying whatever came into his head, relevant or irrelevant, appropriate or jarring, obvious or far- fetched, simple or grandiose, according to the mood of the moment and the swing of composition, and thus the whole strain presents an aspect more of rich and arbi- trary picturesqueness than of ordered suavity. And Keats no doubt often did the same : but not in the choicest productions of his later time, nor perhaps so much under incitement from Spenser as in pursuance of that revolt from a factitious and constrained model of work in which Wordsworth in one direction, Coleridge in another, and Leigh Hunt in a third, had already come forward with practice and precept. Making allowance for a few early attempts directly referable to Spenser, I find, even in Keats's first volume, little in which that influence is paramount. He seems to have written be- cause his perceptions were quick, his sympathies vivid in certain directions, and his energies wound up to poetic endeavour. The mannerisms of thought, method, and diction, are much more those of Hunt than of Spenser ; and it is extremely probable that the soreness against Hunt which Keats evidenced at a later period was due to his perceiving that that kindly friend and genial literary ally had misled him into some poetic trivialities KEATS, 165 and absurdities, not less than to anything in himseh^ which could be taken hold of for complaint. Keats's first volume would present nothing worthy of permanent memory, were it not for his after achieve- ?nents, and for the single sonnet upon Chapman's Homer. Several of the compositions are veritable rubbish : probably Keats knew at the time that they were not good, and knew soon afterwards that they were deplorably bad. Such are the address " To Some Ladies" who had sent the author a shell; that "On Receiving a Curious Shell and a Copy of Verses [Moore's **' Golden Chain "] from the same Ladies ; " the " Ode to Apollo " (in which Homer, Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Tasso, are commemorated) ; the " Hymn to Apollo ; " the lines " To Hope " (in which there is a patriotic aspiration, mingled with scorn for the gauds of a Court). " Calidore " has a certain boyish ardour, -clearly indicated if not well expressed. The verses " I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" are very far from good, a.nd are stuffed with affectations, but do nevertheless show a considerable spice of the real Keats. Some lines have already been quoted from this effusion, about " flowery nests," and " the pillowy silkiness that rests full in the speculation of the stars." It is only by an effort that we can attach any meaning to either of these childish Della-Cruscanisms : the " pillowy silkiness " may perhaps be clouds intermingled with stars, and the ^' flowery nests " may, by a great wrenching of English, foe meant for "flowery nooks" — nests or nooks of flowers. "Sleep and Poetry" contains various fine Jines, telling and suggestive images, and luscious descrip- 166 ' LIFE OF tive snatches, and is interesting as showing the bent of the writer's mind, and a sense of his mission begun. Serious metrical flaws are perceptible in it here and there, and throughout this first volume of verse — and indeed in *' Endymion " as well. One metrical weakness- of which he never got rid is the accenting of the preterite or participial form " ed " (in such words as " resolved,"' &c.), where its sound ekes out with feeble stress the prosody of a line. Two songs which have genuine lyric grace — dated in 1817, but not included in the volume of "Poems" — are those which begin "Think not of it^ sweet one, so," and " Unfelt, unheard, unseen." The volume contains sixteen sonnets, besides the grand one on " Chapman's Homer." The best are those which begin " Keen fitful gusts are whispering here and there,'*" and " Happy is England," and the " Grasshopper and Cricket," which was written in competition with Hunt. It seems to me that Keats's production has more of poetry, Hunt's of finish. The sonnet *' On leaving some friends at an early hour " is characteristic enough. This, is as much detail as need be given here to the " Poems " of 181 7. The sonnet on Chapman's Homer revealed a hand which might easily prove to be a master's. All else was prentice-work, with some melody, some richness; and freshness, some independence, much enthusiasm; also many solecisms and perversities of diction, imagery, and method : and not a few pieces were included which only self-conceit, or torpor of the critical faculty, or the mis-persuasion of friends, could have allowed to pass muster. But Keats chose to publish — to exhibit his. poetic identity at this stage and in this guise; and of KEATS. 167 course we can see, In the light of his after-work, that the experiment was rather a rash forestaUing than a positive mistake. There are a few other sonnets which Keats wrote in 1 817, or, in general terms, between the publishing dates of the " Poems " volume and of " Endymion." Those *' On a Picture of Leander," and " On the Sea," and the ore which begins " After dark vapours have oppressed our plains," rank among the best of his juvenile produc- tions. A general observation, applicable to all the early work, whether printed at the time or unprinted, is that the ideas are constantly expressed in an imperfect way. There are perceptions, thoughts, and emotions ; but the vehicle of words is, as a rule, huddled and approximate. " Endymion " now claims our attention. I believe that no better criticism of " Endymion " has ever been written than that which Shelley supplied in a letter dated in September 18 19. Certainly no criticism which is equally short is also equally good. I therefore extract it here, and shall have little to say about the poem which is not potentially condensed into Shelley's brief utterance. " I have read Keats's poem," he wrote : *' much praise is due to me for having read it, the author's intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. Yet it is full of some of the highest and the finest gleams of poetry ; indeed, everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. I tliink if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments fr(jm it I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought, of which there is now no danger." In July 1820 Shelley wrote to Keats himself on the 1G8 LIFE OF subject, furnishing almost the only addendum which could have been needed to the preceding remarks : " I have lately read your ' Endymion ' again, and even with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion." As Shelley shared with Gifford the conviction that it is difficult to read " Endymion " from book i, line i, to book 4, line 1003, and as human nature has not changed essentially since the time of that pre-eminent poet and that rather less eminent critic, I daresay that there are at this day several Keats-enthusiasts who know in foro conscientice, though they may not avow in public, that they have left " Endymion " unread, or only partially read. Others have perused it, but have found in it so much " indistinct profusion " that they also remain after a while with rather a vague impression of the course of the story ; although they agree with Gifford, and even exceed him m. the assurance, that "it seems to be mytho- logical, and probably relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion." As the poem is an extremely important one in relation to the Hfe-work of Keats, I think it may not be out of place if I here give a succinct account of what the narrative really amounts to. This may be all the more desirable as Keats has not followed the con- venient if prosaic practice of several other epic poets by prefixing to the several books of his long poem an '' argument " of their respective contents. Book I. On a lawn within a forest upon a slope of Mount Latmos was held one morning a festival to Pan. The young huntsman-chieftain Endymion attended, but his demeanour betrayed a secret preoccupation and KEATS. 169 trouble. After the rites were over, his sister Peona ad- dressed him, and gradually won him to open his heart to her. He told her that at a certain spot by the river, one of his favourite haunts, he had lately seen a sudden efflor- escence of dittany and poppies (the flowers sacred to Diana). He fell asleep there, and had a dream or vision of entering the gates of heaven, seeing the moon in transcendent splendour, and then being accosted by a Avoman or goddess lovely beyond words, who pressed his' hand. He seemed to faint, and to be upborne into the upper regions of the sky, where he gave the beauty a rapturous kiss, and then they both paused upon a moun- tain-side. Next he dreamed that he fell asleep. This was the prelude to his actual waking out of the vision. Ever since he had retained a mysterious sense that the -dream had not been all a dream. This was confirmed by various incidents of obscure suggestion, and especially by his hearing in a cavern the words (we have read them already, beslavered by the "human serpentry" of criti- cism, but they remain delicious words none the less) — ** Endymion, the cave is secreter > Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys And trembles through my labyrinthine hair." As nothing further, however, had happened, Endymion promised Peona that he would henceforth cease to live a life of feverish expectation, and would resume the calm tenor of his days. 170 LIFE OF Book 2. — Endymion's promise had not been strictly fulfilled ; he was still restless and craving. One day he plucked a rosebud : it suddenly blossomed, and a butter- fly emerged from it, with strangely-charactered wings. He pursued the butterfly, which led him to a fountain by a cavern, and then disappeared. A naiad thereupon addressed him, saying that he must wander far before he could be reunited to his mystic fair one. He then appealed to the moon-goddess for some aid, was rapt into a dizzy vision as if he were sailing through heaven in her car, and heard a voice from the cavern bidding him descend into the entrails of the earth. He eagerly obeyed, and passed through a region of twilight dimness starred with gems, until he reached a natural temple enshrining a statue of Diana. An awful sense of solitude weighed upon him, and he implored the goddess to restore him to his earthly home. A profusion of flowers budded forth before his feet, followed by music as he resumed his journey. At last he came to a verdant space, peopled with slumbering Cupids. Here in a beautiful chamber he found Adonis lying tranced on a couch, attended by other Cupids.^ One of them gave him wine and fruit, and explained to him the winter- sleep and summer-life of Adonis j and at this moment * The passage which begins — ■ *' Hard by Stood serene Cupids watching silently " has some affinity with a passage in Shelley's " Adonais." The latter passage is, however, more directly based upon one in the Idyll of Bion on Adonis, KEATS. 171 Adonis woke up from his trance, and Venus came to solace him with love. Venus spoke soothingly also to Endymion, telling him that she knew of his love for some one of the immortals, but who this was she had failed to fathom. She promised that one day he should be blessed, and with Adonis she then rose heavenward in her car. The earth closed, and Endymion gladly pur- sued his way through caves, jewels, and water-springs. Cybele passed on her lion-drawn chariot. The diamond path ended in middle air; Endymion invoked Jupiter, an eagle swooped and bore him down through darkness into a mossy jasmine-bower. With a sense of ecstasy, chequered by an unsatisfied longing for his unknown love, Endymion prepared himself to sleep : ** And, just into the air Stretching his indolent arms, he took, O bliss ! A naked waist. * Fair Cupid, whence is this ? * A well-known voice sighed, * Sweetest, here am I ! ' " The lovers indulged their passion in kisses and caresses ; he urgent to know who she might be, and she con- fessing herself a goddess hitherto awful in loveless chastity, but not naming herself, though perhaps her avowals were sufhciently indicative,^ and she promised to exalt him ere long to Olympus. The rapturous inter- ' I do not clearly understand from the poem whether Endymion does or does not know, until the story nears its conclusion, that the goddess who favours him is Diana. He appears at any rate to guess as much, either during this present interview or shortly after- wards. 172 LIFE OF view ended with the sleep of Endymion, and awaking he found himself alone. He strayed out, and reached an enormous grotto. Two springs of water gushed forth — • the springs of Arethusa and Alpheus, whose loves found voice in words. Endymion, sending up a prayer for their union, stepped forward and found himself beneath the sea. Book 3. Soothed by a moonbeam which greeted him through the waters, Endymion pursued his course. Upon a rock within the sea he encountered an old, old man, with wand and book. The ancient man started up as from a trance, declaring that he should now be young again and happy. This was Glaucus, who imparted to Endymion the story of his ill-omened love for Scylla (it is told at considerable length, but need not be detailed here), the witchcraft of Circe which had doomed him to a ghastly marine life of a thousand years, and how, after a shipwreck, he came into possession of a book of magic, which revealed to him that at some far-off day a youth should make his appearance and break the accursed spell. In Endymion, Glaucus recognized the predicted youth. Glaucus then led Endymion to an edifice in which he had preserved the corpse of Scylla, and thou- sands of other corpses, being those of lovers who had been shipwrecked during his many cycles of sea-dwelling doom. Glaucus tore his scroll into fragments, bound his cloak round Endymion, and waved his wand nine times. He then instructed Endymion to unwind sa tangled thread, read the markings on a shell, break the wand against a lyre, and strew the fragments of the scroll upon Glaucus himself, and upon the dead bodies. As KEATS. 