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 EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY 
 
K E A.T S 
 
 BY 
 
 SIDNEY COLYIN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 
 
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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. 
 
 Edited by John Morley. 
 
 Johnson Leslie Stephen. 
 
 Gibbon J. C. Morison. 
 
 Scott R. H. Hutton. 
 
 Shhlley J. A. Symonds. 
 
 Hume T. H. Huxley. 
 
 Goldsmith William Black. 
 
 Defoe William Minto. 
 
 Burns J. C. Shairp. 
 
 Spenser R. W. Church. 
 
 Thackeray Anthony Trollope. 
 
 Burke John Morley. 
 
 Milton Mark Pattison. 
 
 Hawthorne Henry James, Jr. 
 
 Southey E. Dowden. 
 
 Chaucer A. W. Ward. 
 
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 Byron John Nichol. 
 
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 Wordsworth F. Myers. 
 
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 Bentley R. C. Jebb. 
 
 Dickens A. W. Ward. 
 
 Gray E. W. Gosse. 
 
 Swift Leslie Stephen. 
 
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 Macaulay J. Cotter Morison. 
 
 Fielding Austin Dobson. 
 
 Sheridan Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 Addison W. J. Courthope. 
 
 Bacon R. W. Church. 
 
 Coleridge H. D. Traill. 
 
 Sir Philip Sidney... J. A. Symonds. 
 Keats Sidney Colvin. 
 
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 PEEFACE. 
 
 With the name of Keats that of his first biographer, the late Lord 
 Houghton, must always justly remain associated. But while the sym- 
 pathetic charm of Lord Houghton's work will keep it fresh, as a rec- 
 ord of the poet's life it can no longer be said to be sufficient. Since 
 the revised edition of the Life and Letters appeared in 1867, other 
 students and lovers of Keats have been busy, and much new infor- 
 mation concerning him been brought to light, while of the old infor- 
 mation some has been proved mistaken. No connected account of 
 Keats's life and work, in accordance with the present state of knowl- 
 edge, exists, and I have been asked to contribute such an account to 
 the present series. I regret that lack of strength and leisure has so 
 long delayed the execution of the task entrusted to me. The chief 
 authorities and printed texts which I have consulted (besides the 
 original editions of the Poems) are the following : 
 
 1. Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries. By Leigh Hunt. 
 London, 1828. 
 
 2. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By Thomas Medwin. 2 
 vols., London, 1847. 
 
 3. Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Edited by 
 Richard Monckton Milnes. 2 vols., London, 1848. 
 
 4. Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Edited and compiled by 
 Tom Taylor. Second Edition. 3 vols., London, 1853. 
 
 5. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, with Reminiscences of 
 Friends and Contemporaries. 3 vols., London, 1850. 
 
 6. The Poetical Works of John Keats. With a Memoir by Rich- 
 ard Monckton Milnes. London, 1854. 
 
 7. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. [Revised edition, edited 
 by Thornton Hunt.] London, 1860. 
 
 8. The Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame : an article by Joseph Severn 
 in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine for 1863 (vol. xi., p. 401). 
 
 9. The Life and Letters of John Keats. By Lord Houghton. 
 New Edition, London, 1867. 
 
 10. Recollections of John Keats : an article by Charles Cowden 
 Clarke in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1874 (N.S., vol. xii., p. 177). 
 Afterwards reprinted with modifications in Recollections of Writers, 
 by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke. Loudon, 1878. 
 
 M822285 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 11. The Papers of a Critic. Selected from the writings of the 
 late Charles Wentworth Dilke. With a biographical notice by Sir 
 Charles Wentworth Dilke, Bart., M.P. 2 vols., London, 1875. 
 
 12. Benjamin Robert Haydon : Correspondence and Table-Talk. 
 With a Memoir by Frederic Wordsworth Haydon. 2 vols., London, 
 1876. 
 
 13. The Poetical Works of John Keats, chronologically arranged 
 and edited, with a memoir, by Lord Houghton [Aldine edition of the 
 British Poets]. London, 1876. 
 
 14. Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, with Introduction 
 and Notes by Harry Buxton Forman. London, 1878. 
 
 A biographer cannot ignore these letters now that they are pub- 
 lished ; but their publication must be regretted by all who hold that 
 human respect and delicacy are due to the dead no less than to the 
 livimr, and to genius no less that to obscurity. 
 
 15T The Poetical Works and other Writings of John Keats. Ed- 
 ited, with notes and appendices, by Harry Buxton Forman. 4 vols., 
 London, 1883. 
 
 In this edition, besides the texts reprinted from the first editions, 
 all the genuine letters and additional poems published in 8, 6, 9, 13, 
 and 14 of the above are brought together, as well as most of the 
 biographical notices contained in 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, and 12; also_ a 
 series of previously unpublished letters of Keats to his sister ; with 
 a great amount of' valuable illustrative and critical material besides. 
 Except for a few errors, which I shall have occasion to point out, 
 Mr. Forman's work might for the purpose of the student be final, 
 and I have necessarily been indebted to it at every turn. 
 
 16. The Letters and Poems of John Keats. Edited by John Gil- 
 mer Speed. 3 vols., New York, 1883. 
 
 17. The Poetical Works of John Keats. Edited by William T. 
 Arnold. London, 1884. 
 
 The Introduction to this edition contains the only attempt with 
 which I am acquainted at an analysis of the formal elements of 
 Keats's style. 
 
 18. An ^Esculapian Poet — John Keats: an article by Dr. B. W. 
 Richardson in the Asclepiad for 1884 (vol. i., p. 134). 
 
 19. Notices and correspondence concerning Keats which have ap- 
 peared at intervals during a number of years in the Athenceum. 
 
 In addition to printed materials I have made use of the following 
 unpriuted, viz. : 
 
 I. Houghton MSS. Under this title I refer to the contents of an 
 album from the library at Fryston Hall, in which the late Lord 
 Houghton bound up a quantity of the materials he had used in the 
 preparation of the Life and Letters, as well as of correspondence con- 
 cerning Keats addressed to him both before and after the publication 
 of his book. The chief contents are the manuscript memoir of Keats 
 by Charles Brown, which was offered by the writer in vain to Galig- 
 nani, and I believe other publishers; transcripts by the same hand' 
 of a few of Keats's poems; reminiscences or brief memoirs of the 
 
PREFACE. vii 
 
 poet by bis friends Charles Cowden Clarke (the first draft of the 
 paper above cited as No. 10), Henry Stephens, George Felton Matthew, 
 Joseph Severn, and Benjamin Bailey ; together with letters from all 
 the above, from John Hamilton Reynolds, and several others. For 
 the use of this collection, without which my work must have been at- 
 tempted to little purpose, I am indebted to the kindness of its owner, 
 the present Lord Houghton. 
 
 II. "Woodhouse MSS. A. A common-place book, in which Richard 
 Woodhouse, the friend of Keats and of his publishers, Messrs. Taylor 
 & Hessey, transcribed — as would appear from internal evidence, 
 about midsummer 1819 — the chief part of Keats's poems at that 
 date unpublished. The transcripts are in many cases made from 
 early drafts of the poems ; some contain gaps which Woodhouse has 
 filled up in pencil from later drafts, to others are added corrections, 
 or suggestions for corrections, some made in the hand of Mr. Taylor 
 and some in that of Keats himself. 
 
 III. Woodhouse MSS. B. A note-book in which the same Wood- 
 house has copied — evidently for Mr. Taylor, at the time when that 
 gentleman was meditating a biography of the poet — a number of 
 letters addressed by Keats to Mr. Taylor himself, to the transcriber, 
 to Reynolds and his sisters, to Rice and Bailey. Three or four of 
 these letters, as well as portions of a few others, are unpublished. 
 
 Both the volumes last named were formerly the property of Mrs. 
 Taylor, the widow of the publisher, and are now my own. A third 
 manuscript volume by Woodhouse, containing personal notices and 
 recollections of Keats, was unluckily destroyed in the fire at Messrs. 
 Kegan Paul & Co.'s premises in 1883. A copy of Endymion, anno- 
 tated by the same hand, has been used by Mr. Forman in his edition 
 (above, No. 15). 
 
 IV. Severs MSS. The papers and correspondence left by the late 
 Joseph Severn, containing materials for what should be a valuable 
 biography, have been put into the hands of Mr. William Sharp, to be 
 edited and published at his discretion. In the meantime Mr. Sharp 
 has been so kind as to let me have access to such parts of them as 
 relate to Keats. The most important single piece, an essay on 
 "The Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame," has been printed already in 
 the Atlantic Monthly (above, No. 8), but in the remainder I have 
 found many interesting details, particularly concerning Keats's voy- 
 age to Italy and life at Rome. 
 
 V. Rawlings v. Jennings. When Keats's maternal grandfather, 
 Mr. John Jennings, died in 1805, leaving property exceeding the 
 amount of the specific bequests under his will, it was thought neces- 
 sary that his estate should be administered by the Court of Chancery, 
 and with that intent a friendly suit was brought in the names of his 
 daughter and her second husband (Frances Jennings, m. 1st Thomas 
 Keats and 2d William Rawlings) against her mother and brother, 
 who were the executors. The proceedings in this suit are referred to 
 under the above title. They are complicated and voluminous^ ex- 
 tending over a period of twenty years, and my best thanks are due 
 
viii FREFACE. 
 
 to Mr. Ralph Thomas, of 27 Chancery Lane, for his friendly pains in 
 searching through and making abstracts of them. 
 
 For help and information, besides what has been above acknowl- 
 edged, I am indebted first and foremost to my friend and colleague, 
 Mr. Richard Garnett ; and next to the poet's surviving sister, Mrs. 
 Llanos ; to Sir Charles Dilke, who lent me the chief part of his valu- 
 able collection of Keats's books and papers (already well turned to 
 account by Mr. Forman); to Dr. B. W. Richardson and the Rev. R. 
 R. Hadden. Other incidental obligations will be found acknowl- 
 edged in the footnotes. 
 
 Among essays on and reviews of Keats's work I need only refer 
 in particular to that by the late Mrs. F. M. Owen (Keats : A Study, 
 London, 1876). In its main outlines, though not in details, I accept 
 and have followed this lady's interpretation of Endymion. For the 
 rest every critic of Modern English poetry is of necessity a critic of 
 Keats. The earliest, Leigh Hunt, was one of the best ; and to name 
 only a few among the living — where Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Swin- 
 burne, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Palgrave, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Mr. W. B. Scott, 
 Mr. Roden Noel, Mr. Theodore Watts, have gone before, for one who 
 follows to be both original and just is not easy. In the following 
 pages I have not attempted to avoid saying over again much that in 
 substance has been said already, and doubtless better, by others : by 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold and Mr. Palgrave especially. I doubt not but 
 they will forgive me ; and at the same time I hope to have contrib- 
 uted something of my own towards a fuller understanding both of 
 Keats's art and life. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Birth and Parentage. — School Life at Enfield. — Life as Surgeon's 
 Apprentice at Edmonton. — Awakening to Poetry. — Life as Hospi- 
 tal Student in London. [1795-1817.] Page 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Particulars of Early Life in London.— Friendships and First Poems. 
 —Henry Stephens.— Felton Mathew. — Cowden Clarke.— Leigh 
 Hunt: his literary and personal influence. — John Hamilton Reyn- 
 olds.— James Rice.— Cornelius Webb.— ^helley^— Haydon.— Jo- 
 seph Severn. — Charles Wells. — Other acquaintances. — Determina- 
 tion to publish. [1814— April, 1817.] . 18 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 The "Poems" of 1817 50 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury.— Summer at 
 Hampstead.— New friends: Dilke, Brown, Bailey.— With Bailey 
 at Oxford.— Return : Old Friends at Odds.— JBurford Bridge.— Win- 
 ter at Hampstead.— Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt.— Poetical Activ- 
 ity.— Spring at Teignmouth. — Studies and Anxieties. — Marriage 
 and Emigration of George Keats. [April, 1817 — May, 1818.]. 67 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 Endymion . . . .' 92 
 
 1* 
 
x . CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Northern Tour.— The Blackwood and Quarterly Reviews. — Death of 
 Tom Keats. — Removal to Wentworth Place.— Fanny Brawne. — Ex- 
 cursion to Chichester.— Absorption in Love and Poetry. — Haydon 
 and Money Difficulties. — Family Correspondence. — Darkening Pros- 
 pects. — Summer at Shanklin and Winchester. — Wise Resolutions. — 
 Return from Winchester. [June, 1818— October, 1819.] . Page 110 
 
 CHAPTER VIL 
 
 Isabella.— Hyperion.— TJie Eve of St. Agnes.— The Eve of St. Mark.— 
 La Belle Dame Sans Merei— Lamia.— The Odes.— The Plays .145 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Return to Wentworth Place.— Autumn occupations: The ^ Cap and 
 Jlells; Recast of Hyperion. — Growing despondency. — Visit of 
 George Keats to England.— Attack of illness in February.— Rally 
 in the Spring. — Summer in Kentish Town. — Publication of the 
 Lamia volume.— Relapse.— Ordered South.— Voyage to Italy, Na- 
 ples, Rome.— Last Days and Death. [October, 1819 — February, 
 1821.] 1V8 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 Character and Genius 207 
 
 c, 
 
 APPENDIX 219 
 
KEATS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Birth and Parentage.-School Life at Enfield.— Life as Surgeon's 
 Apprentice at Edmonton.— Awakening to Poetry.— Life as Hospi- 
 tal Student in London [1795—1817]. 
 
 Science may one day ascertain the laws of distribution 
 and descent which govern the births of genius, but in the 
 meantime a birth like that of Keats presents to the ordi- 
 nary mind a striking instance of nature's inscrutability. 
 If we consider the other chief poets of the time, we can 
 commonly recognize either some strain of power in their 
 blood or some strong inspiring influence in the scenery 
 and traditions of their home. Thus we see Scott prepared 
 alike by his origin, associations, and circumstances to be 
 the " minstrel of his clan " and poet of the romance of the 
 border wilds ; while the spirit of the Cumbrian hills, and 
 the temper of the generations bred among them, speak 
 naturally through the lips of Wordsworth. Byron seems 
 inspired in literature by demons of the same fro ward 
 brood that had urged others of his lineage through lives 
 of adventure or of crime. But Keats, with instincts and 
 faculties more purely poetical than any of these, was par- 
 adoxically born in a dull and middling walk of English 
 city life ; and " if by traduction came his mind "—to quote 
 
2 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Dryden with a difference — it was through channels too 
 obscure for us to trace. His father, Thomas Keats, was a 
 west-country lad who came young to London, and while 
 still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a livery- 
 stable kept by a Mr. John Jennings in Finsbury. Present- 
 ly he married his employer's daughter, Frances Jennings; 
 and Mr. Jennings, who was a man of substance, retiring 
 about the same time to live in the country, at Ponder's 
 End, left the management of the business in the hands of 
 his son-in-law. The young couple lived at the stable, at 
 the sign of the Swan-and-Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, facing 
 the then open space of Lower Moorfields. Here their el- 
 dest child, the poet John Keats, was born prematurely on 
 either the 29th or 31st of October, 1795. A second son, 
 named George, followed on February 28, 1797; a third, 
 Tom, on November 18, 1799 ; a fourth, Edward, who died 
 in infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the 3d of June, 
 1803, a daughter, Frances Mary. In the meantime the 
 family had moved from the stable to a house in Craven 
 Street, City Road, half a mile farther north. 1 
 
 In the gifts and temperament of Keats we shall find 
 much that seems characteristic of the Celtic rather than 
 the English nature. Whether he really had any of that 
 blood in his veins we cannot tell. His father was a native 
 either of Devon or of Cornwall, 2 and his mother's name, 
 Jennings, is common in, but not peculiar to, Wales. There 
 our evidence ends, and all that we know further of his pa- 
 rents is that they were certainly not quite ordinary people. 
 Thomas Keats was noticed in his life-time as a man of in- 
 telligence and conduct — " of so remarkably fine a common 
 sense and native respectability," writes Cowden Clarke, in 
 whose father's school the poet and his brothers were 
 1 See Appendix, p. 219. 2 Ibid. 
 
i] BIRTH AND PARENTAGE. 3 
 
 brought up, " that I perfectly remember the warm terms in 
 ■which his demeanour used to be canvassed by my parents 
 after he had been to visit his boys." It is added that he 
 resembled his illustrious son in person and feature, being 
 of small stature and lively energetic countenance, with 
 brown hair and hazel eyes. Of his wife, the poet's moth- 
 er, we learn more vaguely that she was " tall, of good fig- 
 ure, with large oval face, and sensible deportment ;" and 
 again, that she was a lively, clever, impulsive woman, pas- 
 sionately fond of amusement, and supposed to have hast- 
 ened the birth of her eldest child by some imprudence. 
 Her second son, George, wrote in after life of her and of 
 her family as follows: "My grandfather [Mr. Jennings] 
 was very well off, as his will shows, and but that he was 
 extremely generous and gullible would have been affluent. 
 I have heard my grandmother speak with enthusiasm of 
 his excellencies, and Mr. Abbey used to say that he never 
 saw a woman of the talents and sense of my grandmother, 
 except my mother." And elsewhere : " My mother I dis- 
 tinctly remember, she resembled John very much in the 
 face, was extremely fond of him, and humoured him in 
 every whim, of which he had not a few, she was a most 
 excellent and affectionate parent, and as I thought a wom- 
 an of uncommon talents.' 1 
 
 The mother's passion for her firstborn son was devotedly 
 returned by him. Once as a young child, when she was 
 ordered to be left quiet during an illness, he is said to have 
 insisted on keeping watch at her door with an old sword, 
 and allowing no one to go in. Haydon, an artist who 
 loved to lay his colours thick, gives this anecdote of the 
 sword a different turn : " He was, when an infant, a most 
 violent and ungovernable child. At five years of age or 
 thereabouts, he once got hold of a naked sword, and shut- 
 
4 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 ting the door swore nobody should go out. His mother 
 wanted to do so, but he threatened her so furiously she be- 
 gan to cry, and was obliged to wait till somebody through 
 the window saw her position and came to the rescue." 
 Another trait of the poet's childhood, mentioned also by 
 Haydon, on the authority of a gammer who had known 
 him from his birth, is that when he was first learning to 
 speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had a trick of 
 making a rhyme to the last word people said and then 
 laughing. 
 