17^ the final act was performed, Glaucus resumed his youth, and Scylla and the drowned lovers returned to life. The whole joyous company then rushed off, and paid their devotions to Neptune in his palace. Cupid and Venus were also present here ; and the goddess of love spoke words of comfort to Endymion, assuring him that his long expectancy would soon find its full reward. She had by this time probed the secret of Diana, but she refrained from naming that deity to Endymion. She invited him and his bride to pass a portion of their honeymoon in. Cythera,^ with Adonis and Cupid. A stupendous festival in Neptune's palace succeeded. Endymion finally sank down in a trance ; Nereids conveyed him up to a forest by a lake ; and as he floated earthwards he heard in dream words promising that his goddess would soon waft him up into heaven. He awoke in the sylvan scene. Book 4. The first sound that Endymion heard was a female voice ; the wail of a damsel who had followed Bacchus from the banks of the Ganges, and who longed to be at home again, if only to die there. Unseen him- self, he saw a beautiful girl, who lay bemoaning her loveless lot. He at once felt that, if he adored his unknown goddess, he loved also his Indian Bacchante. He sprang forward and declared his passion. ^ She, after * Keats has been laughed at for ignorance in printing " Visit my Cytherea"; but it appears on good evidence that what he really wrote was "Visit thou my Cythera." A false quantity in this same canto, " Neptiinus," cannot be explained away. ^ Declared it in some very odd lines ; for instance — " Do gently murder half my soul, and I Shall feel the other half so utterly 1 " 174 LIFE OF chaunting her long journeyings in the train of Bacchus, explained that, being sick-hearted and weary, she had strayed away in the forest, and was now but the votary of sorrow. Endymion continued to woo her with sweet w^ords and hot : he heard a dismal voice, " Woe to Endymion ! " echoing through the forest. Mercury descended and touched the ground with his wand, and two winged horses sprang out of the earth, Endymion seated his Bacchante upon one horse and mounted the other; they flew upward, eagle-high. In the air they passed Sleep, who had heard a report that a mortal was to wed a daughter of Jove, and who desired to hearken to the marriage ditties before he returned to his cave. The influence of Sleep made the winged horses drowse, iind also Endymion and the Bacchante. Endymion then dreamed of being in heaven, the mate of gods and goddesses, Diana among them. In dream he sprang towards Diana, and so awoke; but awake he still saw the same vision. Diana was there in heaven ; his Bac~ •chante was beside him lying on the horse's pinions. He kissed the Bacchante, and almost in the same breath protested to Diana his unshaken constancy. The Bac- chante then awoke. Endymion, dazed in mind with his divided allegiance, urged her to be gone, and the winged horses resumed their flight. They advanced towards the galaxy, the moon peeped out of the sky, the Bacchante faded away in the moonbeams. Her steed dropped down to the earth ; while the one which bore Endymion continued mounting upwards, and he again fell into a sort of trance. He heard not the celestial messengers bespeaking guests to Diana's wedding. The KEATS. 176 winged horse then carried Endymion down to a hill-top. Here once more he found his beautiful Indian, and for her sake forswore all praeterhuman passion. She, how- •ever, declared to him that a divine terror forbade her to be his. His sister Peona now re-appeared. She rallied him and the Bacchante on their love and melan- choly, both equally obvious, and bade him attend at night a festival to Diana, whom the soothsayers had pro- nounced to be in a mood peculiarly propitious. Endy- mion announced his resolution to abandon the world, and live an eremitic life : Peona and the fair Indian should both be his sisters. The Indian vowed lifelong •chastity, devoted to Diana. Both the women then retired. The day passed over Endymion motionless and mute. At eventide he walked towards the temple ; he heeded not the hymning to Diana. Peona, companioned by the Indian damsel, accosted him. He replied, ■** Sister, I would have command, if it were heaven's will, on our sad fate." The Indian replied that this he should assuredly have ; as she spoke she changed sem- blance, and stood revealed as Diana herself. She laid upon her own fears and upon fate the blame of past delays, and told Endymion that it had also been fitting that he should be spiritualized out of mortality by some unlooked-for change. As Endymion kneeled and kissed "her hands, they both vanished away. The last words of the poem are — "Peona went Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment : " words which may perhaps be modelled upon the grave and subdued conclusion ot *' Paradise Lost." 176 LIFE OF This is a bald outline of the thread of story which meanders through that often-skimmed, seldom-read, not easily readable poem — in snatches alluring, in entirety disheartening — the ** Endymion " of Keats. It will be perceived that the poet keeps throughout tolerably close to his main and professed subject-matter — the loves of Diana and Endymion, although the episode of Glaucus, which is brought within the compass of the amorous quest, is certainly a very long and extraneous one. As we have seen, Keats, when well advanced with this poem, spoke of it as a test of his inventive faculty : and truly it is such, but I am not sure that his inventive faculty has come extremely well out of the ordeal. The best part which invention could take in such an attempt would be a vigorous, sane, and adequate conception of the imagin- able relation between a loving goddess and her human lover ; her emotion towards him, and his emotion towards her ; and his ultimate semi-spiritualized and semi-human mode of existence in the divine conclave ; along with a chain of incidents — partly of mythologic tradition, partly the poet's own — which should illustrate these essential elements of the legend, and take possession of the reader's mind, for their own sake at the moment, and for the sake of the main conception as ultimate result Of all this we find little in Keats's poem. Diana figures as a very willing woman, passing oiit of the stage of maidenly coyness. Endymion talks indeed at times of the exaltation of a passion transcending the bounds of mortahty, but his conduct and demeanour go little beyond those of an adventurous lover of the knight-errant sort who, having taken the first leap in the dark, follows where Fortune KEATS. 177 leads him — and assuredly she leads him a very curious dance, where one cannot make out how his human organism, with respirative and digestive processes, con- tinues to exist. Moreover, the last book of the poem spoils all that has preceded, so far as continuity of feeling is concerned ; for here we learn that no sooner does Endymion see a pretty Indian Bacchante than he falls madly in love with her, and casts to the winds every shred and thought of Diana, already his bride or quasi- bride ; she goes out like a cloud-veiled glimpse of moon- light. True, the Bacchante is in fact Diana herself ; but of this Endymion knows nothing at all, and he deliberately — or rather with fatuous precipitancy — gives up the glorious goddess for the sentimental and beguihng wine- bibber. Diana, when she re-assumes her proper person, has not a word of reproach to level at him. This may possibly be true to the nature of a goddess — it is certainly not so to that of a woman ; and it is the only crisis at which she shows herself different from womanhood — shall we say superior to it ? In another and minor sense there is no lack of inven- tion in this Poetic Romance. So far as I know, there is nothing in Grecian mythology furnishing a nucleus for the incidents of Endymion's descending into the bowels of the earth, passing thence beneath the sea, meeting Glaucus, and restoring to life the myriads of drowned lovers, encountering the Indian Bacchante, and taking with her an aerial voyage upon winged coursers. These incidents — except indeed that of the Bacchante — are passing strange, and could not be worked out in a long narrative poem without a lavish command of fanciful and 178 LIFE OF surprising touches. The tale of the aerial voyage seems abortive ; its natural raisoii d'etre and needful sequel would appear to be that Diana, having thus launched Endymion along with herself into the heavenly regions, should bear him straight onward to the high court of the gods ; but, instead of that, the horses and their riders return to earth, the air has been traversed to no purpose and with no ostensible result, and Endymion is allowed again to forswear Diana for the Bacchante before the consummation is reached. Presumably Morpheus (Sleep) is responsible for this mishap. His untoward presence in the sky sent the Bacchante, as well as Endymion, to sleep for awhile : when they awoke, Diana had to leave the form of the Bacchante, and, in her character of Phoebe, regulate the nascent moon ; though a goddess, she could not be in two places at once, and so the winged horses descended re infecta. This is an ingenious point of incident enough ; but it is just one of those points which indicate that the poet's mind moved in a region of scintillating details rather than of large and majestic contours. Such is in fact the quality of " Endymion " throughout. Everything is done for the sake of variegation and em- broidery of the original fabric ; or we might compare it to a richly-shot silk which, at every rustling movement, catches the eye with a change of colour. Constant as they are, the changes soon become fatiguing, and in effect monotonous ; one colour, varied with its natural light and shade, would be more restful to the sight, and would even, in the long run, leave a sense of greater, because more congruous and harmonized, variety. Lus- KEATS. 179 cious and luxuriant in intention — for I cannot suppose that Keats aimed at being exalted or ideal — the poem becomes mawkish in result : he said so himself, and we need not hesitate to repeat it. Affectations, conceits, and puerilities, abound, both in thought and in diction : however willing to be pleased, the reader is often discon- certed and provoked. The number of clever things said cleverly, of rich things richly, and of fine things finely, is however abundant and superabundant ; and no one who peruses " Endymion " with a true sense for poetic endow- ment and handling can fail to see that it is peculiarly the work of a poet. The versification, though far from fault- less, is free, surging, and melodious — one of the devices which the author most constantly employs with a view to avoiding jogtrot uniformity being that of beginning a new sentence with the second line of a couplet. On every page the poet has enjoyed himself, and on most of them the reader can joy as well. The lyrical interludes, especi- ally the hymn to Pan, and the chaunt of the Bacchante (which comprises a sort of verse-transcript of Titian's *' Bacchus and Ariadne "), are singularly wealthy in that fancy which hovers between description and emotion. The hymn to Pan was pronounced by Wordsworth, vivA voce, to be "a pretty piece of paganism" — a comment which annoyed Keats not a little. Shelley (in his undis- patched letter to the editor of the Quarterly Review) pointed out, as particularly worthy of attention, the pas- sages — " And then the forest told it in a dream " (book ii.) ; " The rosy veils mantling the East " (book iii.) ; and " Upon a weeded rock this old man sat " (book iii.) The last — relating to Glaucus and his pictured cloak — is cer- i80 LIFE OF tainly remarkable ; the other two, I should say, not more remarkable than scores of others — as indeed Shelley him- self implied. To sum up, " Endymion " is an essentially poetical poem, which sins, and greatly or even grossly does it sin, by youthful indiscipline and by excess. To deny these blemishes would be childish — they are there, and must be not only admitted, but resented. The faults, like the beauties, of the poem, are positive — not negative or neutral. The work was in fact (as Keats has already told us) a venture of an experimental kind. At the age of twenty- one to twenty-two he had a mind full of poetic material ; he turned out his mind into this poetic romance, con- scious that, if some things came right, others would come wrong. We are the richer for his rather overweening experiment ; we are not to ignore its conditions, nor its partial failure, but we have to thank him none the less. If " a thing of beauty is a joy for ever," a thing of alloyed beauty is a joy in its minor degree. The next long poem of Keats — " Isabella, or the Pot of Basil " — is a vast advance on " Endymion " in sureness of hand and moderation of work : it is in all respects the better poem, and justifies what Keats said (in his letter ot October 9, 1818, quoted in our Chapter v.) of the experi- ence which he was sure to gain by the adventurous plunge he had made in " Endymion." Of course it was a less arduous attempt ; the subject being one of directly human passion, the story ready-furnished to him by Boccaccio, and the narrative much briefer. Except in altering the locality from Messina to Florence (a change which seems objecdess), Keats has adhered faithfully enough to the KEATS. 181 sweet and sad story of Boccaccio ; he has however ampli- fied it much in detail, for the Italian tale is a short one. " Isabella" has always been a favourite with the readers of Keats, and deservedly so ; it is tender, touching, and picturesque. Yet I should not place it in the very first rank of the poet's works — the treatment seems to me at once more ambitious and less masculine than is needed. The writer seems too conscious that he has set himself to narrating something pathetic ; he tells the story ab extra, and enlarges on " the pity of it," instead of leaving the pity to speak to the heart out of the very cir- cumstances themselves. The brothers may have been *' ledger-men " and " money-bags " (Boccaccio does not insist upon any such phase of character), and they cer- tainly became criminals, though the Italian author treats their murder of Lorenzo as if it were a sufficiently obvious act in vindication of the family honour ; but, when Keats "again asks aloud " why these commercial brothers were proud, he seems to intrude upon us overmuch the person- ality of the narrator of a tragic story, and pounds away at his text like a pulpiteer. This is only one instance of the flaw which runs through the poem — that it is all told as with a direct appeal to the reader to be sympathetic — indignant now, and now compassionate. Leigh Hunt has pointed out the absurdity of putting into the mouth of one of the brother "money-bags," just as they are about to execute their plot for murdering Lorenzo, the lines (though he praises the pretty conceit in itself) — Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count His dewy rosary on the eglantine. " 182 LIFE OF The author's invocation to Melancholy, Music, Echo, Spirits in grief, and Melpomene, to condole the ap- proaching death of Isabella, seems to me a fadeur hardly more appropriate than the money-bag's epigram upon the "dewy rosary." But the reader is probably tired of my qualifying clauses for the admiration with which he re- gards " The Pot of Basil." He thinks it both beautiful and pathetic — and so do I. " Isabella " is written in the octave stanza ; " The Eve of St. Agnes" in the Spenserean. This difference of metre corresponds very closely to the difference of character between the two poems. " Isabella " is a nar- rative poem of event and passion, in which the incidents are presented so as chiefly to subserve purposes of senti- ment ; " The Eve of St. Agnes," though it assumes a narrative form, is hardly a narrative, but rather a monody of dreamy richness, a pictured and scenic presentment, which sentiment again permeates and over-rules. I rate it far above " Isabella " — and indeed above all those poems of Keats, not purely lyrical, in which human or quasi-human agents bear their part, except only the ballad " La Belle Dame sans Merci," and the uncom- pleted " Eve of St. Mark." " Hyperion " stands aloof in lonely majesty ; but I think that, in the long run, even ''Hyperion "represents the genius of Keats less adequately, and past question less characteristically, than " The Eve of St. i\gnes." The story of this fascinating poem is so meagre as to be almost nugatory. There is nothing in it but this — that Keats took hold of the superstition proper to St. Agnes' Eve, the power of a maiden to see her absent lover under certain conditions, and added to it KEA TS. 183 that a lover, who was clandestinely present in this con- juncture of circumstances, eloped with his mistress. This extreme tenuity of constructive power in the poem, coupled with the rambling excursiveness of " Endymion," and the futility of " The Cap and Bells," might be held to indicate that Keats had very little head for framing a story — and indeed I infer that, if he possessed any faculty in that direction, it remained undeveloped up to the day of his death. One of the few subsidiary incidents introduced into " The Eve of St. Agones " is that the lover Porphyro, on emerging from his hiding- place while his lady is asleep, produces from a cupboard and marshals to sight a large assortment of appetizing eatables. Why he did this no critic and no admirer has yet been able to divine ; and the incident is so trivial in itself, and is made so much of for the purpose of verbal or metrical embellishment, as to reinforce our persuasion that Keats's capacity for framing a story out of suc- cessive details of a suggestive and self-consistent kind was decidedly feeble. The power of " The Eve of St. Agnes " lies in a wholly different direction. It lies in the delicate transfusion of sight and emotion into sound ; in making pictures out of words, or turning words into pictures ; of giving a visionary beauty to the closest items of description ; of holding all the materials of the poem in a long-drawn suspense of music and reverie. " The Eve of St. Agnes " is par excellence the poem of "glamour." It means next to nothing; but means that little so exquisitely, and in so rapt a mood of musing or of trance, that it tells as an intellectual no less, than a sensuous restorative. Perhaps no reader has ever risen 184 LIFE OF from " The Eve of St. Agnes " dissatisfied. After a while he can question the grounds of his satisfaction, and may possibly find them wanting ; but he has only to peruse the poem again, and the same spell is upon him. " The Eve of St. Mark " was begun at much the same date as " The Eve of St. Agnes," rather the earlier of the two. Its relation to other poems by the author is singular. In " Endymion " he had been a prodigal of treasures — some of them genuine, others spurious; in ''The Eve of St. Agnes" he was at least opulent, a magnate superior to sumptuary laws ; but in " The Eve of St. Mark " he subsides into a delightful simplicity — a simplicity full, certainly, of " favour and prettiness," but chary of ornament. It comes perfectly natural to him, and promises the most charming results. The non- completion of "The Eve of St. Mark" is the greatest grievance of which the admirers of Keats have to com- plain. I should suppose that, in the first instance, he advisedly postponed the eve of one saint, Mark, to the eve of the other, Agnes ; and that he did not afterwards find a convenient opportunity for resuming the uncom- pleted poem. The superstition connected with St. Mark's vigil is not wholly unlike that pertaining to St. Agnes's. In the former instance (I quote from Dante Rossetti), *' it is believed that, if a person placed himself near the church porch when twilight was thickening, he would behold the apparition of those persons in the parish who were to be seized with any severe disease that year go into the church. If they remained there, it signified their death ; if they came out again, it portended their recovery ; and, the longer or shorter the time they KEA TS. 185 remained in the building, the severer or less dangerous their illness." The same writer, forecasting the pro- bable course of the story, '^ surmised that " the heroine, remorseful after trifling with a sick and now absent lover, might make her way to the minster porch to learn his fate by the spell, and perhaps see his figure enter but not return." If this was really to have been the sequel, we can perceive that the unassuming simplicity of the poem at its commencement would, ere its close, have deepened into a different sort of simplicity — emotional, and even tragic. As it stands, the simplicity of " The Eve of St. Mark " is full-blooded as well as quaint — there is nothing starved or threadbare about it. Diverse though it is from Coleridge's " Christabel," ^ve seem to feel in it something of the Hke possessing or haunting quality, modified by Keats's own distinctive genius. In this respect, and in perfectness of touch, we link it with " La Belle Dame sans Merci." " Hyperion " has next to be considered. This was the only poem by Keats which Shelley admired in an ex- treme degree. He wrote at different dates : " The fragment called ' Hyperion ' promises for him that he is destined to become one of the first writers of the age. ... It is certainly an astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of Keats which I confess I had not before. ... If the ' Hyperion ' be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries. . . . The great proportion of this piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry." Byron, who had been particu- larly virulent against Keats during his lifetime, wrote ^ See p. 52 as to Miss Brawne. 186 LIFE OF after his death a much more memorable phrase : " His fragment of ' Hyperion ' seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as ^schylus." Mr. Swinburne has written of the poem more at length, and with care- fully weighed words : "The triumph of ' Hyperion' is as nearly complete as the failure of ' Endymion.' Yet Keats never gave such proof of a manly devotion and rational sense of duty to his art as in his resolution to leave this great poem un- finished ; not (as we may gather from his correspondence on the subject) for the pitiful reason assigned by his publishers, that of discouragement at the reception given to his former work, but on the solid and reasonable ground that a Miltonic study had something in its very scheme and nature too artificial, too studious of a foreign influence, to be carried on and carried out at such length as was implied by his original design. Fortified and purified as it had been on a first revision, when much introductory allegory and much tentative effusion of sonorous and superfluous verse had been rigorously clipped down or pruned away, it could not long have retained spirit enough to support or inform the shadowy body of a subject so little charged with tangible signifi- cance." Mr. Swinburne is a critic with whom one may well be content to go astray, if astray it is. I will therefore say that I entirely agree with him in this estimate of " Hyperion," and of the sound discretion which Keats exercised in giving it up. To deal with the gods of KEA TS. 187 Olympus is no easy task — it had decidedly overtaxed Keats in " Endymion," though he limited himself to the two goddesses Diana and Venus, and casually the gods Neptune and Mercury ; but to deal with the elder gods — Saturn, Ops, Hyperion — and with the Titans, on the scale of a long epic narration, is a task which may well be pronounced unachievable. The Olympian gods would also have had to be introduced : Apollo already appears in the poem, not too promisingly. The elder gods are necessarily mere figure-heads of bulk, might, majesty, and antiquity ; to get any character out of them after these "property" attributes have been exhausted to the mind's eye, to " set them going " in act, and doing something apportionable into cantos, and readable by human energies, was not a problem which could be solved by a poet of the nineteenth centur)\ Past question, Keats started grandly, and has left us a monument of Cyclopean architecture in verse almost impeccable — a Stonehenge of reverberance ; he has made us feel that his elder gods were profoundly primseval, powers so august and abstract- natured as to have become already obsolete in the days of Zeus and Hades : his Titans, too, were so vast and muscular that no feat would have been difficult to them except that of interesting us. This sufficed for the first book of the poem; in the second book, the enterprise is already revealing itself as an impossible one, for the council at which Oceanus and others speak is reminiscent of the Pandaemonic council in Milton, and clearly very inferior to that. It could not well help resembling the scene in " Paradise Lost," nor yet help being inferior ; besides, even were it equal or preferable, 188 LIFE OF Milton had done the thing first. The " large utterance of the early gods," large though it be, tends to monotony. In book iii., we go off to Mnemosyne and Apollo ; but of this section little remains, and we close the poem with a conviction that Keats, if he had succeeded in writing " a fragvient as sublime as ^schylus," was both prudent and fortunate in leaving it a fragment. To say that " Hyperion " is after all a semi-artificial utterance of the grand would be harsh, and ungrateful for so noble an effort of noble faculty; but to say that, by being pro- longed, its grandeur must infallibly have partaken more and more of an artificial infusion, appears to me criticism entirely sound and safe. Mr. Woodhouse has informed us : " The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former god of the sun, by Apollo ; and in- cidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, &c., and of the war of the Giants for Saturn's re- establishment \ with other events of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact, the incidents would have been pure creations of the poet's brain." Here again Keats would have been partly forestalled by Milton : the combat of the Giants with the Olympian gods must have borne a very appreciable resemblance to the combat of Satan and his legions with the hosts of heaven. How far Keats's "invention " would have sufficed to filling in this vast canvas may be questioned. The precedent of " Endymion," in which he had attempted something of the same kind, was not wholly encouraging. The method and tone would of course \ ave been very different \ in KEATS. 189 what remains of "Hyperion," the general current of diction is as severe as in " Endymion " it had been florid. The other commencement of " Hyperion " (alluded to in my sixth chapter) was a later version, done in November and December 1819 ; it presents a great deal of poetic or scenic machinery in which the author's personality was copiously introduced. This recast contains impressive things ; but the prominence given to the author as spectator or participant of what he pictures forth was fulsome and fatal. Mr. Swinburne is in error (along with most other writers) in supposing this to be the earlier version of the two. The tragedy of " Otho the Great," written on a peculiar system of collaboration to which I have already referred, succeeded "Hyperion." It is a tragedy on the Eliza- bethan model, and we find in scene i. a curious instance of EHzabethan contempt of chronology — a reference to " Hungarian petards." The main factors in the plot are a fierce and fervent love-passion of the man, and an un- scrupulous ambition of the woman, reddened with crime. Webster may perhaps have been taken by Keats as his chief prototype. To call " Otho the Great " an excellent drama would not be possible ; but it can be read without tedium, and contains vigorous passages, and lines and images moulded with a fine poetic ardour. The action would be sufficient for stage-representation at a time when an audience come prepared to like a play if it is good in verse and strong in romantic emotion ; under such con- ditions, while it could not be a great success, it need not nevertheless fall manifestly flat. Under any other con- ditions, such as those which prevail nowadays, this 190 LIFE OF tragedy would necessarily run no chance at all. In a copy of Keats which belonged to Dante Gabriel Rossetti I find the following note of his, which may bear ex- tracting : " This repulsive yet powerful play is of course in draft only. It is much less to be supposed that it would have been left so imperfect than to be surmised, from its imperfection, how very gradual the maturing of Keats's best work probably may have been. It gives after all, perhaps, the strongest proof of robustness that Keats has left ; and as a tragedy is scarcely more deficient than ' Endymion ' as a poem. Both, viewed as wholes, are quite below Keats's three masterpieces ; ^ yet ' Otho,' as well as ' Endymion,' gives proof of his finest powers." Another note from the same hand remarks : " The character and conduct of Albert [the lover of Auranthe murdered to clear the way for her ambition] are the finest point in the play." Of the later drama, "King Stephen," so little was written that I need not dwell upon it here. " Lamia " was begun about the same time as " Otho the Great," but finished afterwards. The influence of Dryden, under which it was composed, has told strongly upon its versification, as marked especially in the very free use of alexandrines — generally the third line of a triplet, some- times even the second line of a couplet You might search " Endymion " in vain for alexandrines ; and I will '^ I presume the "three masterpieces" are "The Eve of St. Agnes," *' Hyperion," and " Lamia " ; this leaves out of count the short " Belle Dame sans Merci," and the unfinished " Eve of St. Mark," but certainly not because Dante Rossetti rated those lower than the three others. KEATS. 