 The parents were ambitious for their boys, and would 
 have liked to send them to Harrow, but thinking this be- 
 yond their means, chose the school kept by the Rev. John 
 Clarke at Enfield. The brothers of Mrs. Keats had been 
 educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and 
 of exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. Traces 
 of its ancient forest character lingered long, and indeed lin- 
 ger yet, about the neighbourhood of the picturesque small 
 suburban town of Enfield, and the district was one espe- 
 cially affected by City men of fortune for their homes. 
 The school-house occupied by Mr. Clarke had been origi- 
 nally built for a rich West-India merchant, in the finest 
 style of early Georgian classic architecture, and stood in a 
 pleasant and spacious garden at the lower end of the town. 
 When, years afterwards, the site was used for a railway sta- 
 tion, the old house was for some time allowed to stand ; 
 but later it was taken down, and the facade, with its fine 
 proportions and rich ornaments in moulded brick, was 
 transported to the South Kensington Museum as a choice 
 example of the style. 
 
 Not long after Keats had been put to school he lost his 
 father, who was killed by a fall from his horse as he rode 
 home at night from Southgate. This was on the 16th of 
 
i.] SCHOOL LIFE. 5 
 
 April, 1804. Within twelve months his mother had put 
 off her weeds and taken a second husband — one William 
 Rawlings, described as " of Moorgate, in the city of Lon- 
 don, stable-keeper," presumably, therefore, the successor of 
 her first husband in the management of her father's busi- 
 ness. This marriage turned out unhappily. It was soon 
 followed by a separation, and Mrs. Rawlings went with her 
 children to live at Edmonton, in the house of her mother, 
 Mrs. Jennings, who was just about this time left a widow. 1 
 In the correspondence of the Keats brothers after they 
 were grown up no mention is ever made of their step- 
 father, of whom, after the separation, the family seem to 
 have lost all knowledge. The household in Church Street, 
 Edmonton, was well enough provided for, Mr. Jennings 
 having left a fortune of over £13,000, of which, in addi- 
 tion to other legacies, he bequeathed a capital yielding 
 £200 a year to his widow absolutely ; one yielding £50 a 
 year to his daughter Frances Rawlings, with reversion to 
 her Keats children after her death ; and £1000 to be sep- 
 arately held in trust for the said children, and divided 
 among them on their coming of age. 2 Between this 
 home, then, and the neighbouring Enfield school, where 
 he was in due time joined by his younger brothers, the 
 next four or five years of Keats's boyhood (1806-1810) 
 were passed in sufficient comfort and pleasantness. He 
 did not live to attain the years, or the success, of men who 
 write their reminiscences ; and almost the only recollec- 
 tions he has left of his own early days refer to holiday 
 times in his grandmother's house at Edmonton. They are 
 conveyed in some rhymes which he wrote years afterwards, 
 by way of foolishness, to amuse his young sister, and testify 
 
 1 John Jennings died March 8, 1805. 
 
 2 Rawlings v. Jennings. See below, p. 137, and Appendix, p. 219. 
 
G KEATS. [chap. 
 
 to a partiality, common also to little boys not of genius, 
 for dabbling by the brookside— 
 
 " In spite 
 Of the might 
 Of the Maid, 
 Nor afraid 
 Of his granny-good " — 
 
 and for keeping small fishes in tubs. 
 
 If we learn little of Keats's early days from his own 
 lips, we have sufficient testimony as to the impression 
 which he made on his school companions ; which was that 
 of a boy all spirit and generosity, vehement both in tears 
 and laughter, handsome, passionate, pugnacious, placable, 
 lovable, a natural leader and champion among his fellows. 
 But beneath this bright and mettlesome outside there lay 
 deep in his nature, even from the first, a strain of painful 
 sensibility, making him subject to moods of unreasonable 
 suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. These he was 
 accustomed to conceal from all except his brothers, be- 
 tween whom and himself there existed the very closest of 
 fraternal ties. George, the second brother, had all John's 
 spirit of manliness and honour, with a less impulsive dis- 
 position and a cooler blood. From a boy he was the big- 
 ger and stronger of the two ; and at school found himself 
 continually involved in fights for, and not unfrequently 
 with, his small, indomitably fiery elder brother. Tom, the 
 youngest, was always delicate, and an object of protecting 
 care as well as the warmest affection to the other two. 
 The singularly strong family sentiment that united the 
 three brothers extended naturally also to their sister, then 
 a child; and in a more remote and ideal fashion to their 
 uncle by the mother's side, Captain Midgley John Jen- 
 
L ] SCHOOL LIFE. 1 
 
 nings, a tall navy officer who had served with some dis- 
 tinction under Duncan at Caraperdown, and who impressed 
 the imagination of the boys, in those days of militant 
 British valour by land and sea, as a model of manly prow- 
 ess. 1 It may be remembered that there was a much more 
 distinguished naval hero of the time who bore their own 
 nam e— the gallant Admiral Sir Richard Godwin Keats of 
 the Superb, afterwards governor of Greenwich Hospital ; 
 and ho, like their father, came from the west-country, be- 
 ing the son of a Bideford clergyman. But it seems clear 
 that the family of our Keats claimed no connection with 
 that of the Admiral. 
 
 Here are some of George Keats's recollections, written 
 after the death of his elder brother, and referring partly 
 to their school-days and partly to John's character after 
 he was grown up : 
 
 « I loved him from boyhood, even when he wronged me, for the 
 goodness of his heart and the nobleness of his spirit. Before we left 
 school we quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and I can safely say, 
 and my schoolfellows will bear witness, that John's temper was the 
 cause of all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are. 
 
 "From the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, 
 and fought alternately, until we separated in 1818, 1 in a great meas- 
 ure relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhausti- 
 ble spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondri- 
 asm. He avoided teazing any one with his miseries but Tom and 
 myself, and often asked our forgiveness ; venting and discussing 
 them gave him relief." 
 
 Let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly 
 reminiscences to their confirmation in the words of two of 
 Keats's school-friends ; and first in those of his junior, Ed- 
 ward Holmes, afterwards author of the Life of Mozart : 
 
 1 Captain Jennings died October 8, 1808. 
 B ' 
 
8 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 "Keats was in childhood not attached to books. His penchant 
 was for fighting. He would fight any one — morning, noon, and night, 
 his brother among the rest. It was meat and drink to him. . . . His 
 favourites were few ; after they were known to fight readily he seem- 
 ed to prefer them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour He 
 
 was a boy whom any one, from his extraordinary vivacity and per- 
 sonal beauty, might easily fancy would become great — but rather in 
 some military capacity than in literature. You will remark that 
 this taste came out rather suddenly and unexpectedly. ... In all active 
 exercises he excelled. The generosity and daring of his character, 
 with the extreme beauty and animation of his face, made, I remem- 
 ber, an impression on me ; and being some years his junior, I was 
 obliged to woo his friendship, in which I succeeded, but not till I 
 had fought several battles. This violence and vehemence — this 
 pugnacity and generosity of disposition— in passions of tears or out- 
 rageous fits of laughter — always in extremes — will help to paint 
 Keats in his boyhood. Associated as they were with an extraordi- 
 nary beauty of person and expression, these qualities captivated the 
 boys, and no one was more popular." ] 
 
 Entirely to the same effect is the account of Keats given 
 by a school friend seven or eight years older than himself, 
 to whose appreciation and encouragement the world most 
 likely owes it that he first ventured into poetry. This 
 was the son of the master, Charles Cowden Clarke, who 
 towards the close of a long life, during which he had de- 
 served well of literature in more ways than one, wrote 
 retrospectively of Keats : 
 
 " He was a favourite with all. Not the less beloved was he for hav- 
 ing a highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the 
 most picturesque exhibitions — off the stage — I ever saw. . . . Upon 
 one occasion, when an usher, on account of some impertinent behav- 
 iour, had boxed his brother Tom's ears, John rushed up, put himself 
 into the received posture of offence, and, it was said, struck the usher 
 — who could, so to say, have put him in his pocket. His passion at 
 
 1 Houghton MSS. 
 
L ] SCHOOL LIFE. 9 
 
 times was almost ungovernable ; and his brother George, being con- 
 siderably the taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down 
 by main force, laughing when John was ' in one of his moods,' and 
 was endeavouring to beat him. It was all, however, a whisp-of-straw 
 conflagration ; for he had an intensely tender affection for his broth- 
 ers, and proved it upon the most trying occasions. He was not mere- 
 ly the favourite of all, like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage ; 
 but his highmindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, 
 his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his be- 
 half that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior 
 t>r equal, who had known him." 
 
 The same excellent witness records, in agreement with 
 the last, that in his earlier school-days Keats showed no 
 particular signs of an intellectual bent, though always or- 
 derly and methodical in what he did. But during his last 
 few terms, that is, in his fourteenth and fifteenth years, all 
 the energies of his nature turned to study. He became 
 suddenly and completely absorbed in reading, and would 
 be continually at work before school-time in the morning 
 and during play-hours in the afternoon ; could hardly be 
 induced to join the school games, and never willingly had 
 a book out of his hand. At this time he won easily all 
 the literature prizes of the school, and, in addition to his 
 proper work, imposed on himself such voluntary tasks as 
 the translation of the whole JEneid in prose. He devoured 
 all the books of history, travel, and fiction in the school 
 library, and was forever borrowing more from the friend 
 who tells the story. " In my mind's eye I now see him at 
 supper, sitting back on the form from the table, holding 
 the folio volume of Burnet's 'History of his Own Time' 
 between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond 
 it. This work, and Leigh Hunt's ' Examiner '—which my 
 father took in, and I used to lend to Keats— no doubt laid 
 the foundation of his love of civil and religious liberty." 
 
10 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Bat the books which Keats read with the greatest eager- 
 ness of all were books of ancient mythology, and he seemed 
 literally to learn by heart the contents of Tookc's Panthe- 
 on, Lempriere's Dictionary, and the school abridgment by 
 Tindal of Spence's Polymetis — the first the most foolish 
 and dull, the last the most scholarly and polite, of the vari- 
 ous handbooks in which the ancient fables were presented 
 in those days to the apprehension of youth. 
 
 Trouble fell upon Keats in the midst of these ardent 
 studies of his latter school-days. His mother had been for 
 some time in failing health. First she was disabled by 
 chronic rheumatism, and at last fell into a rapid consump- 
 tion, which carried her off in February, 1810. We are told 
 with what devotion her eldest boy attended her sick bed, 
 — " he sat up whole nights with her in a great chair, would 
 suffer nobody to give her medicine, or even cook her food, 
 but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease " 
 — and how bitterly he mourned for her when she was gone 
 — " he gave way to such impassioned and prolonged grief 
 (hiding himself in a nook under the master's desk) as 
 awakened the liveliest pity and sympathy in all who saw 
 him." In the July following, Mrs. Jennings, being desirous 
 to make the best provision she could for her orphan grand- 
 children, "in consideration of the natural love and affection 
 which she had for them," executed a deed putting them 
 under the care of two guardians, to whom she made over, 
 to be held in trust for their benefit from the date of the 
 instrument, the chief part of the property which she derived 
 from her late husband under his will. 1 The guardians were 
 Mr. Rowland Sandell, merchant, and Mr. Ptichard Abbey, a 
 wholesale tea-dealer in Pancras Lane. Mrs. Jennings sur- 
 
 1 Rawlings v. Jennings. See Appendix, p. 2 ID. 
 
i.] LIFE AS SURGEON'S APPRENTICE. 11 
 
 vived the execution of this deed more than four years, 1 but 
 Mr. Abbey, with the consent of his co-trustee, seems at once 
 to have taken up all the responsibilities of the trust. Un- 
 der his authority John Keats was withdrawn from school 
 at the close of this same year 1810, when he was just fif- 
 teen, and made to put on harness for the practical work of 
 life. With no opposition, so far as we learn, on his own 
 part, he was bound apprentice for a term of five years to a 
 surgeon at Edmonton named Hammond. The only pict- 
 ure we have of him in this capacity has been left by R. II. 
 Home, the author of Orion, who came as a small boy to 
 the Enfield school just after Keats had left it. One day 
 in winter Mr. Hammond had driven over to attend the 
 school, and Keats with him. Keats was standing with his 
 head sunk in a brown study, holding- the horse, when some 
 of the boys, who knew his school reputation for pugnacity, 
 dared Home to throw a snowball at him, which Home 
 did, hitting Keats in the back, and then taking headlong 
 to his heels, to his surprise got off scot free. 2 Keats 
 during his apprenticeship used on his own account to be 
 often to and fro between the Edmonton surgery and the 
 Enfield school. His newly awakened passion for the 
 pleasures of literature and the imagination was not to be 
 stifled, and whenever he could spare time from his work, 
 he plunged back into his school occupations of reading 
 and translating. He finished at this time his translation 
 of the xEneid, and was in the habit of walking over 
 to Enfield once a week or oftener to see his friend 
 Cowden Clarke, and to exchange books and " travel in 
 
 1 Mrs. Alice Jennings was buried at St. Stephen's, Coleman Street, 
 December 19, 1814, aged 78. (Communication from the Rev. J. W. 
 Pratt, M.A.) 
 
 * I owe this anecdote to Mr. Gosse, who had it direct from Ilorne. 
 
12 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 the realms of gold" with him. In summer weather the 
 two would sit in a shady arbour in the old school garden, 
 the elder reading poetry to the younger, and enjoying 
 his looks and exclamations of enthusiasm. On a momen- 
 tous day for Keats, Cowden Clarke introduced him for the 
 first time to Spenser, reading him the E})ithalamium in 
 the afternoon, and lending him the Faerie Qiceene, to take 
 away the same evening. It has been said, and trulypCltat ' 
 no one who has not had the good fortune to be attracted 
 to that poem in boyhood can ever completely enjoy it. 
 The maturer student, appreciate as he may its inexhaustible 
 beauties and noble temper, can hardly fail to be in some 
 degree put out by its arbitrary forms of rhyme and diction, 
 and wearied by its melodious redundance, he will perceive 
 the perplexity and discontinuousness of the allegory, and 
 the absence of real and breathing humanity, even the 
 failure at times of clearness of vision and strength of 
 grasp, amidst all that luxuriance of decorative and sym- 
 bolic invention, and prodigality of romantic incident 
 and detail. It is otherwise with the uncritical faculties 
 and greedy apprehension of boyhood. For them there is 
 no poetical revelation like the Faerie Queene, no pleasure 
 equal to that of floating for the first time along that ever- 
 buoyant stream of verse, by those shores and forests of 
 enchantment, glades and wildernesses alive with glancing 
 figures of knight and lady, oppressor and champion, mage 
 and Saracen — with masque and combat, pursuit and rescue, 
 the chivalrous shapes and hazards of the woodland, and 
 beauty triumphant or in distress. Through the new world 
 thus opened to him Keats went ranging with delight : 
 " ramping " is Cowden Clarke's word ; he showed, moreover^ 
 his own instinct for the poetical art by fastening with crit- 
 ical enthusiasm on epithets of special felicity or power. 
 
i.] AWAKENING TO POETRY. 13 
 
 For instance, says his friend, " he hoisted himself up, and 
 looked burly and dominant, as he said, 'What an image 
 that is — sea-shouldering whales /' " Spenser has been oft- 
 en proved not only a great awakener of the love of poetry 
 in youth, but a great fertilizer of the germs of original 
 poetical power where they exist; and Charles Brown, the 
 most intimate friend of Keats during two later years of 
 his life, states positively that it was to the inspiration of 
 the Faerie Queene_ that his first notion of attempting to 
 write was due. " Though born to be a poet, he was igno- 
 rant of his birthright until he had completed his eighteenth 
 year. It was the Faerie Queene that awakened his genius. 
 In Spenser's fairy-land he was enchanted, breathed in a 
 new world, and became another being; till, enamoured of 
 the stanza, he attempted to imitate it, and succeeded. 
 This account of the sudden development of his poetic 
 powers I first received from his brothers, and afterwards 
 from himself. This, his earliest attempt, the ' Imitation 
 of Spenser,' is in his first volume of poems, and it is pecul- 
 iarly interesting to those acquainted with his history." * 
 Cowden Clarke places the attempt two years earlier, but 
 his memory for dates was, as he owns, the vaguest, and 
 we may fairly assume him to have been mistaken. 
 