191 admit that their frequency appears to me to give an arti- ficial tone to " Lamia." The view which Keats has elected to take of his subject is worth considering. The heroine is a serpent-woman, or a double-natured being who can change from serpent into woman and vice versa. In the female form she beguiles a young student of philo- sophy, Lycius, lives with him in a splendid palace, and finally celebrates their marriage-feast The philosopher Apollonius attends among the guests, perceives her to be "human serpentry," and, gazing on her with ruthless fixity, he compels her and all her apparatus of enchant- ment to vanish. This is the act for which (in lines partly quoted in these pages) Keats arraigns philosophy, and its power of stripping things bare of their illusions. No doubt a poet has a right to treat a legend of this sort from such point of view as he likes ; it is for him, and not for his reader, to take the bull by the horns. But it does look rather like taking the bull by the weaker horn to contend that the philosopher who saves a youthful disciple from the wiles of a serpent is condemnably prosaic — a grovelling spirit that denudes life of its poetry. Conveniently for Keats's theory, Lycius is made to die forthwith after the vanishing of his Lamia. If we invent a different finale to the poem, and say that Lycius fell down on his knees, and thanked Apollonius for saving him from such pestilent delusions and perilous blandish- ments, and ever afterwards looked out for the cloven tongue (if not the cloven hoof) when a pretty woman made advances to him, we may perhaps come quite as near to a right construction of so strange a series of events, and to the true moral of the story. But Keats's 192 LIFE OF championship was for the enjoying aspects of life ; he may be held to have exercised it here rather perversely. "Lamia" is one of his completest and most finished pieces of writing — perhaps in this respect superior to all his other long poems, if we except " Hyperion " ; it closes the roll of them with an affluence, even an excess, of sumptuous adornment. " Lamia " leaves on the mental palate a rich flavour, if not an absolutely healthy one. Passing from the long compositions, we find the cream of Keats's poetry in the ballad of " La Belle Dame sans Merci," and in the five odes— " To Psyche," "To Autumn," " On Melancholy," " To a Nightingale," and " On a Grecian Urn." " La Belle Dame sans Merci " may possibly have been written later than any of the odes, but this point is uncertain. I give it here as marking the highest point of romantic imagination to which Keats attained in dealing with human or quasi-human person- ages, and also his highest level of simplicity along with completeness of art. " Ah what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,'' Alone and palely loitering ? The sedge is withered from the lake. And no birds sing. " Ah what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, So haggard and so woe-begone ? The squirrel's granary is full, And the harvest's done. ^ There are some various readings in this poem (as here, wretched wight ") ; I adopt the phrases which I prefer. KEATS. 193 *' I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever-dew ; And on thy cheeks a fading rose Fast withereth too." *' I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful, a faery's child ; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild. ** I made a garland for her head. And bracelets too, and fragrant zone : She looked at me as she did love. And made sweet moan. ** I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long ; For sideways would she lean and sing A faery's song. " She found me roots of relish sweet. And honey wild, and manna-dew ; And sure in language strange she said — * I love thee true.' " She took me to her elfin grot. And there she gazed and sighed deep. And there I shut her wild sad eyes — So kissed to sleep. *' And there we slumbered on the moss. And there I dreamed — ah woe betide ! — The latest dream I ever dreamed On the cold hill-side. ** I saw pale kings and princes too. Pale warriors — death -pale were they all ; They cried — ' La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall.' 13 194 LIFE OF *' I saw their starved lips in the gloam With horrid warning gaped wide ; And I awoke, and found me here On the cold hill-side. " And this is why I sojourn here, Alone and palely loitering ; Though the sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing." This is a poem of impression. The impression is im- mediate, final, and permanent; and words would be more than wasted upon pointing out to the reader that such and such are the details which have conduced to impress him. In the five odes there is naturally some diversity in the degrees of excellence. I have given their titles above in the probable (not certain) order of their composition. Considered intellectually, we might form a kind of symphony out of them, and arrange it thus — i, "Grecian Urn"; 2, "Psyche"; 3, "Autumn"; 4, "Melancholy"; 5, " Nightingale " ; and, if Keats had left us nothing else, we should have in this symphony an almost com- plete picture of his poetic mind, only omitting, or representing deficiently, that more instinctive sort of enjoyment which partakes of gaiety. Viewing all these wondrous odes together, the predominant quahty which we trace in them is an extreme susceptibility to delight, close-Hnked with afterthought — pleasure with pang — or that poignant sense of ultimates, a sense delicious and harrowing, which clasps the joy in sadness, and feasts upon the very sadness in joy. The emotion throughout is the emotion of beauty; beauty intensely perceived, KEATS. 195 intensely loved, questioned of its secret like the sphinx, imperishable and eternal, yet haunted (as it were) by its own ghost, the mortal throes of the human soul. As no poet had more capacity for enjoyment than Keats, so none exceeded him in the luxury of sorrow. Few also exceeded him in the sense of the one moment irre- trievable; but this conception in its fulness belongs to the region of morals yet more than of sensation, and the spirit of Keats was almost an alien in the region of morals. As he himself wrote (March 1818) — " Oh never will the prize, High reason, and the love of good and ill, Be my award ! " I think it will be well to cull out of these five odes- taken in the symphonic order above noted — the phrases which constitute the strongest chords of emotion and of music. (i) " Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter ; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on ; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared. Pipe, to the spirit, ditties of no tone. " Human passion far above That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. " Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (2) ** 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. 196 LIFE OF *' Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts new-grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind. (3) *' 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. {4) " But, when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud, Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave. •* She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die ; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu ; and aching Pleasure nigh. Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips. Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine. (5) " That I might drink, and leave the world unseen. And with thee fade away into the forest dim : Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known. The weariness, the fever, and the fret, Here where men sit and hear each other groan ; Where palsy shakes a few sad last grey hairs ; Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies ; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs ; Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. KEATS. 197 " Darkling I listen : and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, — Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme To take into the air my quiet breath. Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain. While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy. *' The same that oft-times hath Charmed magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self. " Was it a vision or a waking dream? Fled is that music — do I wake or sleep ? " To one or two of these phrases a few words of com- ment may be given. That axiom which concludes the " Ode on a Grecian Urn " — ** Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know," is perhaps the most important contribution to thought which the poetry of Keats contains : it pairs with and transcends " A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." I am not prepared to say whether Keats was the first writer to formulate any axiom to this effect, — I should rather presume not; but at any rate it comes with peculiar appropriateness in the writings of a poet who might have varied the dictum of lago, and said of himself " P'or I am nothing if not beautiful." 198 LIFE OF In the Ode, the axiom is put forward as the message of the sculptured Grecian Urn "to man," and is thus pro- pounded as being of universal application. It amounts to saying — "Any beauty which is not truthful (if any such there be), and any truth which is not beautiful (if any such there be), are of no practical importance to mankind in their mundane condition : but in fact there are none such, for, to the human mind, beauty and truth are one and the same thing." To debate this question on abstract grounds is not in my province : all that I have to do is to point out that Keats's perception and thought crystallized into this axiom as the sum and sub- stance of wisdom for man, and that he has bequeathed it to us to ponder in itself, and to lay to heart as the secret of his writings. Those other lines, from the " Ode on Melancholy," where he says of Melancholy — ' ' She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die ; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu '^ — appear to me unsurpassable in the whole range of his poetry — as intense in imagery as supreme in diction and in music. They pair with the other celebrated verses from the " Ode to a Nightingale " — " Now more then ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain ; " and — " Charmed magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn." The phrase ''^rich to die" is of the very essence of KEATS. 199 Keats's emotion ; and the passage about " magic case- ments " shows a reach of expression which might ahiiost be called the Pillars of Hercules of human language. Far greater things have been said by the greatest minds : but nothing more perfect in form has been said — nothing wider in scale and closer in utterance — by any mind of whatsoever pitch of greatness. And here we come to one of the most intrinsic properties of Keats's poetry. He is a master of imagina- tion in verbal form : he gifts us with things so finely and magically said as to convey an imaginative impression. The imagination may sometimes be in the substance of the thought, as well as in its wording — as it is in the passage just quoted : sometimes it resides essentially in the wording, out of which thought expands in the reader, who is made *' To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest." From wealth of perception, at first confused or docked in the expression, he rose into a height of verbal embodi- ment which has seldom been equalled and seldomer exceeded. His conception of poetry as an ideal, his sense of poetry as an art, spurred him on to artistic achievement; and in the later stages of his work the character of the Artist is that which marks him most strongly. As one of his own letters says, he "looks upon fine phrases like a lover." According to Mr. Swinburne, " the faultless force and profound subtlety of this deep and cunning instinct for the absolute expression of absolute natural beauty is 200 LIFE OF doubtless the one main distinctive gift or power which denotes him as a poet among all his equals." We may safely accept this verdict of poet upon poet as a true one : yet I should be inclined to demur to such strong adjectives as " faultless " and "absolute." Beautiful as several of them are, I might hesitate to say that even one poem by Keats exhibits this his special characteristic in a faultless degree, or expresses absolutely throughout a natural beauty of absolute quality. To the last, he appears to me to have been somewhat wanting in those faculties of selection and of discipline which we sum up, by a rough-and-ready process, in the word " taste." He had done a great deal in this direction, and would probably, with a few years more of life, have done all that was needed; but we have to take him as he stands, with those few years denied. Unless perhaps in "La Belle Dame sans Merci," Keats has not, I think, come nearer to perfection than in the " Ode to a Nightingale." It is with some trepidation that I recur to this Ode, for the invidious purpose of testing its claim to be adjudged "faultless," for in so doing I shall certainly lose the sympathy of some readers, and strain the patience of many. The question, however, seems to be a very fair one to raise, and the specimen a strong one to try it by, and so I persevere. The first point of weakness — excess which becomes weak in result — is a surfeit of mythological allusions : Lethe, Dryad (the nightingale is turned into a " light-winged Dryad of the trees " — which is as much as to say, a light-winged (9«/C'-nymph of the trees)^ Flora, Hippocrene, Bacchus, the Queen-moon (the Queen- moon appears at first sight to be the classical Phoebe, KEATS. 201 who is here "clustered around by all her starry Fays," spirits proper to a Northern mythology ; but possibly Keats thought more of a Faery-queen than of Phoebe). Then comes the passage (already cited in these pages) about the poet's wish for a draught of wine, to help him towards spiritual commune with the nightingale. Some exquisite phrases in this passage have endeared it to all readers of Keats; yet I cannot but regard it as very foreign to the main subject-matter. Surely nobody wants wine as a preparation for enjoying a nightingale's music, whether in a literal or in a fanciful relation. Taken in detail, to call wine "the true, the blushful Hippocrene " — the veritable fount of poetic inspiration — seems both stilted and repulsive, and the phrase " with beaded bubbles winking at the brim " is (though pictu- resque) trivial, in the same way as much of Keats's earlier work. Far worse is the succeeding image, " Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards" — />., not under the inspira- tion of wine : the poet will fly to the nightingale, but not in a leopard- drawn chariot. Further on, as if we had not already had enough of wine and its associations, the coming musk-rose is described as " full of dewy wine " — an expression of very dubious appositeness : and the like may be said of " become a sod," in the sense of " become a corpse — earth to earth." The renowned address — '* Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird ! No hungry generations tread thee down," seems almost outside the region of criticism. Still, it is a palpaple fact that this address, according to its place in 202 LIFE OF the context, is a logical solecism. While " Youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies," while the poet would " become a sod " to the requiem sung by the nightingale, the nightingale itself is pronounced immortal. But this antithesis cannot stand the test of a moment's reflection. Man, as a race, is as deathless, as superior to the tramp of hungry generations, as is the nightingale as a race : while the nightingale as an individual bird has a life not less fleeting, still more fleeting, than a man as an individual. We have now arrived at the last stanza of the ode. Here the term " deceiving elf," applied to "the fancy," sounds rather petty, and in the nature of a make- rhyme : but this may possibly be a prejudice. Having thus — in the interest of my reader as a criti- cal appraiser of poetry — burned my fingers a little at the clear and perennial flame of the "Ode to a Nightingale," I shall quit that superb composition, and the whole quin- tett of odes, and shall proceed to other phases of my subject. The " Ode to Indolence," and the fragment of an " Ode to Maia," need not detain us ; the former, how- ever, is important as indicating a mood of mind — too vaguely open to the influences of the moment for either love, ambition, or poesy — to which we may well suppose that Keats was sufficiently prone. The few poems which remain to be mentioned were all printed posthumously. There are four addresses to Fanny Brawne, dating perhaps from early till late in 1819; two of them are irregular lyrics, and two sonnets. The best of the four is the sonnet, " The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone," which counts indeed among the better sonnets of Keats. Taken collectively, all four supply valuable evi- KEA TS. 203 dence as to the poet's love affair, confirmatory of what appears in his letters ; they exhibit him quelled by the thought of his mistress and her charms, and jealous of her mixing in or enjoying the company of others. Keats wrote some half-hundred of sonnets altogether, some of them among his very earliest and most trifling performances, others up to his latest period, including the last of all his compositions. Notwithstanding his marked growth in love of form, and his ultimate sur- prising power of expression — both being qualities pecu- liarly germane to this form of verse — his sonnets appear to me to be seldom masterly. A certain freakishness of disposition, and liability to be led astray by some point of detail into side-issues, mar the symmetry and concen- tration of his work. Perhaps the sonnet on " Chapman's Homer," early though it was, remains the best which he produced ; it is at any rate pre-eminent in singleness of thought, illustrated by a definite and grand image. It has a true opening and a true climax, and a clear link of inventive association between the thing mentally signified in chief, and the modes of its concrete presentment. In points of this kind Keats is seldom equally happy in his other sonnets ; sometimes not happy at all, but distinctly at fault. There is a second Homeric sonnet, " Standing aloof in giant ignorance" (1818), which contains one line which has been very highly praised, *' There is a budding morrow in midnight :" but, regarded as a whole, it is a weakling in com- parison with the Chapman sonnet. The sonnets, " To 204 LIFE OF Sleep" (" O soft embalmer of the still midnight"), " Why did I laugh to-night? " and " On a Dream" ("As Hermes once took to his feathers light ")— all of them dated in 1 819 — are remarkable; the third would indeed almost be excellent were it not for the inadmissible laxity of an alexandrine last line. This is the sonnet of which we have already spoken, the dream of Paolo and Francesca. The " Why did I laugh to-night ? " is a strange personal utterance, in which the poet (not yet attacked by his mortal illness) exalts death above verse, fame, and beauty, in the same mood of mind as in the lovely passage of the " Ode to a Nightingale " ; but the sonnet, considered as an example of its own form of art, is too exclamatory and uncombined. There are several minor poems by Keats of which — though some of them are extremely dear to his devotees — I have made no mention. Such are " Teignmouth," "Where be you going, you Devon maid?" ** Meg Merri- lies," " Walking in Scotland," " Staffa," " Lines on the Mermaid Tavern," "Robin Hood," "To Fancy," "To the Poets," " In a drear-nighted December," " Hush, hush, tread softly," four " Faery Songs." Most of these pieces seem to me over-rated. As a rule they have lyrical impulse, along with the brightness or the tender- ness which the subject bespeaks ; but they are slight in significance and in structure, pleasurable but not memo- rable work. One enjoys them once and again, and then their office is over; they have not in them that stuff which can be laid to heart, nor that spherical unity and replenishment which can make of a mere snatch of verse an inscription for the adamantine portal of time. KEATS. 205 The feeling with which Keats regarded women in real life has been already spoken of As to the tone of his poems respecting them we have his own evidence. A letter of his to Armitage Brown, dated towards the first days of September 1820, says, in reference to the "Lamia" volume: "One of the causes, I understand from different quarters, of the unpopularity of this new book, is the offence the ladies take at me. On thinking that matter over, I am certain that I have said nothing in a spirit to displease any woman I would care to please ; but still there is a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats ; they never see themselves dominant." The long poems in the volume in question were " Isabella," " The Eve of St. Agnes," '* Hyperion," and "Lamia." In "Hyperion " women are of course not dominant ; but, as regards the other three poems, they are surely dominant enough in one sense. In " Isabella " the heroine is the sole figure of prime importance — so also in " Lamia " ; and in the " Eve of St. Agnes " she counts for much more than Porphyro, though the num- ber of stanzas about her may be fewer. Nevertheless it might be that the women in the three poems, though " dominant," are " classed with roses and sweetmeats." I do not see, however, that this can fairly be said of MadeUne in the "Eve of St. Agnes"; she is made a very charming and loveable figure, although she does nothing very particular except to undress without looking behind her, and to elope. Again, Isabella, amenable as she may be to the censure of the severely virtuous, plays a part which takes her very considerably out of affinity to roses and sweetmeats. To Lamia the objection applies 20G LIFE OF clearly enough ; but then she is not exactly a woman, and Keats resents so fiercely the far from indefensible line of conduct which Apollonius adopts in relation to her that it seems hard if the ladies owed the poet a grudge. On the whole I incline to think that they must have been misreported ; but the statement in Keats's letter remains not the less significant as a symptom of his real underlying feeling about women. It has often been pointed out that Keats's lovers have a habit of " swooning," and the fact has sometimes been remarked upon as evidencing a certain want of virility in himself. I cannot affect to be, so far, of a different opinion. The incident and the phrase do manifestly tend to the namby-pamby. This may have been more a matter of affected or self-willed diction on his part — and diction of that kind appears constantly in his earlier poems, and not seldom in his later ones — than of actual character chargeable against himself; yet I would not entirely disregard it in the latter relation either. Keats was a very young man, with a limited experience of life. He had to picture to himself how his lovers would be likely to behave under given conditions; and, if he thought they would be likely to swoon, the probability is that he also, under parallel conditions, would have been likely to swoon — or at least supposed he would be likely. Because he thrashed a butcher-boy, or was indignant at backbiting and meanness, we are not to credit him with an unmingled fund of that toughness which distinguishes the English middle class. The English middle-class man is not habitually addicted to writing an '* Endymion," an *' Eve of St. iVgnes," or an " Ode on Melancholy." KEATS. 207 Sensuousness has been frequently defined as the para- mount bias of Keats's poetic genius. This is, in large measure, unassailably true. He was a man of percep- tion rather than of contemplation or speculation. Per- ception has to do with perceptible things; perceptible things must be objects of sense, and the mind which dwells on objects of sense must ipso facto be a mind of the sensuous order. But the mind which is mainly sensuous by direct action may also work by reflex action, and pass from sensuousness into sentiment. It cannot fairly be denied that Keats's mind continually did this ; it had direct action potently, and reflex action amply. He saw so far and so keenly into the sensuous as to be penetrated with the sentiment which, to a healthy and large nature, is its inseparable outcome. We might say that, if the sensuous was his atmosphere, the breathing apparatus with which he respired it was sentiment. In his best work — for instance, in all the great odes — the two things are so intimately combined that the reader can only savour the sensuous nucleus through the senti- ment, its medium or vehicle. One of the most compen- dious and elegant phrases in which the genius of Keats has been defined is that of Leigh Hunt : " He never beheld an oak tree without seeing the Dryad." In imme- diate meaning Hunt glances here at the mythical sympathy or personifying imagination of the poet ; but, if we accept the phrase as applying to the sensuous object-painting, along with its ideal aroma or suggestion in his finest work, we shall still find it full of right significance. We need not dwell upon other less mature performances in which the two things are less closely interfused. Cer- 208 LIFE OF tainly some of his work is merely, and some even crudely, sensuous : but this is work in which the poet was trying his materials and his powers, and rising towards mastery of his real faculty and ultimate function. While discriminating between what was excellent in Keats, and what was not excellent, or was merely tenta- tive in the direction of final excellence, we must not confuse endowments, or the homage which is due to endowments, of a radically different order. Many readers, and there have been among them several men highly qualified to pronounce, have set Keats beside his great contemporary Shelley, and indeed above him. I cannot do this. To me it seems that the primary gift of Shelley, the spirit in which he exercised it, the objects upon which he exercised it, the detail and the sum of his achievement, the actual produce in appraisable work done, the influence and energy of the work in the future, were all superior to those of Keats, and even superior beyond any reasonable terms of comparison. If Shelley's poems had defects — which they indisputably had — Keats's poems also had defects. After all that can be said in their praise — and this should be said in the most gene- rous or rather grateful and thankful spirit — it seems to me true that not many of Keats's poems are highly admirable; that most of them, amid all their beauty, have an adolescent and frequently a morbid tone, marking want of manful thew and sinew and of mental balance ; that he is not seldom obscure, chiefly through indifler- ence to the thought itself and its necessary means of development ; that he is emotional without substance, and beautiful without control ; and that personalism of a KEATS. 209 wilful and fitful kind pervades the mass of his handiwork. AVe have already seen, however, that there is a certain not inconsiderable proportion of his poems to which these exceptions do not apply, or apply only with greatly diminished force ; and, as a last expression of our large and abiding debt to him and to his well-loved memory, we recur to his own words, and say that he has given us many a " thing of beauty," which will remain " a joy for €ver." By his early death he was doomed to be the poet of youthfulness ; by being^ the poet of youthfulness he was privileged to become and to remain enduringly the poet of rapt expectation and passionate delight THE END. 14 INDEX A. Abbey, Guardian of Keats, 17, 19, 20, 29, 37, 39 "Adonais," by Shelley, 39, 90, 98, 170 -(Eschylus, 186 "Agnes, The Eve of St.,'' 107, 138 ; critical estimate of the poem, 182-184 ; 190, 206 •• Alastor," by Shelley, 82 " Annals of the Fine Arts," no Ariosto, 113 Asclepiad, The, 24 AthefKztim, The, 23 "Autumn, Ode to," by Keats, 109, 192, 194 Bailey, Archdeacon Benjamin, 23, 77, 78, 112, 123 ; his description of Keats, 124 ; 130, 133, 141,142, 14s, 158, 159 " Belle Dame (La) sans Merci," by Keats, 112, 182, 185, 190 ; quoted, 192, &c. ; 200 Benjamin, Nathan, 157 Bion, Idyll on "Adonis," by, 170 Blackwood, William, 91 Blackwood's Magazine, 90 ; articles in by Z, on The Cockney School of Poetry, 91 ; 92, 93, 95. 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 153 Boccaccio's "Decameron," 107, 180, i8i Boileau, 70 Bojardo's "Orlando Innamorato,*' 114 Brawne, Fanny, engaged to Keats, 30, 32 ; Keats's description of her, 33 ; 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45; Keats's love-letters to her, 45-46, &c. ; 53, 57, 60, 62, 102 ; her marriage to Mr. Lin- don, 121 ; 130, 141, 143, 146, 147, 158, 160 ; poems to, 202 Brav^ne, Mrs., 29, 34, 36, 60, 61, 143 Brown, Charles Armitage, friend of Keats, 25 ; Keats's verses on, 26 ; 27, 28, 29, 33, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 46, 48, 53 ; letter from Keats to, 55-56, 59, 108, III, 112, 114, n6, 119 ; his death, 120; 136, 156, 157, 160, 206 Burton's "Anatomy of Melan- choly," 108 212 INDEX. Byron, Lord, 32, 102, 103, 105, 125, 128, 185 Byron's "Don Juan," 58 C. Caius Cestius, 118 " Calidore," by Keats, 65, 165 " Cap and Bells. The," by Keats, "3> 183 " Caviare" (pseudonym of Keats), 112 " Cenci, The," by Shelley, 123 Champion, The, 115 *' Chapman's Homer,'' sonnet by Keats, 66, 69, 165, 166, 203 Chartier, Alain, 112 Chatterton, 67, 68 Chaucer, 112 Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, pic- ture by Haydon, 21, 36, 43, 126, 158 *' Christmas Eve," sonnet by Keats, quoted, 157 Clark, Mrs., 60 Clark, Sir James, 59, 60 Clarke, Charles Cowden, precep- tor and friend of Keats, 14, 18, 19, 20, 25, 65, 66 ; his " Recol- lections," 102 ; 104, 125, 126, 129, 140, 148 Clarke, Epistle to, by Keats, 67, 68 Clarke, Rev. John, Keats's school- master, 14 Coleridge, 25, 151, 164 Coleridge's "Christabel," 185 Colman, 156 Colvin's, Mr., " Life of Keats," 9, 35. 42 *' Comus," by Milton, 115 Cox, Miss Jane [" Charmian"], 30, 31, 32, 34, 143, 146 Cripps, 133 D. Dante, 112, 113 Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 23, 27, 29. 34. 39. 51. 53. 58, 103. 115. 120, 131, 133, 142, 150, 156, 160 Dilke, Mrs., 28 " Dream, A," sonnet by Keats, 112, 204 Dryden, 70, 108, 190 Duncan, Admiral, 16 Edinburgh Review, 109, 117 Edouart, 35 "Endymion," by Keats, 23, 24, 25, 54, 67, 72 ; details as to the composition of, 76 ; preface to, 79, 80 ; criticism upon in The Qzcarierly Revierv, 83 ; Keats's feeling as to this and other criticisms, 91-106 ; 107, 108, 109, 122, 130, 137, 139, 141, 149, 152, 166 ; Shelley's opinion of, 167 ; summary of the poem, 168- 175 ; critical estimate of it, 176- 180 ; 182, 186, 188, 189, 190 Examiner, The, 21, 68, 100 Eyre, Sir Vincent, 119 F. " Fancy, The," by Reynolds, 22 Finch, Colonel, 39, 98 '* Florence, The Garden of," by Reynolds, 22, 107 Forman, Mr. H. Buxton, 18, 25, 33. 34. 35. 52, 123 INDEX. 213 G. Gentleman s Magazine, The, 102 George IV., 21, 114 Giflford, William, 83, 95, i63 Girometti, 128 Gisborne, Mrs., 44, 98 Grafty, Mrs., 64 " Grasshopper and Cricket, The," sonnets by Keats and Hunt, 166 "Grecian Urn, Ode on a," by Keats, 109, no, 192, 194-198 Guide, 155 H. Hammond, Surgeon, 18, 19 Haslam, William, 54 Haydn, 148 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, the painter, friend of John Keats, 13, 16, 18, 21, 36, 37, 44 ; his last interview with Keats, 54 ; 55, 64, 69, 76, 78, 99 ; his view as to Keais's feeling regarding critical attacks, 100, &c. ; 105, no, 123, 126, 127, 128, 132, 133 ; his view of Keats's charac- ter, 134-135. 