 After he had thus first become conscious within him- 
 self of the impulse of poetical composition, Keats went on 
 writino* occasional sonnets and other verses ; secretly and 
 shyly at first like all young poets ; at least it was not until 
 two years later, in the spring of \&}5 r that he showed any- 
 thing he had written to his friend and confidant, Cowden 
 Clarke. In the meantime a change had taken place in his 
 way of life. In the summer or autumn of 1814, more 
 
 1 Houghton MSS. 
 
14 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 than a year before the expiration of his term of appren^ 
 ticeship, he had quarrelled with Mr. Hammond and left 
 him. The cause of their quarrel is not known, and Keats's 
 own single allusion to it is when, once afterwards, speak- 
 ing of the periodical change and renewal of the bodily 
 tissues, he says, " Seven years ago it was not this hand 
 which clenched itself at Hammond." It seems unlikely 
 that the cause was any neglect of duty on the part of the 
 poet-apprentice, who was not devoid of thoroughness and 
 resolution in the performance even of uncongenial tasks. 
 At all events Mr. Hammond allowed the indentures to be 
 cancelled, and Keats, being now nearly nineteen years of 
 age, went to live in London, and continue the study of 
 his profession as a student at the hospitals (then for teach- 
 ing purposes united) of St. Thomas's and Guy's. For the 
 first winter and spring after leaving Edmonton he lodged 
 alone at 8 Dean Street, Borough, and then for about a 
 year, in company with some fellow-students, over a tallow- 
 chandler's shop in St. Thomas's Street. Thence he went, 
 in the summer of 1816, to join his brothers in lodgings in 
 the Poultry, over a passage leading to the Queen's Head 
 tavern. In the spring of 1817 they all three moved for a 
 short time to 76 Chcapside. Between these several ad- 
 dresses in London Keats spent a period of about two years 
 and a half, from the date (which is not precisely fixed) of 
 his leaving Edmonton, in 1814, until April, 1817. 
 
 It was in this interval, from his nineteenth to his twenty- 
 second year, that Keats gave way gradually to his growing 
 passion for poetry. At first he seems to have worked 
 steadily enough along the lines which others had marked 
 out for him. His chief reputation, indeed, among his fel- 
 low-students was that of a " cheerful, crotchety rhymester," 
 much given to scribbling doggerel verses in his friends 1 
 
i.] LIFE AS HOSPITAL STUDENT. 15 
 
 note-books. 1 Bat I have before me the MS. book in which 
 he took down his own notes of a course, or at least the 
 beginning of a course, of lectures on anatomy, and they 
 are not those of a lax or inaccurate student. The only 
 sio-ns of a wandering mind occur on the margins of one 
 or two pages, in the shape of sketches (rather prettily 
 touched) of pansies and other flowers ; but the notes them- 
 selves are both full and close, as far as they qo. Poetry 
 had indeed already become Keats's chief interest, but it is 
 clear, at the same time, that he attended the hospitals and 
 did his work regularly, acquiring a fairly solid knowledge, 
 both theoretical and practical, of the rudiments of medical 
 and surgical science, so that he was always afterwards able 
 to speak on such subjects with a certain mastery. On the 
 26th of July, 1815, he passed with credit his examination 
 as licentiate at Apothecaries' Hall. He was appointed a 
 dresser at Guy's under Mr. Lucas on the 3d of March, 
 1816, and the operations which he performed or assisted 
 in are said to have proved him no bungler. But his heart 
 was not in the work. Its scientific part he could not feel 
 to be a satisfying occupation for his thoughts ; he knew 
 nothing of that passion of philosophical curiosity in the 
 mechanism and mysteries of the human frame which by 
 turns attracted Coleridge and Shelley towards the study of 
 medicine. The practical responsibilities of the profession 
 at the same time weighed upon him, and he was conscious 
 of a kind of absent, uneasy wonder at his own skill. Voices 
 and visions that he could not resist were luring his spirit 
 
 1 A specimen of such scribble, in the shape of a fragment of ro- 
 mance narrative, composed in the sham Old-English of Rowley, and 
 in prose, not verse, will be found in The Philosophy of Mystery, by 
 W. C. Dendy (London, 1841), p. 99, and another, preserved by Mr. H. 
 Stephens, in the Poetical Works, ed. Forman (1 vol., 1884), p. 558. 
 2 
 
16 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 along other paths, and once when Cowden Clarke asked 
 him about his prospects and feelings in regard to his pro- 
 fession, he frankly declared his own sense of his unfitness 
 for it, with reasons such as this, that "the other day, 
 during the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, 
 and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray ; 
 and I was off with them to Oberon and fairy-land." " My 
 last operation," he once told Brown, " was the opening of 
 a man's temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety, 
 but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the 
 time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up 
 the lancet again." 
 
 Keats at the same time was forming intimacies with 
 other young men of literary tastes and occupations. His 
 verses were beginning to be no longer written with a boy's 
 secrecy, but freely addressed to and passed round among 
 his friends; some of them attracted the notice and warm 
 approval of writers of acknowledged mark and standing, 
 and with their encouragement he had, about the time of 
 his coming of age (that is in the winter of 1816-17), con- 
 ceived the purpose of devoting himself to a literary life. 
 We are not told what measure of opposition he encoun- 
 tered on the point from Mr. Abbey, though there is evi- 
 dence that he encountered some. 1 Probably that gentle- 
 man regarded the poetical aspirations of his ward as mere 
 symptoms of a boyish fever which experience would quick- 
 ly cure. There was always a certain lack of cordiality in 
 his relations with the three brothers as they grew up. He 
 gave places in his counting-house successively to George 
 and Tom as they left school, but they both quitted him 
 after a while ; George, who had his full share of the fami- 
 ly pride, on account of slights experienced or imagined at 
 1 See Appendix, p. 220. 
 
i.] LIFE AS HOSPITAL STUDENT. 1? 
 
 the bands of a junior partner ; Tom in consequence of a 
 settled infirmity of health which early disabled him for 
 the practical work of life. Mr. Abbey continued to man- 
 age the money matters of the Keats family — unskilfully 
 enough, as will appear — and to do his duty by them as he 
 understood it. Between him and John Keats there was 
 never any formal quarrel. But that young brilliant spirit 
 could hardly have expected a responsible tea-dealer's ap- 
 proval when he yielded himself to the influences now to 
 be described. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 Particulars of Early Life in London. — Friendships and First Poems. 
 — Henry Stephens. — Felton Mathew. — Cowden Clarke. — Leigh 
 Hunt: his literary and personal influence. — John Hamilton Reyn- 
 olds. — James Rice.— Cornelius Webb. — Shelley. — Haydon. — Jo- 
 seph Severn. — Charles Wells. — Other acquaintances. — Determina- 
 tion to publish. [1814— April, 1817.] 
 
 When Keats moved from Dean Street to St. Thomas's 
 Street in the summer of 1815, he at first occupied a joint 
 sitting-room with two senior students, to the care of one 
 of whom he had been recommended by Astley Cooper. 1 
 When they left he arranged to live in the same house with 
 two other students of his own age named George Wilson 
 Mackereth and Henry Stephens. The latter, who was af- 
 terwards a physician of repute near St. Albans, and later 
 at Finchley, has left some interesting reminiscences of the 
 time. 2 "He attended lectures," says Mr. Stephens of 
 Keats, "and went through the usual routine, but he had 
 no desire to excel in that pursuit. . . . Poetry was to his 
 mind the zenith of all his aspirations — the only thing 
 worthy the attention of superior minds — so he thought — 
 all other pursuits were mean and tame. ... It may readily 
 be imagined that this feeling was accompanied by a good 
 
 1 See C. L. Feltoe, Memorials of J. F. South (London, 1884), p. 81 
 Houghto: 
 vol. i.,p. 134 
 
 2 Houghton MSS. See also Dr. B. W. Richardson in the Asclepiad, 
 
chap, il] HENRY STEPHENS— FELTON MATHEW. 19 
 
 deal of pride and some conceit, and that amongst mere 
 medical students he would walk and talk as one of the 
 gods might be supposed to do when mingling with mor- 
 tals." On the whole, it seems " Little Keats " was popular 
 among his fellow-students, although subject to occasional 
 teasing on account of his pride, his poetry, and even his 
 birth as the son of a stable-keeper. Mr. Stephens goes on 
 to tell how he himself and a student of St. Bartholomew's, 
 a merry fellow called Newmarch, having some tincture of 
 poetry, were singled out as companions by Keats, with 
 whom they used to discuss and compare verses, Keats tak- 
 ing always the tone of authority, and generally disagreeing 
 with their tastes. He despised Pope and admired Byron, 
 but delighted especially in Spenser, caring more in poetry 
 for the beauty of imagery, description, and simile than for 
 the interest of action or passion. Newmarch used some- 
 times to laugh at Keats and his flights — to the indignation 
 of his brothers, who came often to see him, and treated 
 him as a person to be exalted, and destined to exalt the 
 family name. "Questions of poetry apart," continues Mr. 
 Stephens, " he was habitually gentle and pleasant, and in his 
 life steady and well-behaved — his absolute devotion to 
 poetry prevented his having any other taste or indulging 
 in any vice." Another companion of Keats's early Lon- 
 don days who sympathized with his literary tastes was a 
 certain George Felton Mathew, the son of a tradesman 
 whose family showed the young medical student some 
 hospitality. "Keats and I," wrote, in 1848, Mr. Mathew 
 — then a supernumerary official on the Poor-Law Board, 
 struggling meekly under the combined strain of a precari- 
 ous income, a family of twelve children, and a turn for the 
 interpretation of prophecy — " Keats and I, though about 
 the same age, and both inclined to literature, were in many 
 
20 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 respects as different as two individuals could be. He en- 
 joyed good health — a fine flow of animal spirits — was fond 
 of company — could amuse himself admirably with the 
 frivolities of life — and had great confidence in himself. I, 
 on the other hand, was languid and melancholy — fond of 
 repose — thoughtful beyond my years — and diffident to the 
 last degree. ... He was of the sceptical and republican 
 school — an advocate for the innovations which were mak- 
 ing progress in his time — a fault-finder with everything es- 
 tablished. I, on the other hand, hated controversy and dis- 
 pute — dreaded discord and disorder" 1 — and Keats, our 
 good Mr. Timorous farther testifies, was very kind and ami- 
 able, always ready to apologize for shocking him. As to 
 his poetical predilections, the impression left on Mr. Ma- 
 thew quite corresponds with that recorded by Mr. Stephens : 
 " He admired more the external decorations than felt the 
 deep emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you 
 through the mazes of elaborate description, but was less 
 conscious of the sublime and the pathetic. He used to 
 spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never ob- 
 served the tears nor the broken voice which are indicative 
 of extreme sensibility." 
 
 The exact order and chronology of Keats's own first ef- 
 forts in poetry it is difficult to trace. They were certainly 
 neither precocious nor particularly promising. The cir- 
 cumstantial account of Brown above quoted compels us to 
 regard the lines In Imitation of Spenser as the earliest of 
 all, and as written at Edmonton about the end of 1813 or 
 beginning of 1814. They are correct and melodious, and 
 contain few of those archaic or experimental eccentricities 
 of diction which we shall find abounding a little later in 
 Keats's work. Although, indeed, the poets whom Keats 
 1 Houghton MSSL 
 
ii.] FIRST POEMS. 21 
 
 loved the best, both first and last, were those of the Eliza- 
 bethan age, it is clear that his own earliest verses were 
 modelled timidly on the work of writers nearer his own 
 time. His professedly Spenserian lines resemble not so 
 mucli Spenser as later writers who had written in his meas- 
 ure, and of these not the latest, Byron, 1 but rather such 
 milder minstrels as Shenstone, Thomson, and Beattie, or 
 most of all, perhaps, the sentimental Irish poetess Mrs. 
 Tighe, whose Psyche had become very popular since her 
 death, and by its richness of imagery, and flowing and 
 musical versification, takes a place, now too little recognized, 
 among the pieces preluding the romantic movement of the 
 time. That Keats was familiar with this lady's work is 
 proved by his allusion to it in the lines, themselves very 
 youthfully turned in the tripping manner of Tom Moore, 
 which he addressed about this time to some ladies who 
 had sent him a present of a shell. His two elegiac stan- 
 zas On Death, assigned by George Keats to the year 1814, 
 are quite in an eighteenth-century style and vein of moral- 
 izing. Equally so is the address To Hope of February, 
 1815, with its "relentless fair" and its personified abstrac- 
 tions, " fair Cheerfulness," " Disappointment, parent of De- 
 spair," " that fiend Despondence," and the rest. And once 
 more in the ode To Apollo of the same date, the voice 
 with which this young singer celebrates his Elizabethan 
 masters is an echo not of their own voice but rather of 
 Gray's : 
 
 " Thou biddest Shakspeare wave his hand, 
 And quickly forward spring 
 
 1 What, for instance, can be less Spenserian, and at the same time 
 less Byronic, than — 
 
 " For sure so fair a place was never seen 
 Of all that ever charm'd romantic eye ?" 
 
22 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 The Passions — a terrific band — 
 
 And each vibrates the string 
 That with its tyrant temper best accords, 
 While from their Master's lips pour forth the inspiring words. 
 A silver trumpet Spenser blows, 
 
 And, as its martial notes to silence flee, 
 From a virgin chorus flows 
 
 A hymn in praise of spotless Chastity. 
 'Tis still ! Wild warblings from the iEolian lyre 
 Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire." 
 
 The pieces above cited are all among the earliest of Keats's 
 work, written either at Edmonton or during the first year 
 of his life in London. To the same class no doubt be- 
 longs the inexpert and boyish, almost girlish, sentimental 
 sonnet To Byron, and probably that also, which is but a 
 degree better, To Chatterton (both only posthumously 
 printed). The more firmly handled but still mediocre son- 
 net on Leigh Hunt's release from prison brings us again to 
 a fixed date and a recorded occasion in the young poet's 
 life. It was on either the 2d or the 3d of February, 
 1815, that the brothers Hunt were discharged, after serving 
 out the term of imprisonment to which they had been con- 
 demned on the charge of libelling the Prince Regent two 
 years before. Young Cowden Clarke, like so many other 
 friends of letters and of liberty, had gone to offer his re- 
 spects to Leigh Hunt in Surrey jail, and the acquaintance 
 thus begun had warmed quickly into friendship. Within 
 a few days of Hunt's release, Clarke walked in from En- 
 field to call on him (presumably at the lodging he occu- 
 pied at this time in the Edge ware Road). On his return 
 Clarke met Keats, who walked part of the way home with 
 him, and as they parted, says Clarke, " he turned and gave 
 me the sonnet entitled Written on the day that Mr. Leigh 
 Hunt left prison. This I feel to be the first proof I had 
 
n.] FIRST POEMS— COWDEN CLARKE. 23 
 
 received of his having committed himself in verse; and 
 how clearly do I recollect the conscious look and hesita- 
 tion with which he offered it ! There are some momen- 
 tary glances by beloved friends that fade only with life." 
 
 Not long afterwards Cowden Clarke left Enfield, and 
 came to settle in London. Keats found him out in his 
 lodgings at Clerkenwell, and the two were soon meeting 
 as often, and reading together as eagerly, as ever. One of 
 the first books they attacked was a borrowed folio copy of 
 Chapman's Homer. After a night's enthusiastic study, 
 Clarke found, when he came down to breakfast the next 
 morning, that Keats, who had only left him in the small 
 hours, had already had time to compose and send him from 
 the Borough the sonnet, now so famous as to be almost 
 hackneyed, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer : 
 
 " Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, 
 
 And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ; 
 
 Round many "Western islands have I been 
 Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 
 Oft of one wide expanse had I been told, 
 
 That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne : 
 
 Yet did I never breathe its pure serene 
 Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold : 
 Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 
 When a new planet swims into his ken ; 
 Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
 
 He stared at the Pacific— and all his men 
 Look'd at each other with a wild surmise — 
 
 Silent, upon a peak in Darien." 
 