136, 137. 138, 140. 141, 142, 150, 152, 153, 155, 158 Hazlitt, 116, 152 Hilton, 128 Holmes, Edward, 54 Homer, 165 Hood, Mrs. (Miss Reynolds), 23 Hood, Thomas, 23 Hooker, Bishop, 32 Houghton, Lord, 41, 42, 58, 99, 114, 119, 125, 132, 136, 139 Howard, John, 32 Hunt, John, 20 Hunt, Leigh, 20, 21, 25, 44, 59, 66-69, ^^, 83, 84, 8s, 89-92, 97, c8, 100 ; his view as to Keats's sensitiveness to criticism, 102 ; no, 112, 114, 121, 122, 123 ; his description of Keats, 124 ; 125, 131, 134, 141, 142, 148, 150, 156, 158, 164, 166, 181, 207 Hunt, Leigh, dedicatory sonnet to, by Keats, 66 Hunt, Leigh, leaving prison, sonnet by Keats, 66 Hunt, Mrs., 44 Hunt, Thornton, 44 "Hyperion," by Keats, 96, 97, 107, 108, 113, 137, 182 ; critical estimate of the poem, 185-189 ; recast of, 189 ; 190, 192, 206 " I stood tiptoe upon a little hill," poem by Keats, 6t, extract from, 74 ; 165 Indicator, The, H2, 114 "Indolence, Ode to," by Keats, 202 " Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," by Keats, 95, 107, 138 ; critical estimate of the poem, 180-182 ; 206 " Islam, The Revoltor,"by Shelley, 'jT, 82, 123 J- J. S., 93, 94 Jeffrey, Lord, 109 Jeffrey, Mr., 120 Jennings, grandfather of Keats, 12, 37 214 INDEX. Jennings, Captain, i6 Jennings, Mrs., i6 *' Joseph and his Brethren," by Wells, 23 K. Kean as Richard Duke of York, critique by Keats, 93, 115 Kean, Edmund, 112 Keats, Fanny, sister of the poet, 13. 29, 38, 43, 45, 57, 62, 120, 121, 129, 148 Keats, Frances, mother of the poet, 12 ; her death, 16 ; 25, 126 Keats, George, brother of the poet, 13, 15, 18, 19, 25, 27, 30, 32. 37. 38, 64, 71, 95, 98 ; his view as to John Keats 's sensitive- ness to criticism, 103 ; iii, 119, 120, 126, 136, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 155, 159, 160 Reats, George, Epistle to, by John Keats, 6j, 68 Keats, John, his parentage, 12 ; his birth in London, October ' 31, 1795, 13 ; anecdote of his childhood, 13 ; goes to the school of Mr. Clarke at Enfield, 14 ; his studies, pugnacity, &c. , 15 ; death of his parents, 16 ; apprenticed to a surgeon, Ham- mond, 18 ; leaves Hammond, and walks the hospitals, 18, 19 ; reads Spenser's ' ' Faery Queen, " and drops surgical study, 20 ; makes acquaintance with Leigh Hunt, Haydon, and others, 20, 21, 22 ; his first volume. Poems, 1817, 22 ; writes " Endymion," 23 ; his health suffers in Oxford, 24 ; anecdotes (Coleridge, &c.). 25 ; makes a pedestrian tour in Scotland &c. with Charles Armitage Brown, 25-29 ; takes leave of his brother George and his wife, 27 ; his brother Tom dies, 29 ; lodges with Brown at Hampstead, 29 ; meets Miss Cox ("Charmian") and Miss Brawne, and falls in love with the latter, 30-35 ; their engage- ment, 36 ; his friendship towards Haydon cools, 36, 37 ; at Shank- lin and Winchester, 37, 38 ; sees his brother George again, and is left by him in pecuniary straits, 38, 39 ; the painful cir- cumstances of his closing months, owing to illness, his love affair, and the depreciation of his poems, 40, 41 ; beginning of his consumptive illness, 41, 42 ; removes to Kentish Town, 43, 44 ; returns to Mrs. Brawne's house at Hampstead, 45 ; his love-letters, 45-54 ; travels to Italy with Joseph Severn, 54- 59 ; Severn's account of his last days in Rome, 60, 61 ; his death there, February 23, 1821, 62, 63 ; his early turn for mere rhyming, 64 ; his early writings, and first volume, 65, 69 ; dia- tribe against Boileau, and poets of that school, 70 ; the pub- lishers relinquish sale of the volume, 72 ; " Endymion," and passage from an early poem forecasting this attempt, 73-76 ; details as to composition of "Endymion," 76-79; prefaces to the poem, 79-83 ; adverse INDEX. 215 critique in The Quarterly Re- view, 83-91 ; question debated whether this and other attacks affected Keats deeply, 91-97 ; statements by Shelley, 97 ; and by Haydon, 99 ; other evidence, 102 ; conclusion as to this point, 105 ; Keats writes " Isabella," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Hyperion," 107; "Lamia," 108 ; and publishes the volume containing these poems, 1820, 108 ; other poems in the volume, 109 ; posthumous poems of Keats, "The Eve of St. Mark," *'Othothe Great," "The Cap and Bells," &c., 110-115 ; his letters and other prose writings, 115-117 ; Keats's burial-place, 118-119 ; projects for writing his life, accomplished finally by Lord Houghton, 119 ; his rela- tions with Hunt, Shelley, and Others, 121-123 ; Keats's small stature and personal appear- ance, 124-126 ; the portraits of him, 126-129; difficulty of clearly estimating his character, 129 ; his poetic ambition and intensity of thought, 130, 131 ; his moral tone, 132 ; his character ("no decision" &c.,) estimated by Haydon, 133 - 139 ; Lord Houghton's account of his manner in society, 139 ; his suspiciousness, 141 ; and dislike of mankind, 142 ; his feeling to- wards women, 143-146 ; and towards Miss Brawne, 147, 148 ; his habits, opinions, likings, &c. , 148-155 ; humour and jocularity, 155-157 ; negative turn m re- ligious matters, 157-160 ; wine and diet, 160, 161 ; conclusion as to his character, i6r, 162 ; his early tone in poetry, 164 ; critical estimate of his first volume. Poems, 1817, 165-166 ; of " Endymion," 167, 168 ; narrative of this poem, 168-175 ; defects and beauties of " Endy- mion," 176-180; critical esti- mate of " Isabella," 180 ; " Eve of St, Agnes," 182 ; "Eve of St. Mark," 184; "Hyperion," 185; "Otho the Great," 189; " Lamia," 190 ; " Belle Dame sans Merci " (quoted), 192 ; the five chief Odes, 194 ; analysis of the "Ode to a Nightingale,'* 200 ; various posthumous lyrics, sonnets, &c., 202 ; Keats's feel- ing towards women, as developed in his poems, 205 ; "swooning," 206 ; sensuousness and senti- ment, 207 ; comparison between Keats and Shelley, and final remarks, 208 Keats, Mrs. George, 27, 32, 95, 120 Keats, Thomas, father of the poet, 12 ; his death, 16 ; 126 Keats, Thomas, brother of the poet, 13, 15, 19, 23, 24, 25, 28 : his death, 29 ; 37, 38, 39, 121, 13s. 159. 160 " King Stephen," by Keats, 73, 112, 190 Kotzebue, 150 Lamb, Charles, 78, 150 216 INDEX. Lamb, Dr., 44 " Lamia," by Keats, 108, 138, 151, 160 ; critical estimate of the poem, 190, &c. ; 206 *' Lamia, and other Poems," by Keats (1820), 44, 97, 103, 108, 109, no, 2o5 Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 61 Lempriere's " Classical Diction- ary," 15 Lindon, Mrs. [see Brawne, Fanny) Llanos, 121 Lockhart, 91 Lucas, 19 Lucy Vaughan Lloyd (pseudonym of Keats), 114 Lyrics (various) by Keats, 204 M. Mackereth, George Wilson, 19 " Maia, Ode to," by Keats, 202 •'Mark, Eve of St.," by Keats, 52, no, 182 ; critical estimate of the poem, 184-185; 190 Marmontel's " Incas of Peru," 15 Mathew, George Felton, Epistle to, by Keats, 67 ; 157 Medwin's " Life of Shelley," 34 " Melancholy, Ode on," by Keats, 109, 192, 194-199 Milton, 107, 135, 147, 159, 165, 186, 188 " Miserrimus," by Reynolds, 23 Mitford, Miss, loi, 135 Moore, Thomas, 165 Morning Chronicle, The, 93 Murray, John, 102 N. Napoleon L, 32 " Narensky," opera by C. A. Brown, 27 Newton, Sir Isaac, 151 "Nightingale, Ode to a," by Keats, 103, 109, 160, 192, 194— 202 ; analysed, 200-202 ; 204 " Nile, "Sonnets on the, by Keats„ &c. ; no O. Oilier, Charles, 21, 71 "Otho the Great," by Keats, 38, III, 112 ; critical estimate of, 189 P. " Paradise Lost,'' 108, 175, 187 "Paradise Lost," Notes on, by Keats, 115 Philostratus's ' ' Life of Apollo- nius," 108 "Poems" (1817), by Keats, 23, 66 ; letter regarding this volume, by the publishers, 72 ; 122, 164- 167 Pope, 70 Procter, Mrs., 125, 126 Purcell, 148 " Psyche, Ode to," by Keats, 109, 192, 194-199 Q. Quarterly Review, TJie, 83 ; its critique of " Endymion " ex- tracted, 83-91 ; 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 102, 104, 153, 179 "Quixote, Don," 120 R. R. B.. 93 Raphael, 155 Rawlings, William, 16 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 22, 79, 95, 107, 115, 128, 156 Reynolds, Misses, 30, 31, 142, 145, 148 INDEX. 217 Reynolds, Mrs., 31 Rice, James, 38, 41, 147 Richardson, Dr., 25 Ritchie, 78 Robinson Crusoe, 15 Robinson, H. Crabb, 104 Rossetti, Dante G., 52, 184, 185, s. Sandt, 150 Scott, Sir Walter, 91, 100 Severn, Joseph, 39 ; leaves Eng- land with Keats for Italy, 54 ; 59 ; his narrative of Keats's last days, 60, &c. ; 104, n8, 119, 125 ; his portraits of Keats, 127- 129 ; 139, 143, 147, 148 Shakespeare (Macbeth), 15; (Ham- let), 52; 93, 114, 135, 147; (King Lear), 151 ; 155, 165 Shakespeare, Notes on, by Keats, 115 Shakespeare's sonnets, Book on, by C. A. Brown, 27 Sharpey, Dr., 30 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 39, 58, 59, 71, 77, 82, 91, 96 ; his references to "Endymion,"and The Quar- terly Kexdciv, 97-99 ; 102, no, 119, 123, 125, 141, 147, 167, 179, 180, 185 ; comparison between Shelley and Keats, 208 " Sleep and Poetry," by Keats, 6-7, 69 ; extract from, 70 ; 165 Smith, Horace, 68 Snook, 56 Sonnet by Keats ("Bright Star," &c.), 114 Sonnets (various) by Keats, 164, 167, 203, &c. Spence's " Poly metis," 15 Spenser, Edmund, 66, 164, 165 Spenser's Cave of Despair, picture by Severn, 55 Spenser's " Faery Queen," 20, 149 "Spenser, Imitation of, "by Keats, 64 Stephens, Henry, 19, 78, 132, 147 " Stories after Nature," by Wells, 23 Swinburne, Mr. (on "Hyperion"), 186 ; 189, 199 T. Tasso, 165 Taylor and Hessey, 23, 72, "jS, 78, 83. 93' 96, 109, 120, 128, 140, 146, 149, 152 Terry, 100 Thomson, James, 70 Titian's " Bacchus and Ariadne," 179 Tooke's "Pantheon," 15 Torlonia, 61 V. Virgil, 165 Virgil's ^neid, 15, 20 Voltaire, 158 W. Webb, Cornelius, 92 Webster, 189 Wells, Charles, 23 Wilson, John, 91 "Woman, when I behold thee" &c. , poem by Keats, quoted, 143 Wood, Warrington, 119 Woodhouse, Richard, 94, 149, 153, 1S8 Wordsworth, 21, 78 ; ("The Ex- cursion,") 152 ; 153, 156, 164, 179 Z. Z (probably Lockhart), 91, 92, 100. BIBLIOGRAPHY. BY JOHN P. ANDERSON (British Museum). T. Works. II. Poetical Works. III. Single Works. IV. Lettkrs, etc. v. Miscellaneous. VI. VII. Appendix— Biography, Criticism, etc Magazine Articles. Chronological List op Works. I. WORKS. rhe Poetical Works and other Writings of John Keats, now first brought together, includ- ing poems and numerous letters not before ]iublished. Edited, with notes and appendices, by H. B. Forman. 4 vols. Lon- don, 1883, 870. The Letters of John Keats. Edited by J. G. Speed. (The Poems of J. Keats, with the annotations of Lord Houghton, and a memoir by J. G. Speed.) 3 vols. New York, 1883, 8vo. A number of letters now included in this work were first published in the New York World of June 25-6, 1877, and afterwards reprinted in the Academy, vol. xii., 1877, pp. 38-40, 65-67. XL POETICAL WORKS. The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. In one volume. Paris, 1829, 8vo. John Keats (including Memoir), i.-vii. and 1-75. Standard Library. The Poetical Works of J. K. London, 1840, 8vo. The first collected edition of Keats's Works. The Poetical Works of J. K. Lon- don, 1840, 8vo. With an engraved frontispiece from the portrait in chalk by Hil- ton. This book, although dated 1840, was not issued until the follow- ing year. The frontispiece is dated correctly. The Poetical Works of J. K. Lon- don, 1841, 8vo, BIBLIOGRAPHY. The Poetical Works of J. K. A . new edition. London, 1851, 8vo. The Poetical Works of J. K. With Memoir by R. M. Milnes [Lord Houston]. Illustrated by a portrait and 120 desiijns by George Scharf, Jun. London, 1854, 8vo. A small number of copies were struck off upon large paper. The Poetical Works of J. K. With a life [sij^ned J. R. L. — i.e., James Russell Lowell]. Boston [U.S.], 1854, 8vo. The Poetical Works of J. K. With a Memoir by Richard Monckton Milnes [Lord Houghton]. A new edition. London, 1861, Svo. Upon the reverse of the half-title to the "Memoir" is a wood-cut profile of Keats. The Poetical Works of J. K. Edited, with a critical memoir, by W. M. Rossetti. Illustrated bv T. Seccombe. London [1872], 8to. The Poetical Works of J. K. Edited, with an introductory memo'ir and illustrations, by William B. Scott. London [1873], 8to. ThePoetical Worksof J. K. With a memoir by James Russell Lowell. Portrait and 10 illus- trations. New York, 1873, Svo. The Memoir was afterwards re- printed in " Among my Books," second series, 1870, pp. 303-327. The Poetical Works of J. K., re- printed from the early editions, with memoir, explanatory notes, etc. {Chandos Classics.) Lon- don [1874], Svo. The Poetical Works of J. K. Chronologically arranged and edited, with a memoir, by Lord Houghton. {Aldine Edition.) London, 1876, Svo. The Poetical Works of Coleridge and Keats, with a memoir of each. {Riverside Edition.) 4 vols, in 2. New York, 1878, Svo. The Po«tical Works of J. K. Lon- don [1878], Svo. The Po«tical Works of J. K. Edite«l, with an introductory memoir, by W. B. Scott. {Ex- cehnor Series. ) London [1880], 8to. The Poetical Works of J. K. Edited, with a critical memoir, by W. M. Rossetti. [Portrait, fac-simile, and six illustrations by Thomas Seccombe.] {Moxon's Popular Poets.) London [1880], Sto. The sanae as the edition of 1872. The Memoir was reprinted in " Lites of Famous Poets." The Poetical Works of J. K., re- printed from the original edi- tions, with notes, by F. T. Palgrars. {Golden Treasuri/ Series.) London, 1884, 8to. The Poetical Works of J. K. Edited by W. T. Arnold. Lon- don, 1884, Svo. There was a larjre paper edition, consisting of fifty copies, numbered and signed. The Poetical Works of John Keats. Edited by H. B. Forman. Lon- don, 1884, Svo. The Poetical Works of J. K. With an introductory sketch by John Hogben. {Canterbury Poets.) London, 1885, Svo. in. SINGLE WORKS. Poems, by John Keats. London, 1817, ]6mo. The Museum copy contains a MS. note by F. Locker. BIBLIOGRAPHY, i» Endymion ; a Poetic Romance. By J. K. London, 1818, 8vo. Endymion. Illustrated by F. Joubert. From paintings by E. J. Poynter. London, 1873, fol. The Eve of St. Agnes. By J. K. Witli 20 illustrations by E. H. Wehnert. London, 1856, 8vo. The Eve of St. Agnes. Illus- trated by E. H. Wehnert. Lon- don [1875], 8vo. The Eve of St. Agnes. Illus- trated by nineteen etchings by Charles 0. Murray. Loudon, 18-0, fol. The Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems. Illustrated. Boston [U.S.], 1876, 24mo. Miscellanies of the Philobiblon So- ciety. London, 1856-7, 8vo. Vol. iii. contains " Another ver- sion of Keats's Hyperion, a Vuion," edited, with an introduction, by R. M. Mibies (Lord Houghton). Keatsii Hyperionis. Libri i-ii. Latine reddidit Carolus Meri- vale. Cambridge, 1862, 8vo. Keats's Hyperion. Book I. With notes [life and introduction]. London [1877], Svo. Keats's Hyperion. Book I. With introduction, elucidatory notes, and an appendix of exercises. London [1878], 8vo. Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems. By J. K. London, 1820, 12mo. Lamia. With illustrative designs by W. H. Low. Philadelphia, 1885, fol. Ode to a l^iglitingale. By J. K . Edited, with an introduction, by Thomas J. Wise. London, 1884, 8vo. Printed for private distribution, and issued in parchment wrappers. Four copies on velhiin and twenty- five on paper only printed, IV. LETTERS, Etc. Life, Letters, and Literary Re- mains of J. K. Edited by R. M. Milnes. 2 vols. London, 1848, 16mo. Life and Letters of John Keats. A new and completely revised edition. Edited by Lord Houghton. London, 1867, Svo. Letters of J. K. to Fanny Brawne, written in the years 1819 and 1820, and now given from the original manuscripts, with in- troduction and notes, by Harry Buxton Forman. London, 1878, Svo. In addition to the ordinary issue, the following special copies were " printed for private distribution" — In Svo on Whatman's hand-made paper 60 copies, on vellum 2 copies ; m post Svo there were 6 copies with title-page set up in different style, and 2 copies of coloured bank-note paper, one blue and the other yellow. V. MISCELLANEOUS. Contributions to Magazines. Annals of the Fine Arts. A quarterly magazine, edited by James Elmes — " Ode to the Nightingale," vol. iv., 1820, pp. 3.'>4-356. The first appear- ance of this poem, which was after- wards included in the ' ' Lamia " volume, 1820, pp. 107-112. " Ode on a Grecian Urn." Ap- peared first in the " Annals of the Fine Arts" vol. iv., 1820, pp. 638, 639, afterwards included in the Lamia volume. The Athenxum — First appearance of the Sonnet " On hearing the Bag-pipe and seeing 'The Stranger' played at) Inverary," June 7, lb73, p. 726. BIBLIOGRAPHY, The Champion — " On Edmund Kean as a Shake- sperian actor, and on Kean in 'Richard, Duke of York.'" Ap- peared on the 21st and 28th Dec. 1817. The Dial— •'Notes on Milton's Paradise Lost." In vol. iii., 1813, pp, 500-504 ; reprinted by Lord Houghton. The Examiner — The "Sonnet to Solitude," Keats's first published poem, according to Charles Cowden Clarke, appeared on the 5th of May 1816, signed J. K., p. 282. The first appearance of the sonnet "To Kosciusko," Feb. 16, 1817, p. 107. The first appearance of the sonnet, "After dark vapors have oppress'd our plains," etc., Feb. 23, 1817, p. 124. Two sonnets " To Haydon, with a Sonnet written on seeing the Elgin Marbles," and " On seeing the Elgin Marbles " appear for the first time, March 9, 1817, pi 155. In 1818 they were reprinted in the Annals of the Fine Arts, No. 8. The first appearance of the sonnet, "Written on a blank space at the end of Chaucer's tale of ' The Floure and the Lefe,'" March 16, 1817, p. 173. Sonnet " On the Grasshopper and Cricket " appeared on the 21st Sept. 1817, p. 599. The GeTTiy a Literary Annual. Edited by Thomas Hood — The sonnet " On a picture of Leander" appeared for the first time in 1829, p. lOS. ff cod's Comic Annual — " Sonnet to a Cat," 1830, p. 14. Hood's Magazine — In vol. ii., 1844, p. 240, the sonnet " Life's sea hath been five times at its slow ebb " appears for the first time ; included by Lord Houghton in the Literary Remains. In vol. ii., 1844, p. 562, the poem " Old Mes:," written during a tour in Scotland, appears for the first time. The Indicator. Edited by Leigh Hunt — In vol. i., 1820, p. 120, there are thirty -four lines, headed Vox et prce- terea nihil, supposed by Mr. Forman to be a cancelled passage of En- dymion, and reprinted by him in his edition of Keats, 1883, vol. i., p. 221. In vol. i. 1820, pp. 246-248, the Soem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" rstappeared, andsigned "Caviare." First appearance of the sonnet» " A Dream after reading Dante's Episode of ' Paolo and Francesca,'" signed "Caviare," vol. i. 1820, p. 304. Leigh Hunt's Literary Pocket Book — First appearance of the sonnets, " To Ailsa Rock " and "The Human Season" in 1819. yi. APPENDIX. Biography, Criticism, etc. Armstrong, Edmund J. — Essays and Sketches of Edmund J. Armstrong. London, 1877, 8vo. Keats, pp. 176-179. Atlantic Monthly. — Boston, 1858, 8vo. "The Poet Keats." Seven stanzas, vol. ii., pp. 531-532. Belfast, Earl of. — Poets and Poetry of the xixth century. A course of lectures. London, 1852, 8vo. Moore, Keats, Scott, pp. 59-131. Best Bits. — Best Bits. London, 1884, 8vo. "The Last Moments of Keats," vol. ii., p. 119. Biographical Magazine. — Lives of the Illustrious (The Biographi- cal Magazine). London, 1853, 8vo. John Keats, vol. iii., pp. 260-271. Caine, T. Hall. Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Lon- don, 1882, 8vo. Keats, pp. 167-183. BIBLIOGRAPHY, Caine, T. Hall.— Cobwebs of Criti- cism, etc. London, 1883, 8vo. Keats, pp. 158-190. Carr, J. Comyns. — Essays on Art. London, 1879, 8vo. The artistic spirit in Modem Eng- lish Poetry, pp. 3-34. Clarke, Charles Cowden. — The Riches of Chaucer, in which his impurities have been expunged, etc. 2 vols. London, 1835, 12mo. John Keats, vol. i., pp. 52, &8. Recollections of Writers. Lon- don, 1878, 8vo. John Keats, pp. 120-157. Colvin, Sidney. — Keats {English Men of Letters). London, 1887, 8vo. Cotterill, H. B. — An Introduction to the Study of Poetry. Lon- don, 1882, 8vo. Keats, pp. 242-268. Courthope, William J. — The Liberal Movement in English Literature. London, 1885, 8vo. Poetry, Music, and Painting. Coleridge and Keats, pp. 159-194. Cunningham, Allan. — Biographi- cal and Critical History of the British Literature of the last fifty years. [Reprinted from the "Athenaeum."] Paris, 1834, 12mo. Keats, pp. 102-104. Dennis, John. — Heroes of Litera- ture. English Poets. London, 1883, 8vo. Keats, pp. 365-373. De Quincey, Thomas. — Essays on the Poets, and other English Writers. Boston, ]853, 8vo. John Keats, pp. 75-97. — — De Quincey's Works. 16 vols. Edinburgh, 1862-71, 12mo. John Keats, vol. v, pp.. 269-288. Devey, J. — A comparative esti- mate of Modern English Poetry. London, 1873, 8vo. Alexandrine Poets. Keats, pp. 263-274. Dilke, Charles Wentworth.— The Papers of a Critic. Selected from the writings of the late Charles W. Dilke. 2 vols. Lon- don, 1875, 8vo. John Keats, vol. 1., pp. 2-14. Encyclopsedia Britannica. — En- cyclopaedia Brflannica. Eighth edition. Edinburgh, 1857, 4to. John Keats, vol. xiii., pp. 55-57. Ninth edition. Edinburgh, 1882, 4to. John Keats, by Algernon C. Swinburne, vol. xiv., pp. 22-24. English Writers. — Essays on Eng- lish Writers. By the author of "The Gentle Life." London, 1869, 8vo. Shelley, Keats, etc., pp. 338-349. Gilfillan, George. — A Gallery of Literary Portraits. Edinburgh, 1845, 8vo. John Keats, pp. 372-385. Gossip. — The Gossip. London, 1821, 8vo. Three Stanzas, signed G. V. D., May 19, 1821, p. 96, " On Reading Lamia and other poems, by John Griswold, Rufus W.— The Poets and Poetry of England in the Nineteenth Century. New York, 1875, 8vo. John Keats, with portrait, pp. 301-311. Haydon, Benjamin Robert. — Life of B. R. Haydon. Edited and compiled by Tom Taylor. 3 vols. London, 1853, 8vo. Numerous references to Keats. Correspondence and Table- Talk. With a memoir by hi3 son, F. W. Haydon. 2 vols. London, 1876, 8vo. Contains ten letters and two ex- tracts from letters to Haydon, and Yl BIBLIOGRAPHY. ten letters from Hay don to Keats, vol. ii., pp. 1-17. Hiiide, r. — Essays and Poems. Liverpool, 1864, 8vo. The life and works of the poet Keats : a paper read before the Liverpool Philomathic Society, AprU 16, 1862, pp. 57-95. Hoffmann, Frederick A. — Poetry, its origin, nature, and history, etc. London, 1884, 8ro. Keats, vol. i., pp. 483-491. Howitt, William. — Homes and Haunts of the most eminent British Poets. Third edition. London, 1857, 8vo. John Keats, pp. 292-300. The Northern Heights of London, etc. London, 1869, Svo. Keats, pp. 95-103. Hunt, Leigh. —Imagination and Fancy ; or, selections from the English Poets. London, 1844, 12mo. Keats, bom 1796, died 1821, pp. 312-345. Foliage, or Poems original and translated. London, 1818, Svo. Contains four sonnets ; " To John Keats," " On receiving a Crown of Ivy from the same," "On the same," "To the Grasshopper and the Cricket." ——Lord Byron and some of hi? Contemporaries ; with recollec- tions of the author's life, and of his visit to Italy. London, 1828, 4to. John Keats, pp. 246-268. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt; with reminiscences of friends and contemporaries. In three volumes. London, 1850, 8vo. The references to John Keats, vol. ii., pp. 201-216, etc. are substantially reproduced from the preceding work. Hutton, Laurence. — Literary Landmarks of London. Lou- don, [1885], 8vo. John Keats, pp. 177-182. Jeffrey, Francis. — Contributions to the Edinburgh Review. London, 1853, 8vo. John Keats. Review of Endymion and Lamia, pp. 526-534. Lester, John W. — Criticisms. Third edition. London, 1853, 8vo. John Keats, pp. 343-349. Lowell, James Russell. — Among my Books. Second aeries. London, 1876, 8vo. Keats, pp. 803-327. The Poetical Works of J. R. L. New revised edition. Boston [U.S.], 1882, 8vo. Sonnet " To the Spirit of Keats," p. 20. Maginn, William. — Miscellanies : prose and verse. Edited by R. W. Montagu. 2 vols. Lon- don, 1885i 8vo. Remarks on Shelley's Adonais, vol. ii., pp. 300-311. Mario, Jessie White. — Sepolcri Inglesi in Roma. (Estratto dalla Nuova Antologia, 15 Maggio, 1879.) Roma, 1879, Svo. On Keats and Shelley. Mason, Edward T. — Personal Traits of British Authors. New York, 1885, 8vo. John Keats, pp. 195-207. Masson, David. — Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and other Essavs. London, 1874, Svo. "The Life and Poetry of Keats," pp. 143-191. Medwin, Thomas. — Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byror : noted during a residence wiih his Lordship at Pisa, in the BIBLIOGRAPHY, years 1821 and 1822. By T. Medwin. London, 1824, 4to. John Keats, pp. 143, 237-240, 255, etc. Milnes, Richard Monckton, Lord Houghton. — Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. In two volumes. London, 1848, 8vo. Life and Letters of John Keats. A new and completely revised edition. Edited by Lord Houghton, London, 1867, 8vo. Mitford, Mary Russell. — Recollec- tions of a Literary Life, etc. 3 vols. London, 1852, 8vo. Shelley and Keats, vol. ii., pp. 183-192. Moir, D. M. — Sketches of the poetical literature of the past half-century. London, 1851, 8vo. John Keats, pp. 215-221: Noel, Hon. Roden, — Essays on poetry and poets. London, 1886, 8vo. Keats, pp. 150-171. Notes and Queries. — General Index to Notes and Queries. 5 series. London, 1856-80, 4to, Numerous references to John Olio.— The Olio. London [1828], 8vo. " Recollections of Books and their Authors," No. 6, "John Keats, the Poet," vol. i., pp. 391-394. Oliphant, Mrs. — The Literary History of England, etc. 3 vols. London, 1885, 8vo. John Keats, vol. iii., pp. 133-155. Owen, Frances Mary. — John Keats, A Study. London, 1880, 8vo. Reviewed in the Academy, July 5, 1884, p. 2. Payn, James. — Stories from Boccaccio, and other Poems, London, 1852, 8vo. Sonnet to John Keats, p. 97. Phillips, Samuel. — Essays from "The Times." Being a selec- tion from the literary papers which have appeared in that journal. London, 1851, Svo. "The Life of John Keats," pp. 255-269. This article originally appeared in " The Times " ou Sept. 17, 1849. New Edition. 2 vols. Lon. don, 1871, Svo. John Keats, vol. i., pp. 255-269. Richardson, David Lester. — Literary Chit-Chat, etc. Cal- cutta, 1848, Svo. Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, pp. 271-281. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. — Ballads andSonnets. London, 1881, Svo. Sonnets "To Five English Poets." No. iv., John Keats, p. 316. Rossetti, William Michael. — Lives of Famous Poets. London [1885], Svo. John Keats pp. 849-861. Sarrazin, Gabriel. — Pontes Mo- dernes de I'Angleterre. Paris, 1885, Svo. John Keats, pp. 131-152. Scott, William Bell. — Poems, Ballads, Studies from Nature, Sonnets, etc. Illustrated by seventeen etchings by the author and L. Alma Taclema. London, 1875, Svo. An etching by the author of Keats' Grave, p. 177 ; sonnet " On the Inscription, Keats' Tombstone," S. 179. An Ode "To the memory of ohn Keats," pp. 226-230. Scribner's Monthly Magazine. — Scribner's Monthly Magazine. New York, ISSO, 1S87, Svo. The No. for June 1880 contains fourteen lines "To the Immortal memory of Keats," and the May No. for 1887, p. 110, " Keats " (ten verses) by Robert Burns WiUon. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. — ^Adonais. An elegy on the death of John 15 BIBLIOGRAPHY. Keats, author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. Pisa, 1821, 4to. Adonais. An elegy on the death of John Keats, etc. Cambridge, 1829, 8vo. Adonais. Edited, with notes, by H. Buxton Forman. Lon- don, 1880, 8vo. Shelley, Lady. — Shelley Me- morials ; from authentic sources. Edited by Lady Shelley. London, 1859, 8vo. John Keats, pp. 74, 150-152, 155, 156, 200, 203. Stedman, Edmund Clarence. — Victorian Poets. London, 1876, Svro. John Keats, pp. 18, 104, 105, 155, 367, etc. Swinburne, Algernon , Charles. — Miscellanies. London, 1886, 8vo. Keats, pp. 210-218. Originally appeared in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Tuckerman, Henry T. — Charac- teristics of Literature, illustrated by the genius of distinguished men. Pliiladelphia, 1849, 8vo. Final Memorials of Lamb and Keats, pp. 256-209. Thoughts on the Poets. London [1852], 12rao. Keats, pp. 212-226. Verdicts. — Verdicts. [Verse.] London, 1852, 8vo. John Keats, occupies 93 lines, pp. 28-32. Ward, Thomas H.— The English Poets, etc. 4 vols. London, 1883, 8vo. John Keats, by Matthew Arnold, vol. iv., pp. 427-464. Willis, N. P.— Pencillings by the Way. A new edition. London, 1844, 8vo. " Keats's Poems," pp. 84-88. Wiseman, Cardinal. — On the Per- ception of Natural Beauty by the Ancients and the Moderns, etc. London, 1856, 8vo. Keats, pp. 13, 14 ; reviewed by Leigh Hunt in Fraser's Magazine f or December, 1859. Magazine Articles. Keats, John — Examiner, June 1, 1817, p. 345, July 6, 1817, pp. 428, 429, July 13, 1817, pp. 443, 444.— Blackwood's Edin- burgh Magazine, vol. 3, 1818, pp. 519-524. — Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 7, 1820, p. 665 ; vol. 27, 1830, p. 633. — Indicator, by Leigh Hunt, vol. 1, 1820, pp. 337- 352. — Quarterly Review, vol. 37, 1828, pp. 416-421.— Southern Literary Messenger, by H. T. Tuckerman, vol. 8. 1842, pp. 37-41.— Taifs Edin- burgh Magazine, by T. De Quincey, vol. 13, K S. , 1846, pp. 249-254 ; same article, Eclectic Magazine, vol. 8, pp. 202-209. — Democratic Review, vol. 21, N.S., 1847, pp. 427-429.— United States Magazine, vo'. 21, N.S., 1847, pp. 427-429 ; vol. 26, N.S., 1850, pp. 415- 421. — Hogg's Weekly Instruc- tor, with portrait, vol. 1, 1848, pp. 145-148 ; same article, Eclectic Magazine, vol. 14, pp. 409-415.— Chambers's Edin- burgh Journal, vol. 10, N.S., 1848, pp. 376-380.- Sharpe's London Magazine, vol. 8, 1849, pp. 56-60. — Knickerbocker, vol. 65, 1860, pp. 392-397.— Temple Bar, vol. 38, 1873, pp. 501-512, — Edinburgh Review, July 1876, pp. 38-42.— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 40. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Keats, John. 1870, pp. 523-525 and vol. 55, 1877, by E. F. Madden, pp. 357-361, illustrated.— Scribner's Monthly, by R. H. Stoddard, vol. 15, 1877, pp. 203-213.— American Bibliopolist, vol. 7, p. 94, etc., and vol. 8, p. 94, etc. — La Revue Politiqibe et LitUraire, by Leo Quesnel, 1877, pp. 61-65.— Argonaut, by Reginald W. Corlass, vol. 2, 1875, pp. 172-178.