 The date of the incident cannot be precisely fixed, but it 
 was when nights were short in the summer of 1815. The 
 seventh line of the sonnet is an after-thought : in the orig- 
 inal copy sent to Cowden Clarke it stood more baldly, 
 2* C 
 
24 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 "Yet could I never tell what men might mean." Keats 
 here for the first time approves himself a poet indeed. 
 The concluding sestet is almost unsurpassed, nor can there 
 be a finer instance of the alchemy of genius than the im- 
 age of the explorer, wherein a stray reminiscence of school- 
 boy reading (with a mistake, it seems, as to the name, 
 which should be Balboa and not Cortez, but what does it 
 matter?) is converted into the perfection of appropriate 
 poetry. 
 
 One of the next services which the ever zealous and affec- 
 tionate Cowden Clarke did his young friend was to make 
 him personally known to Leigh Hunt. The acquaintance 
 carried with it in the sequel some disadvantages and even 
 penalties, but at first was a source of unmixed encourage- 
 ment and pleasure. It is impossible rightly to understand 
 the career of Keats if we fail to realize the various modes 
 in which it was affected by his intercourse with Hunt. The 
 latter was the elder of the two by eleven years. He was 
 the son, by marriage with an American wife, of an elo- 
 quent and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable 
 preacher of West Indian origin who had chiefly exercised 
 his vocation in the northern suburbs of London. Leigh 
 Hunt was brought up at Christ's Hospital about a dozen 
 years later than Lamb and Coleridge, and gained at sixteen 
 some slight degree of precocious literary reputation with 
 a volume of juvenile poems. A few years later he came 
 into notice as a theatrical critic, being then a clerk in the 
 War Office, an occupation which he abandoned at twenty- 
 four (in 1808) in order to join his brother, John Hunt, in 
 the conduct of the Examiner newspaper. For five years 
 the managers of that journal helped to fight the losing 
 battle of liberalism, in those days of Eldon and of Castle- 
 reagh, with a dexterous brisk audacity, and a perfect sin- 
 
il] LEIGH HUNT. 25 
 
 cerity, if not profoundness, of conviction. At last they 
 were caught tripping, and condemned to two years' im- 
 prisonment for strictures ruled libellous, and really sting- 
 ing as well as just, on the character and person of the 
 Prince Regent. Leigh Hunt bore himself in his captivity 
 with cheerful fortitude, and issued from it a sort of hero. 
 Liberal statesmen, philosophers, and writers pressed to offer 
 him their sympathy and society in prison, and his engag- 
 ing presence and affluence of genial conversation charmed 
 all who were brought in contact with him. Tall, straight, 
 slender, and vivacious, with curly black hair, bright coal- 
 black eyes, and " nose of taste," Leigh Hunt was ever one 
 of the most winning of companions, full of kindly smiles 
 and jests, of reading, gaiety, and ideas, with an infinity of 
 pleasant things to say of his own, yet the most sympathet- 
 ic and deferential of listeners. If in some matters he was 
 far too easy, and especially in that of money obligations, 
 which he shrank neither from receiving nor conferring — 
 only circumstances made him nearly always a receiver — 
 still men of sterner fibre than Hunt have more lightly 
 abandoned graver convictions than his, and been far less 
 ready to suffer for what they believed. Liberals could 
 not but contrast his smiling steadfastness under persecu- 
 tion with the apostasy, as in the heat of the hour they con- 
 sidered it, of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. In 
 domestic life no man was more amiable and devoted under 
 difficulties, and none was better loved by his friends, or 
 requited them, so far as the depth of his nature went, with 
 a truer warmth and loyalty. His literary industry was in- 
 cessant, hardly second to that of Southey himself. He 
 had the liveliest faculty of enjoyment, coupled with a sin- 
 gular quickness of intellectual apprehension for the points 
 and qualities of what he enjoyed ; and for the gentler 
 
26 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 pleasures, graces, and luxuries (to use a word lie loved) of 
 literature he is the most accomplished of guides and in- 
 terpreters. His manner in criticism has at its best an easy 
 penetration and flowing unobtrusive felicity most remote 
 from those faults to which Coleridge and De Quincey, with 
 their more philosophic powers and method, were subject, 
 the faults of pedantry and effort. The infirmity of Leigh 
 Hunt's style is of an opposite kind. " Incomparable," ac- 
 cording to Lamb's well-known phrase, " as a fire-side com- 
 panion," it was his misfortune to carry too much of the 
 fire-side tone into literature, and to affect both in prose 
 and verse, but much more in the latter, an air of chatty 
 familiarity and ease which passes too easily into Cockney 
 pertness. 
 
 A combination of accidents, political, personal, and lit- 
 erary, caused this writer of amiable memory and second- 
 rate powers to exercise, about the time of which we are 
 writing, a determining influence both on the work and the 
 fortunes of stronger men. And first of his influence on 
 their work. He was as enthusiastic a student of " our 
 earlier and nobler school of poetry " as Coleridge or Lamb, 
 and though he had more appreciation than they of the 
 characteristic excellences of the " French school," the school 
 of polished artifice and restraint which had come in since 
 Dryden, he was not less- bent on its overthrow, and on the 
 return of English poetry to the paths of nature and free- 
 dom. But he had his own conception of the manner in 
 which this return should be effected. He did not admit 
 that Wordsworth with his rustic simplicities and his re- 
 cluse philosophy had solved the problem. "It was his 
 intention," he wrote in prison, " by the beginning of next 
 year to bring out a piece of some length ... in which he 
 would attempt to reduce to practice his own ideas of what 
 
ii.] LEIGH HUNT: HIS LITERARY INFLUENCE. 27 
 
 is natural in style, and of the various and legitimate har- 
 mony of the English heroic." The result of this intention 
 was the Story of Rimini, begun before his prosecution and 
 published a year after his release, in February or March, 
 1816. "With the endeavour," so he repeated himself in 
 the preface, " to recur to a freer spirit of versification, I 
 have joined one of still greater importance — that of hav- 
 ing, a free and idiomatic cast of language." 
 
 In versification Hunt's aim was to bring back into use 
 the earlier form of the rhymed English decasyllabic or 
 "heroic" couplet. The innovating poets of the time had 
 abandoned this form of verse (Wordsworth and Coleridge 
 using it only in their earliest efforts, before 1796); while 
 the others who still employed it, as Campbell, Rogers, 
 Crabbe, and Byron, adhered, each in his manner, to the is- 
 olated couplet and hammering rhymes with which the 
 English ear had been for more than a century exclusively 
 familiar. The two contrasted systems of handling the 
 measure may best be understood if we compare the 
 rhythm of a poem written in it to one of those designs in 
 hangings or wall-papers which are made up of two differ- 
 ent patterns in combination : a rigid or geometrical ground 
 pattern, with a second flowing or free pattern winding in 
 and out of it. The regular or ground pattern, dividing 
 the field into even spaces, will stand for the fixed or strict- 
 ly metrical divisions of the verse into equal pairs of rhym- 
 ing lines ; while the flowing or free pattern stands for its 
 other divisions — dependent not on metre but on the sense 
 — into clauses and periods of variable length and struct- 
 ure. Under the older system of versification the sentence 
 or period had been allowed to follow its own laws, with a 
 movement untrammelled by that of the metre; and the 
 beauty of the result depended upon the skill and feeling 
 
28 KEATS. [ CHAP . 
 
 with which this free element of the pattern was made to 
 play about and interweave itself with the fixed element, 
 the flow and divisions of the sentence now crossing and 
 now coinciding with those of the metre, the sense now 
 drawing attention to the rhyme and now withholding it. 
 For examples of this system and of its charm we have 
 only to turn at random to Chaucer : 
 
 " I-clothed was sche fresh for to devyse. 
 Hir yelwe hair was browded in a tresse, 
 Byhynde her bale, a yerde long, I gesse, 
 And in the garden as the sonne upriste 
 She walketh up and down, and as hir liste 
 She gathereth floures, party white and reede, 
 To make a sotil garland for here heede, 
 And as an aungel hevenlyche sche song." 
 
 Chaucer's conception of the measure prevails through- 
 out the Elizabethan age, but not exclusively or uniform ly. 
 Some poets are more inobservant of the metrical division 
 than he, and keep the movement of their periods as inde- 
 pendent of it as possible, closing a sentence anywhere 
 rather than with the close of the couplet, and making use 
 constantly of the enjambement, or way of letting the sense 
 flow over from one line to another, without pause or em- 
 phasis on the rhyme-word. Others show an opposite ten- 
 dency, especially in epigrammatic or sententious passages, 
 to clip their sentences to the pattern of the metre, fitting 
 single propositions into single lines or couplets, and letting- 
 the stress fall regularly on the rhyme. This principle 
 gradually gained ground during the seventeenth century, 
 as every one knows, and prevails strongly in the w^ork of 
 Dryden. But Dryden has two methods. which he freely 
 employs for varying the monotony of his couplets : in se- 
 
il] LEIGH HUNT: HIS LITERARY INFLUENCE. 29 
 
 rious narrative or didactic verse, the use of the triplet and 
 the Alexandrine, thus: ' 
 
 " Full bowls of wine, of honey, milk, and blood 
 Were poured upon the pile of burning wood, 
 And hissing flames receive, and hungry lick the food. 
 Then thrice the mounted squadrons ride around 
 The fire, and Arcite's name they thrice resound : 
 ' Hail and f life well,' they shouted thrice amain, 
 Thrice facing to the left, and thrice they turned again — " 
 
 and in lively colloquial verse the use, not uncommon also 
 with the Elizabethans, of disyllabic rhymes: 
 
 " I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye ; 
 I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly. 
 Sweet ladies, be not frighted ; I'll be civil ; 
 I'm what I was, a little harmless devil." 
 
 In the hands of Pope, the poetical legislator of the fol- 
 lowing century, these expedients are discarded, and the 
 fixed and purely metrical element in the design is suffered 
 to regulate and control the other element entirely, The sen- 
 tence-structure loses its freedom, and periods and clauses, 
 instead of being allowed to develop themselves at their 
 ease, are compelled mechanically to coincide with and re- 
 peat the metrical divisions of the verse. To take a famous 
 instance, and from a passage not sententious, but fanciful 
 and discursive : 
 
 " Some in the fields of purest aether play, 
 And bask and whiten in the blaze of day. 
 Some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high, 
 Or roll the planets through the boundless sky. 
 Some less refined, beneath the moon's pale light 
 Pursue the stars that shoot across the night, 
 
30 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Or seek the mists in grosser air below, 
 Or dip their pinions in the painted bow, 
 Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main, 
 Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain." 
 
 Leigh Hunt's theory was that Pope, with all his skill, 
 had spoiled instead of perfecting his instrument, and that 
 the last true master of the heroic couplet had been Dry- 
 den, on whom the verse of Rimini is avowedly modelled. 
 The result is an odd blending of the grave and the collo- 
 quial cadences of Dryden, without his characteristic nerve 
 and energy in either : 
 
 " The prince, at this, would bend on her an eye 
 Cordial enough, and kiss her tenderly ; 
 Nor, to say truly, was he slow in common 
 To accept the attentions of this lovely woman ; 
 But the meantime he took no generous pains, 
 By mutual pleasing, to secure his gains ; 
 He entered not, in turn, in her delights, 
 Her books, her flowers, her taste for rural sights ; 
 Nay, scarcely her sweet singing minded he 
 Unless his pride was roused by company ; 
 Or when to please him, after martial play, 
 She strained her lute to some old fiery lay 
 Of fierce Orlando, or of Ferumbras, 
 Or Ryan's cloak, or how by the red grass 
 In battle you might know where Richard was." 
 
 It is usually said that to the example thus set by Leigh 
 Hunt in Rimini is due the rhythmical form alike of En- 
 dymion and Epipsychidion, of Keats's Epistles to his 
 friends and Shelley's Letter to Maria Gisborne. Certainly 
 the Epistles of Keats, both as to sentiment and rhythm, 
 are very much in Hunt's manner. But the earliest of 
 them, that to G. F. Mathew, is dated November, 1815, when 
 
il] LEIGH HUNT: HIS LITERARY INFLUENCE. 31 
 
 Rimini was not yet published, and when it appears Keats 
 did not yet know Hunt personally. He may, indeed, have 
 known his poem in MS. through Clarke or others ; or the 
 likeness of his work to Hunt's may have arisen indepen- 
 ently : as to style, from a natural affinity of feeling ; and 
 as to rhythm, from a familiarity with the disyllabic rhyme 
 and the " overflow " as used by some of the Elizabethan 
 writers, particularly by Spenser in Mother Hubbard's Tale, 
 and by Browne in Britannia's Pastorals. At all events 
 the appearance of Rimini tended unquestionably to en- 
 courage and confirm him in his practice. 
 
 As to Hunt's success with his "ideas of what is natural 
 in style," and his " free and idiomatic cast of language " to 
 supersede the styles alike of Pope and Wordsworth, the 
 specimen of his which we have given is perhaps enough. 
 The taste that guided him so well in appreciating the works 
 of others deserted him often in original composition, but 
 nowhere so completely as in Rimini. The piece, indeed, is 
 not without agreeable passages of picturesque colour and 
 description, but for the rest the pleasant creature does but 
 exaggerate in this poem the chief foible of his prose, re- 
 doubling his vivacious airs where they are least in place, 
 and handling the great passions of the theme with a tea- 
 party manner and vocabulary that are intolerable. Con- 
 temporaries, welcoming as a relief any departure from the 
 outworn poetical conventions of the eighteenth century, 
 found, indeed, something to praise in Leigh Hunt's Rimini, 
 and ladies are said to have wept over the sorrows of the 
 hero and heroine ; but what, one can only ask, must be 
 the sensibilities of the human being who can endure to 
 hear the story of Paolo and Francesca — Dante's Paolo and 
 Francesca — diluted through four cantos in a style like 
 this?— 
 
32 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 " What need I tell of lovely lips and eyes, 
 A clipsome waist, and bosom's balmy rise ? — " 
 
 "How charming, would he think, to see her here, 
 How heightened then, and perfect would appear 
 The two divinest things the world has got, 
 A lovely woman in a rural spot." 
 
 When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer 
 poetical gifts and instincts, successively followed Leigh 
 Hunt in the attempt to add a familiar lenity of style to 
 variety of movement in this metre, Shelley, it need not be 
 said, was in no danger of falling into any such underbred 
 strain as this ; but Keats at first falls, or is near falling, 
 into it more than once. 
 
 Next as to the influence which Leigh Hunt involuntarily 
 exercised on his friends' fortunes, and their estimation by 
 the world. We have seen how he found himself, in pris- 
 on, and for some time after his release, a kind of political 
 hero on the liberal side, a part for which nature had by no 
 means fitted him. This was in itself enough to mark him 
 out as a special butt for Tory vengeance ; yet that ven- 
 geance would hardly have been so inveterate as it was but 
 for other secondary causes. During his imprisonment 
 Leigh Hunt had reprinted from the Reflector, with notes 
 and additions, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse called 
 the Feast of the Poets, which he had written about two 
 years before. In it Apollo is represented as convoking 
 the contemporary British poets, or pretenders to the poet- 
 ical title, to a session, or rather to a supper. Some of 
 those who present themselves the god rejects with scorn, 
 others he cordially welcomes, others he admits with reserve 
 and admonition. Moore and Campbell fare the best; 
 Southey and Scott are accepted, but with reproof; Coleridge 
 and Wordsworth chidden and dismissed. The criticisms 
 
ii.] LEIGH HUNT: HIS LITERARY INFLUENCE. 33 
 
 are not more short-sighted than those even of just and 
 able men commonly are on their contemporaries. The 
 bitterness of the " Lost Leader " feeling to which we have 
 , referred accounts for much of Hunt's disparagement of 
 the Lake writers, while in common with all liberals he was 
 prejudiced against Scott as a conspicuous high Tory and 
 friend to kings. But he quite acknowledged the genius, 
 while he condemned the defection, and also what he 
 thought the poetical perversities, of Wordsworth. His 
 treatment of Scott, on the other hand, is idly flippant and 
 patronising. Now it so happened that of the two cham- 
 pions who were soon after to wield, one the bludgeon, 
 and the other the dagger, of Tory criticism in Edinburgh, 
 — I mean Wilson and Lockhart — Wilson was the cordial 
 friend and admirer of Wordsworth, and Lockhart a man 
 of many hatreds but one great devotion, and that devotion 
 was to Scott. Hence a part at least of the peculiar and, as 
 it might seem, paradoxical rancour with which the gentle 
 Hunt, and Keats as his friend and supposed follower, were 
 by-and-bye to be persecuted in Blackwood. 
 
 To go back to the point at which Hunt and Keats first 
 became known to each other. Cowden Clarke began by 
 carrying up to Hunt, who had now moved from the Edge- 
 ware Road to a cottage in the Yale of Health at Ilamp- 
 stead, a few of Keats's poems in manuscript. Horace Smith 
 was with Hunt when the young poet's work was shown 
 him. Both were eager in its praises, and in questions con- 
 cerning the person and character of the author. Cowden 
 Clarke at Hunt's request brought Keats to call on him 
 soon afterwards, and has left a vivid account of their pleas- 
 ant welcome and conversation. The introduction seems 
 to have taken place early in the spring of 181G. 1 Keats 
 1 See Appendix, p. 220. 
 
34 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 immediately afterwards became intimate in the Hampstead 
 household, and for the next year or two Hunt's was the 
 strongest intellectual influence to which he was subject. 
 So far as opinions were concerned, those of Keats had al- 
 ready, as we have seen, been partly formed in boyhood 
 by Leigh Hunt's writings in the Examiner. Hunt was a 
 confirmed sceptic as to established creeds, and supplied 
 their place with a private gospel of cheerfulness, or system 
 of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his own sunny 
 temperament, and partly by the hopeful doctrines of eigh- 
 teenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the 
 natural sympathy of generous youth for Hunt's liberal and 
 optimistic view of things, and he had a mind naturally 
 unapt for dogma — ready to entertain and appreciate any 
 set of ideas according as his imagination recognised their 
 beauty or power, he could never wed himself to any as 
 representing ultimate truth. In matters of poetic feeling 
 and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in common. 
 Both alike were given to " luxuriating" somewhat effusive- 
 ly and fondly over the " deliciousness " of whatever they 
 liked in art, books, or nature. To the e very-day pleasures 
 of summer and the English fields Hunt brought in a lower 
 degree the same alertness of perception, and acuteness of 
 sensuous and imaginative enjoyment, which in Keats were 
 intense beyond parallel. In his lighter and shallower 
 way Hunt also felt with Keats the undying charm of classic 
 fable, and w 7 as scholar enough to produce about this time 
 some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and 
 some, less adequate, of Homer. The poets Hunt loved 
 best were Ariosto and the other Italian masters of the chiv- 
 alrous-fanciful epic style; and in English he was devoted 
 to Keats's own favourite, Spenser. 
 
 The name of Spenser is often coupled with that of "Lib- 
 
ii.] LEIGH HUNT: HIS LITERARY INFLUENCE. 35 
 
 ertas," " the lov'd Libertas," meaning Leigli Hunt, in the 
 verses written by Keats at this time. He attempts in 
 some of these verses to embody the spirit of the Fairie 
 Queene in the metre of Rimini, and in others to express 
 in the same form the pleasures of nature as he felt them 
 in straying about the beautiful, then rural, Hampstead 
 woods and slopes. In the summer of 1816 he seems to 
 have spent a good deal of his time at the Yale of Health, 
 where a bed was made up for him in the library. In one 
 poem he dilates at length on the associations suggested by 
 the busts and knick-knacks in the room ; and the sonnet 
 beginning, "Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and 
 there," records pleasantly his musings as he walked home 
 from his friend's house one night in winter. We find him 
 presenting Hunt with a crown of ivy, and receiving a set 
 of sonnets from him in return. Or they would challenge 
 each other to the composition of rival pieces on a chosen 
 theme. Cowden Clarke, in describing one such occasion 
 in December, 1816, when they each wrote to time a sonnet 
 on the Grasshopper and Cricket, has left us a pleasant pict- 
 ure of their relations : 
 
 " The event of the after-scrutiny was one of many such occur- 
 rences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affec- 
 tionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly 
 unpretentious encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the 
 
 first line — 
 
 " ' The poetry of earth is never dead.' 
 
 1 Such a prosperous opening !' he said ; and when he came to the 
 tenth and eleventh lines — 
 
 " ' On a lone winter morning, when the frost 
 Hath wrought a silence ' — 
 
 ' Ah, that's perfect ! Bravo Keats !' And then he went on in a dila- 
 tation on the dumbness of Nature during the season's suspension and 
 torpidity." 
 
36 KEATS. [chap, 
 
 Through Leigh Hunt Keats was before long introduced 
 to a number of congenial spirits. Among them he at- 
 tached himself especially to one John Hamilton Reynolds, 
 a poetic aspirant who, though a year younger than him- 
 self, had preceded him with his first literary venture. 
 Reynolds was born at Shrewsbury, and his father settled 
 afterwards in London as writing-master at the Blue Coat 
 School. He lacked health and energy, but has left the 
 reputation of a brilliant playful wit, and the evidence of 
 a charming character and no slight literary talent. He 
 held a clerkship in an Insurance office, and Jived in Little 
 Britain with his family, including three sisters with whom 
 Keats was also intimate, and the eldest of whom after- 
 wards married Thomas Hood. His earliest poems show 
 him inspired feelingly enough with the new romance and 
 nature, sentiment of the time. One, Safte, is an indifferent 
 imitation of Byron in his then fashionable Oriental vein * 
 much better work appears in a volume published in the 
 year of Keats's death, and partly prompted by the writer's 
 relations with him. In a lighter strain Reynolds wrote a 
 musical entertainment which was brought out in 1819 at 
 what is now the Lyceum theatre, and about the same time 
 offended Wordsworth with an anticipatory parody of Pe- 
 ter Bell, which Byron assumed to be the work of Moore. 
 In 1822 he produced a spirited sketch in prose and verse 
 purporting to relate, under the name Peter Corcoran, the 
 fortunes of an amateur of the prize-ring ; and a little later, 
 in conjunction with Hood, the.volume of anonymous Odes 
 and Addresses to Eminent Persons which Coleridge on its 
 appearance declared confidently to be the work of Lamb. 
 But Reynolds had early given up the hope of living by 
 literature, and accepted the offer of an opening in busi- 
 ness as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell son- 
 
ii.] JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS. 37 
 
 net to the Muses in a copy of Shakspeare which he gave 
 to Keats, and in 1821 he writes again, 
 
 " As time increases 
 I give up drawling verse for diving leases." 
 
 In point of fact, Reynolds continued for years to contrib- 
 ute to the London Magazine and other reviews, and to 
 work occasionally in conjunction with Hood. Bat neither 
 in literature nor law did he attain a position commensurate 
 with the promise of his youth. Starting level, at the time 
 of which we speak, with men w r ho are now in the first 
 rank of fame — with Keats and Shelley — he died in 1852 
 as Clerk of the County at Newport, Isle of Wight, and it 
 is only in association with Keats that his name will live. 
 Not only was he one of the warmest friends Keats had, 
 entertaining from the first an enthusiastic admiration for 
 his powers, as a sonnet written early in their acquaintance 
 proves, 1 but also one of the wisest, and by judicious ad- 
 vice more than once saved him from a mistake. In con- 
 nection with the name of Reynolds among Keats's asso- 
 ciates must be mentioned that of his inseparable friend, 
 James Rice, a young solicitor of literary tastes and infinite 
 jest, chronically ailing or worse in health, but always, in 
 Keats's words, "coming on his legs again like a cat;" ever 
 cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and indefat- 
 igable in good offices to those about him. "Dear noble 
 generous James Rice," records Dilke — " the best, and in his 
 quaint way one of the wittiest and wisest, men I ever 
 knew." Besides Reynolds, another and more insignificant 
 rhyming member of Hunt's set, when Keats first joined 
 it, was one Cornelius Webb, remembered now, if remem- 
 1 See Appendix, p. 220. 
 
38 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 bered at all, by Blackwood's derisory quotation of his lines 
 
 on — „ 
 
 "Keats, 
 
 The Muses' son of promise, and what feats 
 
 He yet may do — " 
 
 as well as by a disparaging allusion in one of Keats's own 
 later letters. He : disappeared early from the circle, but not 
 before he had caught enough of its spirit to write sonnets 
 and poetical addresses which might almost be taken for the 
 work of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his 
 weak moments. 1 For some years afterwards Webb served 
 as press-reader in the printing-office of Messrs. Clowes, be- 
 ing charged especially with the revision of the Quarterly 
 proofs. Towards 1830-1840 he re-appeared in literature 
 as Cornelius "Webbe," author of the Man about Town, 
 and other volumes of cheerful gossiping Cockney essays, 
 to which the Quarterly critics extended a patronizing no- 
 tice. 
 
 An acquaintance more interesting to posterity which 
 Keats made a few months later at Leigh Hunt's was that 
 of Shelley, his senior by only three years. During the 
 harrowing period of Shelley's life which followed the sui- 
 cide of his first wife — when his principle of love, a law to 
 itself, had in action entailed so dire a consequence, and his 
 obedience to his own morality had brought him into such 
 harsh collision with the world's — the kindness and affec- 
 tion of Leigh Hunt were among his chief consolations. 
 After his marriage with Mary Godwin he flitted often, 
 alone or with his wife, between Great Mario w and Hamp- 
 stead, w r here Keats met him early in the spring of 1817. 
 " Keats," says Hunt, " did not take to Shelley as kindly as 
 
 1 See particularly the Invocation to Sleep in the little volume of 
 Webb's poems published by the Olliers in 1821. 
 
ii.] SHELLEY. 39 
 
 Shelley did to him," and adds the comment, " Keats, being 
 a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined 
 to see in every man of birth a sort of natural enemy." 
 " He was haughty, and had a fierce hatred of rank," says 
 Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his pride had not 
 been aroused by anticipation, Keats had a genius for friend- 
 ship, but towards Shelley we find him in fact maintaining 
 a tone of reserve, and even of something like moral and 
 intellectual patronage, at first, no doubt, by way of defence 
 against the possibility of social or material patronage on 
 the other's part; but he should soon have learnt better 
 than to apprehend anything of the kind from one whose 
 delicacy, according to all evidence, was as perfect and un- 
 mistakable as his kindness. Of Shelley's kindness Keats 
 had in the sequel sufficient proof ; in the meantime, until 
 Shelley went abroad the following year, the two met often 
 at Hunt's without becoming really intimate. Pride and 
 social sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full under- 
 standing was not easy between them, and that Keats, with 
 his strong vein of every-day humanity, sense, and humour, 
 and his innate openness of mind, may well have been as 
 much repelled as attracted by the unearthly ways and ac- 
 cents of Shelley, his passionate negation of the world's 
 creeds and the world's law, and his intense proselytizing 
 ardour. 
 
 It was also at Hunt's house that Keats for the first time 
 met by pre-arrangement, in the beginning of November, 
 1816, the painter Haydon, whose influence soon became 
 hardly second to that of Hunt himself. Haydon was now 
 thirty. He had lately been victorious in one of the two 
 great objects of his ambition, and had achieved a tempo- 
 rary semblance of victory in the other. He had been 
 mainly instrumental in getting the pre-eminence of the 
 3 D 
 
40 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Elgin marbles among the works of the sculptor's art ac- 
 knowledged in the teeth of hostile cliques, and their acqui- 
 sition for the nation secured. This is Haydon's chief real 
 title to the regard of posterity. His other and life-long, 
 half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to take 
 him at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence 
 to add the crown of heroic painting to the other glories of 
 his country. His indomitable high-flaming energy and in- 
 dustry, his strenuous self-reliance, his eloquence, vehemence, 
 and social gifts, the clamour of his self-assertion and of his 
 fierce oppugnancy against the academic powers, even his 
 unabashed claims for support on friends, patrons, and soci- 
 ety at large, had won for him much convinced or half-con- 
 vinced attention and encouragement, both in the world of 
 art and letters and in that of dilettanteism and fashion. 
 His first two great pictures, "Dentatus" and "Macbeth," 
 had been dubiously received; his last, the "Judgment of 
 Solomon," with acclamation; he was now busy on one 
 more ambitious than all, " Christ's Entry into Jerusalem," 
 and while, as usual, sunk deep in debt, was perfectly confi- 
 dent of glory. Vain confidence — for he was in truth a 
 man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one 
 part of the gifts of genius and not the other. Its energy 
 and voluntary power he possessed completely, and no man 
 has ever lived at a more genuinely exalted pitch of feeling 
 and aspiration. " Never," wrote he about this time, " have 
 I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future 
 greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under 
 his arm-pits and ether in his soul. While I was painting, 
 walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of energy followed 
 and impressed me. . . . They came over me, and shot across 
 me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked 
 God." Cut for all his sensations and conviction of power, 
 
II.] HAYDON. 41 
 
 the other half of genius — the half which resides not in 
 energy and will, but in faculties which it is the business of 
 energy and will to apply — was denied to Haydon ; its vital 
 gifts of choice and of creation, its magic power of working 
 on the materials offered it by experience, its felicity of 
 touch and insight, were not in him. Except for a stray 
 note here and there, an occasional bold conception, or a 
 touch of craftsmanship caught from greater men, the pict- 
 ures with which he exultingly laid siege to immortality be- 
 long, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of 
 true heroic art, but of rodomontade. Even in drawing 
 from the Elgin marbles, Haydon fails almost wholly to ex- 
 press the beauties which he enthusiastically perceived, and 
 loses every distinction and every subtlety of the original. 
 Very much better is his account of them in words, as, in- 
 deed, Haydon's chief intellectual power was as an observer, 
 and his best instrument the pen. Readers of his journals 
 and correspondence know with what fluent, effective, if 
 often overcharged, force and vividness of style he can relate 
 an experience or touch off a character. But in this, the 
 literary form of expression, also, as often as he flies higher, 
 and tries to become imaginative and impressive, we find 
 only the same self-satisfied void turgidity, and proof of a 
 commonplace mind, as in his paintings. Take, for instance, 
 in relation to Keats himself, Haydon's profound admoni- 
 tion to him as follows: "God bless you, my dear Keats! 
 do not despair; collect incident, study character, read 
 Shakspere, and trust in Providence, and you will do, you 
 must ;" or the following precious expansion of an image 
 in one of the poet's sonnets on the Elgin marbles : " I know 
 not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable to 
 express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, 
 where he must have remembered his former towerings 
 
42 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 amid the blaze of dazzling sunbeams, in the pure expanse 
 of glittering clouds ; now and then passing angels, on heav- 
 enly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless 
 wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and 
 intent on objects of their seeking — " 
 
 But it was the gifts and faculties which Hay don pos- 
 sessed, and not those he lacked, it was the ardour and en- 
 thusiasm of his temperament, and not his essential com- 
 monness of mind and faculty, that impressed his associates 
 as they impressed himself. The most distinguished spirits 
 of the time were among his friends. Some of them, like 
 Wordsworth, held by him always, while his imperious and 
 importunate egotism wore out others after a while. He 
 was justly proud of his industry and strength of purpose ; 
 proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit 
 of thanking his Maker effusively in set terms for special 
 acts of favour and protection, for this or that happy in- 
 spiration in a picture, for deliverance from " pecuniary 
 emergencies," and the like. " I always rose up from my 
 knees," he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, " with a re- 
 freshed fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of 
 feeling that sent me streaming on with a repulsive power 
 against the troubles of life." And he was prone to hold 
 himself up as a model to his friends in both particulars, 
 lecturing them on faith and conduct while he was living, 
 it might be, on their bounty. Experience of these quali- 
 ties partly alienated Keats from him in the long run. But 
 at first sight Haydon had much to attract the spirits of 
 ardent youth about him as a leader, and he and Keats 
 were mutually delighted when they met. Each struck fire 
 from the other, and they quickly became close friends and 
 comrades. After an evening of high talk at the beginning 
 of their acquaintance, on the 19th of November, 1816, the 
 
il] HAYDON. 43 
 
 young poet wrote to Hay don as follows, joining his name 
 with those of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt : 
 
 " Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you 
 the following: 
 
 Great spirits now on earth are sojourning : 
 He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, 
 Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake, 
 
 Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing : 
 
 He of the rose, the violet, the spring, 
 
 The social smile, the chain for Freedom's sake, 
 And lo ! whose steadfastness would never take 
 
 A meaner sound than Raphael's whispering. 
 
 And other spirits there are standing apart 
 Upon the forehead of the age to come ; 
 
 These, these will give the world another heart, 
 And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum 
 
 Of mighty workings in the humau mart ? 
 Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb." 
 
 Haydon was not unused to compliments of this kind. 
 The three well-known sonnets of Wordsworth had been 
 addressed to him a year or two before; and about the 
 same time as Keats, John Hamilton Reynolds also wrote 
 him a sonnet of enthusiastic sympathy and admiration. 
 In his reply to Keats he proposed to hand on the above 
 piece to Wordsworth — a proposal which " puts me," an- 
 swers Keats, " out of breath — you know with what rever- 
 ence I would send my well-wishes to him." Haydon sug- 
 gested, moreover, what I cannot but think the needless and 
 regrettable mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out the 
 words after "workings" in the last line but one. The 
 poet, however, accepted the suggestion, and his editors 
 have respected his decision. Two other sonnets, which 
 Keats wrote at this time, after visiting the Elgin marbles 
 with his new friend, are indifferent poetically, but do 
 
44 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 credit to his sincerity in that he refuses to go into stock 
 raptures on the subject, confessing his inability rightly to 
 grasp or analyse the impressions he had received. By the 
 spring of the following year his intimacy with Haydon 
 was at its height, and we find the painter giving his young 
 friend a standing invitation to his studio in Great Marl- 
 borough Street, declaring him dearer than a brother, and 
 praying that their hearts may be buried together. 
 