— Canadian Monthly, by Edgar Fawcett, vol. 2, 1879, pp. 449-454.— Century, by Edmund C. Sted- man, illustrated, vol. 27, 1884, pp. 599-602. and his Critics. Dial, vol. 1, 1881, pp. 265, 266. and Joseph Severn. Dublin University Magazine, by E. S. R., vol. 96, 1880, pp. 37-39. and Lamb. Southern Literary Messenger, by H. T. Tucker- man, vol. 14, 1848, pp. 711- 715. and Shelley. To-Day, June 1883, pp. 188-206, etc. and the Quarterly Review. Morning Chronicle, Oct. 3 and 8, 1818 (two letters). Examiner, 11 Oct., 1818, pp. 648, 649. an Esculapian Poet. Ascle- piad, -with portrait on steel, vol. 1, 1884, pp. 138-155. Art of. Our Corner, by J. Robertson, vol. 4, 1884, pp. 40- 45, 72-76. ■: Cardinal Wiseman on. Era- ser's Magazine, by Leigh Hunt, vol. 60, 1859, pp. 759, 760. daintiest of Poets. Victoria Magazine, vol. 15, 1870, pp. 55- 67. Keats, John. Death of. London Magazine, vol. 3, 1821, pp. 426, 427. Verses on death of. London Magazine, vol. 3, 1821, p. 526. Did he really care for music? Manchester Quarterly, by John Llortimer, vol 2, 1883, pp. 11- 17. Endymion. Quarterly Review,. by Gifford, vol. 19, 1818, pp. 204-208. — London Magazine, vol. 1, 1820, pp. 380-389. FormarHs Edition of. Mac- millan's Magazine, vol. 49, 1884, pp. 330-341. — Times, Aug. 7, 1884. Fragment from. Gentleman's Magazine, by Grant Allen, vol. 244, 1879, pp. 676-686. Genius of. Christian Remem- brancer, vol. 6, N.S., 1843, pp. 251-263. Holman Hunt's ^'Isabel." Fortnightly Review, by B. Cra- croft, vol. 3, 1868, pp. 648-657. Hyperion. American Whig Review, vol. 14, 1851, pp. 311- 322. Hyperionis, Libri i-ii. Satur- day Review, April 26, 1862, pp. 477, 478. in Cloudland. A poem of thirty-one verses. St. James's Magazine, by R. W. Buchanan, vol. 7, 1863, pp. 470-475. Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and other poems. London Magazine, vol. 2, 1820, pp. 315-321. — Indicator, by Leigh Hunt, vol. 1, 1820, pp. 337-352.— Monthly R.^view, vol. 92, N.S., 1820, pp. 305-310.— Eclectic Review, vol.l^N.S., 1820, 158-171. BIBLIOGRAPHY, Keats, John. Leigh Hunt^s Farewell Words to. Indicator, September 20, 1820. Letters to Fanny Brawne. Athenaeum, July 14, p. 60, July 21, pp. 80, 81, and July 28, 1877, pp. 114, 115.— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 57, 1878, p. 466. — Eclectic Magazine, vol. 27, N.S., 1878, pp. 495-498 (from the Academy). — Appleton's Journal, by R. H. Stoddard, vol 4, N.S., 1878, pp. 379-382. Life and Poems of. Mac- millan's Magazine, by D. Mas- son, vol. 3, 1860, pp. 1-16. Marginalia made hy Dante O. Bossetti in a copy af Keats' Poems. Manchester Quarterly, by George Milner, vol. 2, 1883, pp. 1-10. Milnes' Life of. American Review, by C. A. Bristed, vol. 8, 1848, pp. 603-610.— Littell's Living Age, vol. 19, 1848, pp. 20 - 24. — United States Magazine, vol. 23, KS., 1848, pp. 375-377.— Athenaeum, Aug. 12, 1848, pp. 824-827. — Revue des Deux Mondes, by Philar^te Chasles, Tom. 24, Serie 5, 1848, pp. 584- 607. — Eclectic Review, vol. 24, KS., 1848, pp. 533 552.— Dub- lin Review, vol. 25, 1848, pp. 164-179. — Britisli Quarterly Review, vol. 8, 184S, pp. 328- 343. — Prospective Review, vol. 4, 1848, pp. 539-555.— Demo- cratic Review, vol. 23, N.S., 1848, pp. 375-377. — West- minster Review, vol. 50, 1849, np. 349-371. — Sharpe's London ^lagazine, vol. 8, 1849, pp. 56- Keats, John. 60. — North British Review, voU 10, 1848, pp. 69-96 ; same article, Eclectic Magazine, vol. 16, pp. 145-159.— New Monthly Magazine, vol. 84, 1848, pp. 105-115 ; same article, Eclectic Magazine, vol. 15, pp. 340-348. — Dublin University Magazine, vol. 33, 1849, pp. 28-35. — Democratic Review, vol, 26, N.S., 1850, pp. 415-421. My Copy of. Tinsley's Maga- zine, by Richard Dowling, vol. 25, 1879, pp. 427-436. New Editions of. Dial, by W. M. Payne, vol. 4, 1884, pp. 255, 256. — —Le Paganisme po4tique en Angleterre. Revue des Deux Mondes, by Louis Etienne, Tom. 69, periode 2, pp. 291-317.— Eclectic Review, vol. 8, 1817, pp. 267-275. Poems of. Examiner, by Leigh Hunt, June 1, July 6 and 13, 1817.— Edinburgh Review, by F. Jeffrey, vol. 34, 1820, pp. 203-213.— Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 8, N.S., 1841, pp. 650, 651.— Dublin Univer- sity Magazine, vol. 21, 1843, pp. 690-703.— Edinburgh Re- view, vol. 90. 1849, pp. 424- 430.— Massachusetts Quarterly Review, vol. 2, 1849, pp. 414- 428.— Dublin University Maga- zine, vol. 83, 1874, pp. 699- 706.— North American Review, vol. 124, 1877, pp. 500-501. Poetry y Music, and Painting : Coleridge and Keats. National Review, by W. J. Courthope, vol. 5, 1885, pp. 504-518. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Keats, John. — — Recollections of. Gentleman's Magazine, by Charles Cowden Clarke, vol. 12, N.S., 1874, pp. 177-204 ; same article, Littell's Living Age, vol. 121, pp. 174- 188 ; Every Saturday, vol. 16, p. 262, etc., 669, etc.— Atlantic Monthly, by C. C. Clarke, vol. 7, 1861, pp. 86- 100. School House of, at Enfield. St. James's Magazine Holiday Annual, 1875, by Charles Cowden Clarke. Keats, John, Thoughts on. New Dominion Monthly (portrait), by Robert S. Weir, 1877, pp. 293-300. UnprihlulLed Notes on Milton. Athenpeum, Oct. 26, 1872, pp. 529, 530. Unpublished Notes on Shake- speare. Athenaeum, Nov. 16, 1872, p. 634. Vicissitudes of his fame. Atlantic Monthly, by J. Severn, vol. 11, 1863, pp. ^ 401-407 ; same article, Sharpe's Londoti Magazine, vol. 34, N.S., 1869, pp. 246-249. VII.— CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS. Poems Endymion Lamia, etc. 1817 1818 1820 1 Life, letters, and literary remains. . . . 1848 Letters to Fanny Brawns . 1878 Letters .... 1883 TLe C^fil^rBurj Poel5. Jn SHILLING Monthly Volumes, Square %vo. 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An Issue of all the Volumes in this Series will be published, printed on large paper of extra quality, in handsome binding, Demy 8vo, price 2s. 6d. per volume. London : Walter Scott, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row. Price 6d,; Post Free, ^d. No. I. READY SEPTEMBER ist, 18S7. IP FiinHAlISIS' MOFIHLY: A JOURNAL FOR NATURE-LOVERS AND NA TURE- THINKERS. Edited by Dr. J. W. WILLIAMS, M.A. The Naturalists Monthly will contain — 1. Original and Recreative Papers on Popular Scientific subjects by well-known writers. 2. Articles on the Distribution of Animal and Plant Life in the British Islands. 3 Monographs on groups generally looked over by the Field- Naturalist, as the British Fresh-water Worms and Leeches in Zoology, and the Lichens and Mosses in Botany. 4. Accounts of Scientific Voyages and Expeditions. 5. Biographical Lives of the Greatest Scientific Men 6. " The Editor's Easy Chair "—a Monthly Chit-chat on the most important Scientific Questions of the day. 7. Reports of the Learned Societies. 8. General Notes and Correspondence. 9. Reviews of the latest Works and Papers. 10. Answer and Query Column for Workers. The Naturalists' Monthly will be issued on the 1st of each lVI()nth. Annual Subscription, 7/- post free. London : Walter Scott, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row. iooth thousand. CROWN Zvo, 440 PAGES, PRICE ONE SHILLING. THE WORLD OF CANT " Daily Telegraph.^'' — " Decidedly a book with a purpose." ^^ Scotsman.'^ — *'A vigorous, clever, and almost ferocious exposure, in the form of a story, of the numerous shams and injustices." ^* Newcastle Weekly Chronicle.'*' — "Trenchant in sarcasm, warm in commendation of high purpose. . . . A s,OTt\Q\ihdX remaf kable book.''* ** London Figaro.''* — "It cannot be said that the author is partial; clergymen and Nonconformist divines. Liberals and Conservatives, lawyers and tradesmen, all come under his lash. . , . The sketches are worth reading. Some of the characters are portrayed with considerable skill." " May the Lord deliver us from all Cant : may the Lord, whatever else He do or forbear, teach us to look facts honestly in the face, and to beware (with a kind of shudder) of smearing them over with our despicable and damnable palaver into irrecognisability, and so falsifying the Lord's own Gospels to His unhappy blockheads of Children, all staggering down to Gehenna and the everlasting Swine's-trough, for want of Gospels. **0 Heaven ! it is the most accursed sin of man: and done every- where at present, on the streets and high places at noonday ! Verily, seriously I say and pray as my chief orison, May the Lord deliver us from it." — Letter from Carlyle to Emerson. London : Walter Scott, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row. CHEAP AND REVISED EDITION, PRICE ONE SHILLING. Our American COUSINS: PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF THE PEOPLE AND INSTITUTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES. By W. E. ADAMS. The author brings to his work acute penetration, a keen observation^ a graphic picturesque style of presenting his impressions, and a quiet humour that finds expression in quoting amusing scraps from newspaper stories and sayings that aptly illustrate the case in point. — New York Herald. That Mr. Adams is a person with a power for observing closely, describing impartially, and arriving at conclusions sustained by his process of argument, cannot be doubted by those who read his interesting work. — New York Evening Telegram. We can heartily recommend Mr. Adams's book to those Englishmen who want to know something about America. — Saturday Review ^ 13th October 1883. . . . We can say emphatically and truthfully of Mr. Adams-s book that it is by far the best work of its kind we have yet seen. — Knowledge. . . . Altogether, it is a sober, sensible book, by a level-headed observer of men and things. — Pall Mall Gazette^ 12th November 1883. People who want to know what Americans are like, and how they live, cannot do better than consult Mr. Adams's work, in which they will not find a single tedious page. — Scotsman^ 13th September. London: Walter Scott, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row, Crown 8vo, Paper Cover, Price Sixpence. THE TURKISH BATH ITS HISTORY AND USES. BY FREDERIC C. COLEY, M.D. Contents :— The History of the Turkish Bath— How to take a Turkish Bath— Rules for the Turkish Bath— The Theory of the Turkish Bath. London : WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row. Cj'cnun 8vo, Cloth^ PRICE ONE SHILLING, ELOCUTION BY T. R. WALTON PEARSON, M.A. Of St. Catharine's College ^ Cambridge y AND FREDERIC WILLIAM WAITHMAN, Lecturer on Elocution in the Leeds and Bradford Instittites, London: WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row. Square SvOy Price 6d. Neiv and Revised Edition. PARENTAL COMMAPMEBTS Or, Warnings to Parents ON THE PHYSICAL, INTELLECTUAL, AND MORAL TRAINING OF THEIR CHILDREN. The Lancet — "Very sensible advice — agreeably readable — terse, interesting, instructive, well considered, and accurate; readers will doubtless learn some points which they don't know." Christian World — "Terse and sententious warnings on the physical, intellectual, and moral training of children, which parents will do well to lay to heart." Newcastle Chronicle — "Valuable book — mass of information — ^have not seen any work which treats in such an exhaustive and interesting fashion on training of children ; if studied and acted upon, would quickly be a more beneficial revolution of society than all the hosts of social reformers can ever hope to accomplish." Literary World — "Sound common sense and knowledge of the conditions of healthy child-life. " Bristol Mercury — "Shall not be surprised if the circulation rivals Called Back ; it has that touch of genius which makes it everybody's reading. " Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone — "It has been read by two members of my family, on whose taste and judgment I fully rely. Both of them think of it with warm favour.'" Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol — "Very useful and suggestive precepts." Late Earl of Lddesleigh — " How interested I have been in its perusal." Dr. Samuel Smiles — " Capital book — full of sound advice — should be widely read. " Professor Huxley — " Excellent manual of negative commandments for fathers and mothers." Mr. S. C. ^a//— "Valuable little book. I know no book ccm- taing a tenth part so many wise, moral, social, and physical axioms." George R. Sims, Author ^^ Dagonet Ballads,*' etc. — "Admirable little book ; hope it will have the success it deserves." Mr. Wilkie Collins — " The second axiom at once informed me that it was the work of a man whose knowledge of human nature, and whose wise and gentle method of communicating that knowledge, establisherl claims on the gratitude and respect of his reader ; there are, as I firmly believe, thousands of intelligent people in this country to whom this book will be a blessing, in the truest sense of that word." Cardinal Newman — " So full of good sense and wisdom." Lord Brabazon — " Valuable work." Lord Salisbury — " Interesting little book." London : Walter Scott, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row. NEW VOLUME OF YERSE. Cloth Gilt^ Price Three Shillings. LAST YEAR'S LEAVES. By JOHN JERVIS BERESFORD, M.A. "Mr. Beresford always writes gracefully; he is at his best when some theme of personal feeling inspires him. When he sings, it would seem, "because he must," there is some real vigour in the strain." — Spectator. "The author is a true poet, and his work is a valuable contribution to literature. "-:- Wakefield Free Press. *' Short pieces of graceful verse." — Graphic. *' Mr. Beresford 's subjects are many and varied, and he displays a ready versatility in adapting his strains to the most opposite themes. His lines on * Ireland ' are marked by an ardent patriotism that finds vent in justly indignant and vigorous accents. In quite another key the poem called 'Amor Vincit Omnia' is an example of tender and pathetic verse, in which both idea and form deserve equal praise. ' The Poet's Crown ' is another of the charming poems contained in this volume." — The Morning Post. ^^ Last Year's Leaves is quite above the average of the numerous books of verse which are poured in ever-increasing volume over an unappreciative public. We commend this volume to our readers." — Literary World. " These poems and sonnets make a handsome little volume. The poet finds inspiration in many subjects, and the events, domestic and public, which touch the springs of the nation's life. — The Christian. "A collection of gracefully-written verse." — Western Mail. "Instinct with true poetry." — The Malvern Advertiser. ** Altogether, there is much merit and promise in this handsome little volume. We shall hope to extend our acquaintance with Mr. Beresford. " — Oxford Review. "His descriptions of ' Elsie Venner ' and Shorthouse's lovely book, • Sir Perceval, ' are full of point and poetic beauty^ which all readers of those books will fully appreciate." — The Carmarthen journal. " * The Legend of Myddfai,' and ' The Poet's Crown ' should live in our literature." — The Bayswater Chronicle. " We commend this little volume very heartily to all true lovers of poetry and nature." — Malvern Looker-on. London : WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row. / /V J oc