 To complete the group of Keats's friends in these days, 
 we have to think of two or three others known to him 
 otherwise than through Hunt, and not belonging to the 
 Hunt circle. Among these were the family and friends 
 of a Miss Georgiana Wylie, to whom George Keats was 
 attached. She was the daughter of a navy officer, with 
 wit, sentiment, and an attractive irregular cast of beauty, 
 and Keats on his own account had a great liking for her. 
 On Valentine's day, 1818, we find him writing, for George 
 to send her, the first draft of the lines beginning, " Hadst 
 thou lived in days of old," afterwards amplified and pub- 
 lished in his first volume. 1 Through the Wylies Keats be- 
 came acquainted with a certain William Haslam, who was 
 afterwards one of his own and his brothers' best friends, 
 but whose character and person remain indistinct to us; 
 and through Haslam with Joseph Severn, then a very young 
 and struggling student of art. Severn was the son of an 
 engraver, and to the despair of his father had determined 
 to be himself a painter. He had a talent also for music, 
 a strong love of literature, and doubtless something al- 
 ready of that social charm which Mr. Ruskin describes in 
 him when they first met five -and -twenty years later at 
 Rome. 2 From the moment of their introduction Severn 
 
 1 See Appendix, p. 221. 
 
 2 See Praeterita, vol. ii., chap. 2. 
 
ii.] JOSEPH SEVERN— CHARLES WELLS. 45 
 
 found in Keats his very ideal of the poetical character 
 realized, and attached himself to him with an admiring 
 affection. 
 
 A still younger member of the Keats circle was Charles 
 Wells, afterwards author of Stories after Nature, and of 
 that singular and strongly imagined Biblical drama or 
 " dramatic poem " of Joseph and his Brethren, which hav- 
 ing fallen dead in its own day has been resuscitated by a 
 group of poets and critics in ours. "Wells had been a 
 school companion of Tom Keats at Enfield, and was now 
 living with his family in Featherstone buildings. He has 
 been described by those who knew him as a sturdy, bois- 
 terous, blue-eyed and red-headed lad, distinguished in those 
 days chiefly by an irrepressible spirit of fun and mischief. 
 He was only about fifteen when he sent to John Keats the 
 present of roses acknowledged in the sonnet beginning, 
 " As late I rambled in the happy fields." A year or two 
 later Keats quarrelled with him for a practical joke played 
 on Tom Keats without due consideration for his state of 
 health; and the Stories after Nature, published in 1822, 
 are said to have been written in order to show Keats " that 
 he too could do something." 
 
 Thus by his third winter in London our obscurely born 
 and half-schooled young medical student found himself 
 fairly launched in a world of art, letters, and liberal aspira- 
 tions, and living in familiar intimacy .with some, and friend- 
 ly acquaintance with others, of the brightest and most 
 ardent spirits of the time. His youth, origin, and temper- 
 ament alike saved him from anything but a healthy rela- 
 tion of equality with his younger, and deference towards 
 his elder, companions. But the power and the charm of 
 genius were already visibly upon him. Portraits both 
 verbal and other exist in abundance, enabling us to realize 
 
46 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Lis presence and the impression which he made. "The 
 character and expression of his features," it is said, " would 
 arrest even the casual passenger in the street." A small, 
 handsome, ardent -looking youth — the stature little over 
 five feet ; the figure compact and well - turned, with the 
 neck thrust eagerly forward, carrying a strong and shapely 
 head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair ; the 
 features powerful, finished, and mobile ; the mouth rich 
 and wide, with an expression at once combative and sensi-. 
 tive in the extreme ; the forehead not high, but broad and 
 strong; the eyebrows nobly arched, and eyes hazel-brown, 
 liquid-flashing, visibly inspired — " an eye that had an in- 
 ward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who 
 saw visions." "Keats was the only man I ever met who 
 seemed and looked conscious of a high calling, except 
 Wordsworth." These words are Haydon's, and to the 
 same effect Leigh Hunt : " The eyes mellow and glowing, 
 large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble action 
 or a beautiful thought they would suffuse with tears, and 
 his mouth trembled." It is noticeable that his friends, 
 whenever they begin to describe his looks, go off in this 
 way to tell of the feelings and the soul that shone through 
 them. To return to Haydon : " He was in his glory in 
 the fields. The humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, 
 the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble ; 
 then his eyes flashed his cheek glowed, and his mouth 
 quivered." In like manner George Keats: "John's eyes 
 moistened and his lip quivered at the relation of any tale 
 of generosity or benevolence or noble daring, or at sights 
 of loveliness or distress ;" and a shrewd and honoured sur- 
 vivor of those days, " herself of many poets the frequent 
 theme and valued friend" — need I name Mrs. Procter? — 
 has recorded the impression the same eyes have left upon 
 
ii.] PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 47 
 
 her, as those of one who had been looking on some glori- 
 ous sight. 1 
 
 In regard to his social qualities, Keats is said, and owns 
 himself, to have been not always perfectly well-conditioned 
 or at his ease in the company of women, but in that of 
 men all accounts agree that he was pleasantness itself : 
 quiet and abstracted, or brilliant and voluble, by turns, 
 according to his mood and company, but thoroughly ami- 
 ble and unaffected. If the conversation did not interest 
 him he was apt to draw apart, and sit by himself in the 
 window, peering into vacancy, so that the window -seat 
 came to be recognized as his place. His voice was rich 
 and low, and when he joined in discussion it was usually 
 with an eager but gentle animation, while his occasional 
 bursts of fiery indignation at wrong or meanness bore no 
 undue air of assumption, and failed not to command re- 
 spect. His powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are 
 said to have been great, and never used unkindly. 
 
 Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as 
 we have described, Keats found among those with whom 
 he lived nothing to check, but rather everything to foster, 
 his hourly growing, still diffident and trembling, passion 
 for the poetic life. His guardian, as we have said, of 
 course was adverse ; but his brothers, including George, 
 the practical and sensible one of the family, were warmly 
 with him, as his allusions and addresses to them both in 
 prose and verse, and their own many transcripts from his 
 compositions, show. In August, 1816, we find him ad- 
 dressing from Margate a sonnet and a poetical Epistle in 
 terms of the utmost affection and confidence to George. 
 About the same time he gave up his lodgings in St. 
 
 1 See Appendix, p. 221. 
 3* 
 
48 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Thomas's Street to go and live with his brothers in the 
 Poultry ; and in November he composes another sonnet 
 on their fraternal fire-side occupations. Poetry and the 
 love of poetry were at this period in the air. It was a 
 time when even people of business and people of fashion 
 read : a time of literary excitement, expectancy, and discus- 
 sion, such as England has not known since. In such an 
 atmosphere Keats soon found himself induced to try his 
 fortune and his powers with the rest. The encouragement 
 of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. 
 It was Leigh Hunt who first brought him before the world 
 in print, publishing without comment, in the Examiner for 
 the 5th of May, 1816, his sonnet beginning, "0 Solitude! 
 if I with thee must dwell," and on the 1st of Decem- 
 ber in the same year the sonnet on Chapman's Homer. 
 This Hunt accompanied by some prefatory remarks on the 
 poetical promise of its author, associating with his name 
 those of Shelley and Reynolds. It was by the praise of 
 Hunt in this paper, says Mr. Stephens, that Keats's fate 
 was sealed. But already the still more ardent encourage- 
 ment of Hay don, if more was wanted, had come to add, 
 fuel to the fire. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the 
 Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three broth- 
 ers,' and in the convivial gatherings of their friends, it was 
 determined that John Keats should put forth a volume of 
 his poems. A sympathetic firm of publishers was found 
 in the Olliers. The volume was printed, and the last proof- 
 sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial 
 company, with the intimation that if a dedication was to 
 be added the copy must be furnished at once. Keats, go- 
 ing to one side, quickly produced the sonnet To Leigh 
 Hunt, Esq., with its excellent opening and its weak con- 
 clusion : 
 
ii.] DETERMINATION TO PUBLISH. 49 
 
 " Glory and Loveliness have pass'd away ; 
 
 For if we wander out in early morn, 
 
 No wreathed incense do we see upborne 
 Into the East to meet the smiling day: 
 No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay, 
 
 In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, 
 
 Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn 
 The shrine of Flora in her early May. 
 But there are left delights as high as these, 
 
 And I shall ever bless my destiny, 
 That in a time when under pleasant trees 
 
 Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, 
 A leafy luxury, seeing I could please, 
 
 With these poor offerings, a man like thee." 
 
 With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the 
 beauty of the old pagan world, and of gratitude for present 
 friendship, the young poet's first venture was sent forth in 
 the month of March, 1817. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Poems of 1817. 
 
 The note of Keats's early volume is accurately struck in 
 the motto from Spenser which he prefixed to it : 
 
 " What more felicity can fall to creature 
 Than to enjoy delight with liberty?" 
 
 The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the con- 
 sciousness of release from those conventions and restraints, 
 not inherent in its true nature, by which the art had for 
 the last hundred years been hampered. And the spirit 
 which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight — 
 delight in the beauty of nature and the vividness of sensa- 
 tion, delight in the charm of fable and romance, in the 
 thoughts of friendship and affection, in anticipations of the 
 future, and in the exercise of the art itself which expresses 
 and communicates all these joys. 
 
 We have already glanced, in connection with the occa- 
 sions which gave rise to them, at a few of the miscellane- 
 ous boyish pieces, in various metres, which are included 
 in the volume, as well as at some of the sonnets. The re- 
 maining, and much the chief portion of the book consists 
 of half a dozen poems in the rhymed decasyllabic couplet. 
 These had all been written during the period between No- 
 vember, 1815, and April, 1817, under the combined influ- 
 
chap, in.] THE "POEMS" OF 1817. 51 
 
 ence of the older English poets and of Leigh Hunt. The 
 former influence shows itself everywhere in the substance 
 and spirit of the. poems, but less, for the present, in their 
 form and style. Keats had by this time thrown off the 
 eighteenth-century stiffness which clung to his earliest ef- 
 forts, but he had not yet adopted, as he was about to do, 
 a vocabulary and diction of his own, full of licences caught 
 from the Elizabethans and from Milton. The chief verbal 
 echoes of Spenser to be found in his first volume are a line 
 quoted from him entire in the epistle to G. F. Mathew, and 
 the use of the archaic " teen " in the stanzas professedly 
 Spenserian. We can, indeed, trace Keats's familiarity with 
 Chapman, and especially with one poem of Chapman's, his 
 translation of the Homeric Hymn to Pan, in a predilec- 
 tion for a particular form of abstract descriptive substan- 
 tive: 
 
 " The pillowy silkiness that rests 
 
 Full in the speculation of the stars :" 
 " Or the quaint mossiness of aged roots :" 
 " Ere I can have explored its widenesses." l 
 
 The only other distinguishing marks of Keats's diction in 
 this first volume consist, I think, in the use of the Milton- 
 ic " sphery," and of an unmeaning coinage of his own, 
 
 1 Compare Chapman, Hymn to Pan : 
 
 " The bright-hair'd god of pastoral, 
 "Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe, 
 By lot, all loftiest mountains crown'd with snow, 
 All tops of hills, and cliffy highnesses, 
 All sylvan copses, and the fortresses 
 Of thorniest queaches here and there doth rove, 
 And sometimes, by allurement of his love, 
 Will wade the wafry softr, 
 
52 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 " boundly," with a habit — for which Milton, Spenser, and, 
 among the moderns, Leigh Hunt, all alike furnished him 
 the example — of turning nouns into verbs, and verbs into 
 nouns at his convenience. For the rest, Keats writes in 
 the ordinary English of his day, with much more feeling 
 for beauty of language than for correctness, and as yet 
 without any formed or assured poetic style. Single lines 
 and passages declare, indeed, abundantly his vital poetic 
 faculty and instinct. But they are mixed up with much 
 that only illustrates his crudity of taste, and the tendency 
 he at this time shared with Leigh Hunt to mistake the air 
 of chatty, trivial gusto for an air of poetic ease and grace. 
 In the matter of metre, we can see Keats in these poems 
 making a succession of experiments for varying the regu- 
 larity of the heroic couplet. In the colloquial Epistles, 
 addressed severally to G. F. Mathew, to his brother George, 
 and to Cowden Clarke, he contents himself with the use of 
 frequent dissyllabic rhymes, and an occasional enjambement 
 or " overflow." In the Specimen of an Induction to a 
 Poem, and. in the fragment of the poem itself, entitled 
 Calidore (a name borrowed from the hero of Spenser's 
 sixth book), as well as in the unnamed piece beginning " I 
 stood tiptoe upon a little hill," which opens the volume, he 
 further modifies the measure by shortening now and then 
 the second line of the couplet, with a lyric beat that may 
 have been caught either from Spenser's nuptial odes or 
 Milton's Lycidas — 
 
 " Open afresh your round of starry folds, 
 Ye ardent marigolds." 
 
 In Sleep and Poetry, which is the most personal and inter- 
 esting, as well as probably the last-written, poem in the 
 volume, Keats drops this practice, but in other respects va- 
 
in.] THE "POEMS" OF 1817. 53 
 
 ries the rhythm far more boldly, making free use of the 
 overflow, placing his full pauses at any point in a line 
 rather than at the end, and adopting as a principle rather 
 than an exception the Chaucerian and Elizabethan fashion 
 of breaking the couplet by closing a sentence or paragraph 
 with its first line. 
 
 Passing from the form of the poems to their substance, 
 we find that they are experiments or poetic preludes mere- 
 ly, with no pretension to be organic or complete works of 
 art. To rehearse ramblingly the pleasures and aspirations 
 of the poetic life, letting one train of images follow anoth- 
 er with no particular plan or sequence, is all that Keats as 
 yet attempts, except in the Calidore fragment, and that is 
 on the whole feeble and confused. From the outset the 
 poet loses himself in a maze of young, luxuriant imagery ; 
 once and again, however, he gets clear, and we have some 
 good lines in an approach to the Dry den manner : 
 
 " Softly the breezes from the forest came, 
 Softly they blew aside the taper's flame ; 
 Clear was the song from Philomel's far bower ; 
 Grateful the incense from the lime-tree flower; 
 Mysterious, wild, the far-heard trumpet's tone ; 
 Lovely the moon in ether, all alone." 
 
 To set against this are occasionally expressions in the com- 
 plete taste of Leigh Hunt, as for instance, 
 
 "The lamps that from the high-roof'd wall were pendent, 
 And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent." 
 
 The Epistles are full of cordial tributes to the conjoint 
 pleasures of literature and friendship. In that to Cowden 
 Clarke, Keats acknowledges to his friend that he had been 
 shy at first of addressing verses to him : 
 
 m 
 
54 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 "Nor should I now, but that I've known you long; 
 That }-ou first taught me all the sweets of song: 
 The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine, 8 
 What swell'd with pathos, and what right divine : 
 Spenserian vowels that elope with ease, 
 And float along like birds o'er summer seas ; 
 Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness ; 
 Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve's fair slenderness. 
 "Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly 
 Up to its climax, and then dying proudly? 
 Who found for me the grandeur of the ode, 
 Growing, like Atlas, stronger for its load ? 
 Who let me taste that more than cordial dram, 
 The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram ? 
 Show'd me that Epic was of all the king, 
 Kound, vast, and spanning all like Saturn's ring ?" 
 
 This is characteristic enough of the quieter and lighter 
 manner of Keats in his early work. Blots like the un- 
 grammatical fourth line are not infrequent with him. The 
 preference for Miltonian tenderness over Miltonian storms 
 may remind the reader of a later poet's more masterly ex- 
 pression of the same sentiment : " Me rather all that bow- 
 ery loneliness." The two lines on Spenser are of inter- 
 est as conveying one of those incidental criticisms on poetry 
 by a poet of which no one has left us more or better than 
 Keats. The habit of Spenser to which he here alludes is 
 that of coupling or repeating the same vowels, both in their 
 open and their closed sounds, in the same or successive 
 lines, for example, 
 
 " Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide, 
 More swift than swallow sheres the liquid skye ; 
 Withouten oare or pilot it to guide, 
 Or winged canvas with the wind to fly." 
 
 The run here is on a and e, principally on i, which occurs 
 
in.] THE "POEMS" OF 1817. 55 
 
 five times in its open and ten times in its closed sound in 
 the four lines — if we are indeed to reckon as one vowel 
 these two unlike sounds denoted by the same sign. Keats 
 was a close and conscious student of the musical effects of 
 verse, and the practice of Spenser is said to have suggested 
 to him a special theory as to the use and value of the itera- 
 tion of vowel sounds in poetry. What his theory was we 
 are not clearly told, neither do I think it can easily be dis- 
 covered from his practice, though every one must feel a 
 great beauty of his verse to be in the richness of the vowel 
 and diphthong sequences. He often spoke of the subject, 
 and once maintained his view against Wordsworth, when 
 the latter seemed to be advocating a mechanical principle 
 of vowel variation. 
 
 Hear next how the joys of brotherly affection, of poetry, 
 and of nature come naively jostling one another in the 
 Epistle addressed from the sea-side to his brother George : 
 
 "As to my sonnets, though none else should heed, them, 
 I feel delighted, still, that you should read them. 
 Of late, too, I have had much calm enjoyment, 
 Stretch'd on the grass at my best loved employment 
 Of scribbling lines for you. These things I thought 
 While in my face the freshest breeze I caught. 
 E'en now I am pillow'd on a bed of flowers 
 That crowns a lofty cliff, which proudly towers 
 Above the ocean waves. The stalks and blades 
 Chequer my tablet with their quivering shades. 
 On one side is a field of drooping oats, 
 Through which the poppies show their scarlet coats ; 
 So pert and useless that they bring to mind 
 The scarlet coats that pester human kind. 
 And on the other side, outspread is seen 
 Ocean's blue mantle, streak'd with purple and green. 
 Now 'tis I see a canrass'd ship, and now 
 Mark the bright silver curling round her brow ; 
 E 
 
56 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 I see the lark down-dropping to his nest, 
 And the broad-wing'd sea-gull never at rest; 
 For when no more he spreads his feathers free, 
 His breast is dancing on the restless sea." 
 
 It is interesting' to watch the newly awakened literary 
 faculty in Keats thus exercising itself in the narrow circle 
 of personal sensation, and on the description of the objects 
 immediately before his eyes. The effect of rhythmical 
 movement attempted in the last lines, to correspond with 
 the buoyancy and variety of the motions described, has a 
 certain felicity, and the whole passage is touched already 
 with Keats's exquisite perception and enjoyment of exter- 
 nal nature. His character as a poet of nature begins, in- 
 deed, distinctly to declare itself in this first volume. lie 
 differs by it alike from Wordsworth and from Shelley. 
 The instinct of Wordsworth was to interpret all the opera- 
 tions of nature by those of his own strenuous soul ; and 
 the imaginative impressions he had received in youth from 
 the scenefy of his home, deepened and enriched by contin- 
 ual after-meditation, and mingling with all the currents of 
 his adult thought and feeling, constituted for him through- 
 out his life the most vital part alike of patriotism, of phi- 
 losophy, and of religion. For Shelley, on his part, natural 
 beauty was in a twofold sense symbolical. In the visible 
 glories of the world his philosophy saw the veil of the un- 
 seen, while his philanthropy found in them types and au- 
 guries of a better life on earth, and all that imagery of 
 nature's more remote and skyey phenomena, of which no 
 other poet has had an equal mastery, and which comes 
 borne to us along the music of the verse — 
 
 " With many a mingled close 
 Of wildiEolian sound and mountain odour keen " — 
 
in.] THE "POEMS" OF 1817. 57 
 
 was inseparable in bis soul from visions of a radiant fut- 
 ure and a renovated — alas! not a buman — humanity. In 
 Keats tbe sentiment of nature was simpler than in either 
 of these two other masters ; more direct, and, so to speak, 
 more disinterested. It was his instinct to love and inter- 
 pret nature more for her own sake, and less for the sake of 
 sympathy which the human mind can read into her with 
 its own workings and aspirations. He had grown up nei- 
 ther like Wordsworth, under the spell of lake and mount- 
 ain, nor in the glow of millennial dreams, like Shelley, but 
 London - born and Middlesex - bred, was gifted, we know 
 not whence, as if by some mysterious birthright, with a de- 
 lighted insight into all the beauties, and sympathy with 
 all the life, of the woods and fields. Evidences of the 
 gift appear, as every reader know r s, in the longer poems 
 of his first volume, with their lingering trains of peace- 
 ful summer imagery, and loving inventories of "Nature's 
 gentle doings;" and pleasant touches of the same kind 
 are scattered also among the sonnets, as in that To Charles 
 Wells— 
 
 " As late I rambled in the happy fields, 
 What time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew 
 From his lush clover covert ;" 
 
 or again in that To Solitude — 
 
 " Let me thy vigils keep 
 'Mongst boughs pavilion'd, where the deer's swift leap 
 Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell." : 
 
 1 Compare Wordsworth : 
 
 " Bees that soar for bloom, 
 High as the highest peak of Furness Fells, 
 Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells." 
 
 Is the line of Keats an echo or merely a coincidence ? 
 
£8 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Such intuitive familiarity with the blithe activities, un- 
 noted by common eyes, which make up the life and magic 
 of nature, is a gift we attribute to men of primitive race 
 and forest nurture; and Mr. Matthew Arnold would have 
 us recognize it as peculiarly characteristic of the Celtic 
 element in the English genius and English poetry. It 
 was allied in Keats to another instinct of the early world 
 which we associate especially with the Greeks, the instinct 
 for personifying the powers of nature in clearly defined 
 imaginary shapes endowed with human beauty and half- 
 human faculties. The classical teaching of the Enfield 
 school had not gone beyond Latin, and neither in boyhood 
 nor afterwards did Keats acquire any Greek ; but towards 
 the creations of the Greek mythology he was attracted by 
 an overmastering delight in their beauty, and a natural 
 sympathy with the phase of imagination that engendered 
 them. Especially he shows himself possessed and fancy- 
 bound by the mythology, as well as by the physical en- 
 chantment, of the moon. Never was bard in youth so 
 literally moonstruck. He had planned a poem on the an- 
 cient story of the loves of Diana, with whom the Greek 
 moon-goddess Selene is identified in the Latin mythology, 
 and the shepherd-prince Endymion ; and had begun a sort 
 of prelude to it in the piece that opens, " I stood tiptoe 
 upon a little hill." Afterwards, without abandoning the 
 subject, Keats laid aside this particular exordium, and 
 printed it, as we have seen, as an independent piece at the 
 head of his first volume. It is at the climax of a passage 
 rehearsing the delights of evening that he first bethinks 
 himself of the moon — 
 
 "Lifting her silver rim 
 Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim 
 Coming into the blue with all her light." 
 
in.] THE "POEMS" OF 181V. 59 
 
 The thought of the mythic passion of the moon-goddess 
 for Endymion, and the praises of the poet who first sang 
 it, follow at considerable length. The passage conjuring 
 up the wonders and beneficences of their bridal night is 
 written in part with such a sympathetic touch for the col- 
 lective feelings and predicaments of men, in the ordinary 
 conditions of human pain and pleasure, health and sick- 
 ness, as rarely occurs again in Keats's poetry, though his 
 correspondence shows it to have been most natural to his 
 mind — 
 
 " The evening weather was so bright, and clear, 
 That men of health were of unusual cheer. 
 
 The breezes were ethereal, and pure, 
 
 And crept through half-closed lattices to cure 
 
 The languid sick ; it cool'd their fever'd sleep, 
 
 And sooth'd them into slumbers full and deep. 
 
 Soon they awoke clear-ey'd : nor burnt with thirsting, 
 
 Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting : 
 
 And springing up, they met the wond'ring sight 
 
 Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight ; 
 
 Who feel their arms and breasts, and kiss and stare, 
 
 And on their placid foreheads part the hair." 1 
 
 Finally Keats abandons and breaks off this tentative exor- 
 dium of his unwritten poem with the cry — 
 
 " Cynthia ! I cannot tell the greater blisses 
 That followed thine and thy dear shepherd's kisses : 
 Was there a poet born ? But now no more 
 My wandering spirit must no farther soar." 
 
 1 Mr. W. T. Arnold in his Introduction (p. xxvii.) quotes a parallel 
 passage from Leigh Hunt's Gentle Armour as an example of the de- 
 gree to which Keats was at this time indebted to Hunt : forgetting 
 that the Gentle Armour was not written till 1831, and that the debt 
 in this instance is therefore the other way. 
 
60 KEATS. [cnAP. 
 
 Was there a poet born ? Is the labour and the reward 
 of poetry really and truly destined to be his? The ques- 
 tion is one which recurs in this* early volume importu- 
 nately and in many tones : sometimes with words and 
 cadences closely recalling those of Milton in his boyish 
 Vacation Exercise; sometimes with a cry like this, which 
 occurs twice over in the piece called Sleep and Poetry : 
 
 " Poesy ! for thee I hold my pen, 
 That am not yet a glorious denizen 
 Of thy wide heaven ;" 
 
 and anon, with a less wavering, more confident and daring- 
 tone of young ambition — 
 
 " But off, Despondence ! miserable bane ! 
 They should not know thee, who, athirst to gain 
 A noble end, are thirsty every hour. 
 What though I am not wealthy in the dower 
 Of spanning wisdom ; though I do not know 
 The shiftings of the mighty winds that blow 
 Hither and thither all the changing thoughts 
 Of man ; though no great ministering reason sorts 
 Out the dark mysteries of human souls 
 To clear conceiving ; yet there ever rolls 
 A vast idea before me." 
 
 The feeling expressed in these last lines, the sense of the 
 overmastering pressure and amplitude of an inspiration as 
 yet unrealized and indistinct, gives way in other passages 
 to confident anticipations of fame, and of the place which 
 he will hold in the affections of posterity. 
 
 There is obviously a great immaturity and uncertainty 
 in all these outpourings, an intensity and effervescence of 
 emotion out of proportion, as yet, both to the intellectual 
 and the voluntary powers, much confusion of idea, and not 
 a little of expression. Yet even in this first book of Keats 
 
in.] THE "POEMS" OF 1817. 61 
 
 there is much that the lover of poetry will always cherish. 
 Literature, indeed, hardly affords another example of work 
 at once so crude and so attractive. Passages that go to 
 pieces under criticism nevertheless have about them a spirit 
 of beauty and of morning, an abounding young vitality 
 and freshness, that exhilarate and charm us, whether with 
 the sanction of our judgment or without it. And alike at 
 its best and worst, the work proceeds manifestly from a 
 spontaneous and intense poetic impulse. The matter of 
 these early poems of Keats is as fresh and unconventional 
 as their form, springing directly from the native poignancy 
 of his sensations and abundance of his fancy. That his 
 inexperience should always make the most discreet use of 
 its freedom could not be expected ; but with all its imma- 
 turity his work has strokes already which suggest compar- 
 ison with the great names of literature. AVho much ex- 
 ceeds him, even from the first, but Shakspeare in momentary 
 felicity of touch for nature? and in that charm of morning 
 freshness who but Chaucer? Already, too, we find him 
 showing signs of that capacity for clear and sane self- 
 knowledge which becomes by-and-by so admirable in him. 
 And he has already begun to meditate to good purpose on 
 the aims and methods of his art. He has grasped, and 
 vehemently asserts, the principle that poetry should not 
 strive to enforce particular doctrines, that it should not 
 contend in the field of reason, but that its proper organ 
 is the imagination, and its aim the creation of beauty. 
 With reference to the theory and practice of the poetic 
 art the piece called Sleep and Poetry contains one passage 
 which has become classically familiar to all readers. Often 
 as it has been quoted elsewhere, it must be quoted again 
 here, as indispensable to the understanding of the literary 
 atmosphere in which Keats lived : 
 
62 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 " Is there so small a range 
 In the present strength of manhood that the high 
 Imagination cannot freely fly 
 As she was wont of old ? prepare her steeds, 
 Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds 
 Upon the clouds ? Has she not shown us all ? 
 From the clear space of ether, to the small 
 Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning 
 Of Jove's large eyebrow, to the tender greening 
 Of April meadows ? here her altar shone, 
 E'en in this isle ; and who could paragon 
 The fervid choir that lifted up a noise 
 Of harmony, to where it aye will poise 
 Its mighty self of convoluting sound, 
 Huge as a planet, and like that roll round, 
 Eternally around a dizzy void ? 
 Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy'd 
 With honours ; nor had any other care 
 Than to sing out and soothe their wavy hair. 
 
 Could all this be forgotten ? Yes, a schism 
 Nurtured by foppery and barbarism 
 Made great Apollo blush for this his land. 
 Men were thought wise who could not understand 
 His glories ; with a puling infant's force 
 They sway'd about upon a rocking-horse, 
 And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-soul'd ! 
 The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd 
 Its gathering waves — ye felt it not. The blue 
 Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew 
 Of summer night collected still to make 
 The morning precious : Beauty was awake ! 
 Why were ye not awake •? But ye were dead 
 To things ye knew not of — were closely wed 
 To musty laws lined out with wretched rule 
 And compass vile ; so that ye taught a school 
 Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit, 
 Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, 
 Their verses tallied. Easy was the task : 
 A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask 
 
m .] THE "POEMS" OF 1817. 63 
 
 Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race ! 
 '■ That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, 
 And did not know it — no, they went about, 
 Holding a poor, decrepit standard out, 
 Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large 
 The name of one Boileau ! 
 
 ye whose charge 
 It is to hover round our pleasant hills ! 
 Whose congregated majesty so fills 
 My boundly reverence that I cannot trace 
 Your hallow'd names in this unholy place, 
 So near those common folk ; did not their shames 
 Affright you ? Did our old lamenting Thames 
 Delight you? did ye never cluster round 
 Delicious Avon with a mournful sound, 
 And weep ? Or did ye wholly bid adieu 
 To regions where no more the laurel grew ? 
 Or did ye stay to give a welcoming 
 To some lone spirits who could proudly sing 
 Their youth away, and die ? 'Twas even so. 
 But let me think away those times of woe : 
 Now 'tis a fairer season ; ye have breathed 
 Rich benedictions o'er us ; ye have wreathed 
 Fresh garlands : for sweet music has been heard 
 In many places ; some has been upstirr'd 
 From out its crystal dwelling in a lake 
 By a swan's ebon bill ; from a thick brake, 
 Nested and quiet in a valley mild, 
 Bubbles a pipe ; fine sounds are floating wild 
 About the earth : happy are ye, and glad." 
 
 Both the strength and the weakness of this are typical- 
 ly characteristic of the time and of the man. The passage 
 is likely to remain for posterity the central expression of 
 the spirit of literary emancipation then militant and about 
 to triumph in England. The two great elder captains of 
 revolution, Coleridge and Wordsworth, have both cxpound- 
 4 
 
64 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 ed their cause, in prose, with much more maturity of 
 thought and language ; Coleridge in the luminous retro- 
 spect of the Biographia Literaria, Wordsworth in the au- 
 stere contentions of his famous prefaces. But neither has 
 left any enunciation of theory having power to thrill the 
 ear and haunt the memory like the rhymes of this young 
 untrained recruit in the cause of poetic liberty and the re- 
 turn to nature. It is easy, indeed, to pick these verses of 
 Keats to shreds, if we choose to fix a prosaic and rational 
 .attention on their faults. What is it, for instance, that 
 imagination is asked to do? fly, or drive? Is it she, or 
 her steeds, that are to paw up against the light? and why 
 paw ? Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hard- 
 ly be other than strange. What sort of a verb is " I green, 
 thou greenest?" Delight with liberty is very well, but 
 liberty in a poet ought not to include liberties with the 
 parts of speech. Why should the hair of the muses re- 
 quire "soothing?" — if it were their tempers it would be 
 more intelligible. And surely " foppery " belongs to civ- 
 ilization and not to " barbarism ;" and a standard-bearer 
 may be decrepit, but not a standard, and a standard flimsy, 
 but not a motto. " Boundly reverence:" what is bound- 
 ly ? And so on without end, if we choose to let the mind 
 assume that attitude. Many minds not indifferent to lit- 
 erature were at that time, and some will at all times be, 
 incapable of any other. Such must naturally turn to the 
 work of the eighteenth-century school, the school of tact 
 and urbane brilliancy and sedulous execution, and think 
 the only " blasphemy " was on the side of the youth who 
 could call, or seem to call, the poet of Belinda and the 
 Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot fool and dolt. Byron, in his 
 controversy with Bowles a year or two later, adopted this 
 mode of attack effectively enough, his spleen against a 
 
in.] THE "POEMS" OF 181?. 65 
 
 contemporary finding, as usual, its most convenient weapon 
 in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, for the 
 genius and the methods of Pope. But controversy apart, if 
 we have in us a touch of instinct for the poetry of imagi- 
 nation and beauty, as distinct from that of taste and reason, 
 however clearly we may see the weak points of a passage 
 like this, however much we may wish that taste and rea- 
 son had had more to do with it, yet we cannot but feel 
 that Keats touches truly the root of the matter ; we can- 
 not but admire the elastic life and variety of his verse, his 
 fine spontaneous and effective turns of rhetoric, the ring 
 and power of his appeal to the elements, and the glow of 
 his delight in the achievements and promise of the new 
 age. 
 
 His volume, on its appearance, by no means made the 
 impression which his friends had hoped for it. Hunt pub- 
 lished a thoroughly judicious, as well as cordial, criticism 
 in the Examiner, and several of the provincial papers no- 
 ticed the book.' Haydon wrote in his ranting vein: "I 
 have read your Sleep and Poetry — it is a flash of lightning 
 that will rouse men from their occupations, and keep them 
 trembling for the crash of thunder that will follow." But 
 people were in fact as far from being disturbed in their 
 occupations as possible. The attention of the reading 
 public was for the moment almost entirely absorbed by 
 men of talent or of genius who played with a more care- 
 less, and some of them with a more masterly, touch than 
 Keats as yet, on commoner chords of the human spirit, 
 as Moore, Scott, and Byron. In Keats's volume every one 
 could see the faults, while the beauties appealed only to 
 the poetically minded. It seems to have had a moderate 
 sale at first, but after the first few weeks none at all. The 
 poet, or at all events his brothers for him, were inclined, 
 
66 KEATS. [chap. hi. 
 
 apparently with little reason, to blame their friends the 
 publishers for the failure. On the 29th of April we find 
 the brothers Oilier replying to a letter of George Keats in 
 dudgeon: "We regret that your brother ever requested 
 us to publish his book, or that our opinion of its talent 
 should have led us to acquiesce in undertaking it. We 
 are, however, much obliged to you for relieving us from 
 the unpleasant necessity of declining any further connex- 
 ion with it, which we must have done, as we think the 
 curiosity is satisfied, and the sale has dropped." One of 
 their customers, they go on to say, had, a few days ago, 
 hurt their feelings as men of business and of taste by call- 
 ing it " no better than a take in." 
 
 A fortnight before the date of this letter Keats had left 
 London. Haydon had been urging on him, not injudi- 
 ciously, the importance of seclusion and concentration of 
 mind. We find him writing to Reynolds soon after the 
 publication of his volume : " My brothers are anxious that 
 I should go by myself into the country; they have al- 
 ways been extremely fond of me, and now that Haydon 
 has pointed out how necessary it is that I should be alone 
 to improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure 
 of living with me continually for a great good which I 
 hope will follow : so I shall soon be out of town." And 
 on the 14th of April he in fact started for the Isle of 
 Wight, intending to devote himself entirely to study, and 
 to make immediately a fresh start upon Endymion. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury. — Summer at 
 Hampstead. — New friends: Dilke, Brown, Bailey. — With Bailey 
 at Oxford.— Return : Old Friends at Odds.— Burford Bridge.— Win- 
 ter at Hampstead. — Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt. — Poetical Activ- 
 ity. — Spring at Teignmouth. — Studies and Anxieties. — Marriage 
 and Emigration of George Keats. [April, 1817 — May, 1818.] 
 
 As soon as Keats reached the Isle of Wight, on April 
 10, 1817, he went to see Shanklin and Carisbrooke, and 
 after some hesitation between the two, decided on a lodg- 
 ing at the latter place. The next day he writes to Reyn- 
 olds that he has spent the morning arranging the books 
 and prints he had brought with him, adding to the latter 
 one of Shakspeare which he had found in the passage, and 
 which had particularly pleased him. He speaks with en- 
 thusiasm of the beauties of Shanklin, but in a postscript 
 written the following day mentions that he has been nerv 
 ous from want of sleep, and much haunted by the passage 
 in Lear, "Do you not hear the sea?" — adding without 
 farther preface his own famous sea-sonnet beginning, 
 
 "It keeps eternal whisperings around 
 
 Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell 
 Gluts twice ten thousand caverns." 
 
 In the same postscript Keats continues : 
 
 "I find I cannot do without poetry — without eternal poetry; half 
 the day will not do— the whole of it. I began with a little, but habit 
 
68 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 has made me a leviathan. I had become all in a tremble from 
 not having written anything of late: the Sonnet overleaf did me 
 good ; I slept the better last night for it ; this morning, however, I 
 am nearly as bad again. ... I shall forthwith begin my Endymion, 
 which I hope I shall have got some way with before you come, when 
 we will read our verses in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, 
 near the Castle." 
 
 The Isle of Wight, however, Keats presently found, did 
 not suit him, and Haydon's prescription of solitude proved 
 too trying. He fell into a hind of fever of thought and 
 sleeplessness which lie thought it wisest to try and shake 
 off by flight. Early in May we find him writing to Leigh 
 Hunt from Margate, where he had already stayed the year 
 before, and explaining the reasons of his change of abode. 
 Later in the same letter, endeavouring to measure his own 
 powers against the magnitude of the task to which he has 
 committed himself, he falls into a vein like that which we 
 have seen recurring once and again in his verses during 
 the preceding year, the vein of awed self-questioning, and 
 tragic presentiment uttered half in earnest and half in jest. 
 The next day we find him writing a long and intimate, 
 very characteristic letter to Ilaydon, signed " Your everlast- 
 ing friend," and showing the first signs of the growing in- 
 fluence which Ilaydon was beginning to exercise over him 
 in antagonism to the influence of Leigh Hunt. Keats was 
 quite shrewd enough to feel for himself, after a little while, 
 the touches of vanity, fuss, and affectation, the lack of 
 depth and strength, in the kind and charming nature of 
 Hunt, and quite loyal enough to value his excellences none 
 the less, and hold him in grateful and undiminished friend- 
 ship. But Haydon, between whom and Hunt there was 
 by degrees arising a coolness, must needs have Keats see 
 things as he saw them. " I love you like my own brother," 
 
iv.] MARGATE. 69 
 
 insists he : " beware, for God's sake, of the delusions and 
 sophistications that are ripping up the talents and morality 
 of our friend ! He will go out of the world the victim of 
 his own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, 
 with the contempt of his enemies and the sorrow of his 
 friends, and the cause he undertook to support injured by 
 his own neglect of character." There is a lugubrious irony 
 in these words, when we remember how Haydon, a self- 
 deluder indeed, came to realize at last the very fate he 
 here prophesies for another — just when Hunt, the harass- 
 ing and often sordid, ever brightly borne, troubles of his 
 earlier life left behind him, was passing, surrounded by af- 
 fection, into the haven of a peaceful and bland old age. 
 But for a time, under the pressure of Haydon's masterful 
 exhortations, we find Keats inclining to take an exagger- 
 ated and slightly impatient view of the foibles of his ear- 
 lier friend. 
 
 Amono- other interesting confessions to be found in 
 Keats's letter to Haydon from Margate is that of the fan- 
 cy — almost the sense — which often haunted him of de- 
 pendence on the tutelary genius of Shakspeare : 
 
 " I remember your saying that you had notions of a good genius 
 presiding over you. I have lately had the same thought, for tilings 
 which I do half at random are afterwards confirmed by my judg- 
 ment in a dozen features of propriety. Is it too daring to fancy 
 Shakspeare this presider ? When in the Isle of Wight I met with 
 a Shakspeare in the passage of the house at which I lodged. It 
 comes nearer to my idea of him than any I have seen ; I was but 
 there a week, yet the old woman made me take it with me, though I 
 went off in a hurry. Do you not think this ominous of good ?" 
 
 Next he lays his finger on the great secret flaw in his own 
 nature, describing it in words which the after issue of his 
 life will keep but too vividly and constantly before our 
 
VO KEATS. [chap. 
 
 minds: "Truth is, I have a horrid Morbidity of Tempera- 
 ment, which has shown itself at intervals ; it is, I have no 
 doubt, the greatest Enemy and stumbling-block I have to 
 fear ; I may even say, it is likely to be the cause of my 
 disappointment." Was it that, in this seven-montlis' child 
 of a consumptive mother, some unhealth of mind as well 
 as body was congenital ? — or was it that, along with what 
 seems his Celtic intensity of feeling and imagination, he 
 had inherited a special share of that inward gloom which 
 the reverses of their history have stamped, according to 
 some, on the mind of the Celtic race? We cannot tell, 
 but certain it is that along with the spirit of delight, ever 
 creating and multiplying images of beauty and joy, there 
 dwelt in Keats's bosom an almost equally busy and invent- 
 ive spirit of self-torment. 
 
 The fit of dejection which led to the remark above 
 quoted had its immediate cause in apprehensions of money 
 difficulties conveyed to Keats in a letter from his brother 
 George. The trust funds of which Mr. Abbey had the 
 disposal for the benefit of the orphans, under the deed 
 .executed by Mrs. Jennings, amounted approximately to 
 £8000/ of which the capital was divisible among them 
 on their coming of age, and the interest was to be applied 
 to their maintenance in the meantime. But the interest 
 of John's share had been insufficient for his professional 
 and other expenses during his term of medical study at 
 Edmonton and London, and much of his capital had been 
 anticipated to meet them : p'resumably in the form of 
 loans raised on the security of his expectant share. Simi- 
 lar advances had also been for some time necessary to the 
 invalid Tom for his support, and latterly — since he left 
 the employment of Mr. Abbey — to George as well. It is 
 1 See Appendix, p. 219. 
 
iv.] MARGATE— CANTERBURY— HAMPSTEAD. VI 
 
 clear that the arrangements for obtaining these advances 
 were made both wasteful ly and grudgingly. It is further 
 plain that the brothers were very insufficiently informed 
 of the state of their affairs. In the meantime John Keats 
 was already beginning to discount his expectations from 
 literature. Before or about the time of his rupture with 
 the Olliers he had made the acquaintance of those excel- 
 lent men, Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who were shortly, as 
 publishers of the London Magazine, to gather about them 
 on terms of cordial friendship a group of contributors com- 
 prising more than half the choicest spirits of the day. With 
 them, especially with Mr. Taylor, who was himself a student 
 and writer of independent, somewhat eccentric ability and 
 research, Keats's relations were excellent from first to last, 
 generous on their part, and affectionate and confidential on 
 his. He had made arrangements with them, apparently 
 before leaving London, for the eventual publication of En- 
 dymion, and from Margate we find him acknowledging a 
 first payment received in advance. Now and again after- 
 wards he turns to the same friends for help at a pinch, 
 adding once, " I am sure you are confident of my responsi- 
 bility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me;" 
 nor did they at any time belie his expectation. 
 
 From Margate, where he had already made good prog- 
 ress with Endymion, Keats went with his brother Tom to 
 spend some time at Canterbury. Thence they moved, early 
 in the summer, to lodgings kept by a Mr. and Mrs. Bentley 
 in Well Walk, Hampstead, where the three brothers had 
 decided to take up their abode together. Here he con- 
 tinued through the summer to work steadily at Endymion, 
 being now well advanced with the second book ; and some 
 of his friends, as Haydon, Cowden Clarke, and Severn, re- 
 membered all their lives afterwards the occasions when 
 4* F 
 
72 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 they walked with him on the heath, while he repeated to 
 them, in his rich and tremulous, half-chanting tone, the 
 newly written passages which best pleased him. From his 
 poetical absorption and Elysian dreams they were accus- 
 tomed to see him at a touch come back to daily life ; some- 
 times to sympathize heart and soul with their affairs, some- 
 times in a burst of laughter, nonsense, and puns (it was a 
 punning age, and the Keatses were a very punning family), 
 sometimes with a sudden flash of his old schoolboy pug- 
 nacity and fierceness of righteous indignation. To this 
 summer or the following winter, it is not quite certain 
 which, belongs the well-known story of his thrashing in 
 stand-up fight a stalwart young butcher whom he had 
 found tormenting a cat (a " ruffian in livery," according to 
 one account, but the butcher version is the best attested). 
 
 For the rest, the choice of Hampstead as a place of resi- 
 dence had much to recommend it to Keats : the freshness 
 of the air for the benefit of the invalid Tom ; for his own 
 walks and meditations those beauties of heath, field, and 
 wood, interspersed with picturesque embosomed habita- 
 tions, which his imagination could transmute at will into 
 the landscapes of Arcadia, or into those, " with high ro- 
 mances blent," of an earlier England or of fable-land. For 
 society there was the convenient proximity to, and yet se- 
 clusion from, London, together with the immediate neigh- 
 bourhood of one or two intimate friends. Among these, 
 Keats frequented as familiarly as ever the cottage in the 
 Vale of Health where Leigh Hunt was still living — a kind 
 of self-appointed poet-laureate of Hampstead, the features 
 of which he was for ever celebrating, now in sonnets and 
 now in the cheerful singsong of his familiar Epistles : 
 
 " And yet how can I touch, and not linger awhile 
 On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile ? 
 
iv.] NEW FRIENDS: DILKE AND BROWN. 73 
 
 On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades, 
 Dark pines, and white houses, and long-alley'd shades, 
 With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees 
 The hills up above him with roofs in the trees." 
 
 Several effusions of this kind, with three sonnets addressed 
 to Keats himself, some translations from the Greek, and a 
 not ungraceful mythological poem, the Nymphs, were pub- 
 lished early in the following year by Leigh Hunt in a vol- 
 ume called Foliage, which helped to draw down on him 
 and his friends the lash of Tory criticism. 
 
 Near the foot of the heath, in the opposite direction 
 from Hunt's cottage, lived two new friends of Keats who 
 had been introduced to him by Reynolds, and with whom 
 he was soon to become extremely intimate. These were 
 Charles Wentworth Dilke and Charles Armitage Brown 
 (or plain Charles Brown, as he at this time styled himself). 
 Dilke was a young man of twenty-nine, by birth belong- 
 ing to a younger branch of the Dilkes of Maxstoke Castle, 
 by profession a clerk in the Navy Pay-office, and by opin- 
 ions at this time a firm disciple of Godwin. He soon gave 
 himself up altogether to literary and antiquarian studies, 
 and lived, as every one knows, to be one of the most ac- 
 complished and influential of English critics and journal- 
 ists, and for many years editor and chief owner of the 
 Athenceum. No two men could well be more unlike in 
 mind than Dilke and Keats : Dilke positive, bent on cer- 
 tainty, and unable, as Keats says, " to feel he has a per- 
 sonal identity unless he has made up his mind about every- 
 thing ;" while Keats, on his part, held that " the only means 
 of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind 
 about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all 
 thoughts." Nevertheless, the two took to each other and 
 became fast friends. Dilke had married young, and built 
 
74 KEATS. L CIIAP - 
 
 himself, a year or two before Keats knew him, a modest 
 semi-detached house in a good-sized garden near the lower 
 end of Hampstead Heath, at the bottom of what is now 
 John Street : the other part of the same block being built 
 and inhabited by his friend Charles Brown. This Brown 
 was the son of a Scotch stockbroker living in Lambeth. 
 He was born in 1786, and while almost a boy went out to 
 join one of his brothers in a merchant's business at St. 
 Petersburg ; but the business failing, he returned to Eng- 
 land in 1808, and lived as he could for the next few years, 
 until the death of another brother put him in possession 
 of a small competency. He had a taste, and some degree 
 of talent, for literature, and held strongly Radical opinions. 
 In 1S10 he wrote an opera on a Russian subject, called 
 Narensky, which was brought out at the Lyceum, with 
 Braham in the principal part ; and at intervals during the 
 next twenty years many criticisms, talcs, and translations 
 from the Italian, chiefly printed in the various periodicals 
 edited by Leigh Hunt. When Keats first knew him, 
 Brown was a young man already of somewhat middle- 
 aged appearance, stout, bald, and spectacled — a kindly com- 
 panion, and jovial, somewhat free liver, with a good meas- 
 ure both of obstinacy and caution lying in reserve, more 
 Scotico, under his pleasant and convivial outside. It is 
 clear by his relation^ with Keats that his heart was warm, 
 and that w r hen once attached, he was capable not only of 
 appreciation but of devotion. After the poet's death 
 Brown went to Italy, and became the friend of Trelawney, 
 whom he helped with the composition of the Adventures 
 of a Younger Son, and of Landor, at whose villa near 
 Florence Lord Houghton first met him in 1832. Two 
 years later he returned to England, and settled at Plym- 
 outh, where he continued to occupy himself with litera- 
 
iv] NEW FRIENDS: BAILEY. V5 
 
 tare and journalism, and particularly with his chief work, 
 an essay, ingenious and in part sound, on the autobio- 
 graphical poems of Shakspeare. Thoughts of Keats, and a 
 wish to be his biographer, never left him, until in 1841 he 
 resolved suddenly to emigrate to New Zealand, and de- 
 parted leaving his materials in Lord Houghton's hands. 
 A year 'afterwards he died of apoplexy^ the settlement 
 of New Plymouth, now called Taranaki. 1 
 
 Yet another friend of Reynolds, who in these months 
 attached himself with a warm affection to Keats, was Ben- 
 jamin Bailey, an Oxford undergraduate reading for the 
 Church, afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo. Bailey was 
 a great lover of books, devoted especially to Milton among 
 past and to Wordsworth among present poets. For his 
 earnestness and integrity of character Keats conceived a 
 strong respect, and a hearty liking for his person, and 
 much of what was best in his own nature, and deepest in 
 his mind and cogitations, was called out in the inter- 
 course that ensued between them. In the course of this 
 summer, 1817, Keats had been invited by Shelley to stay 
 with him at Great Marlow, and Hunt, ever anxious that 
 the two young poets should be friends, pressed him strong- 
 ly to accept the invitation. It is said by Mcdwin, but the 
 statement is not confirmed by other evidence, that Shelley 
 and Keats had set about their respective " summer tasks," 
 the composition of Laon and Oythna and of Endymion, 
 by mutual agreement and in a spirit of friendly rivalry. 
 
 i The facts and dates relating to Brown in the above paragraph 
 were furnished by his son, still living in New Zealand, to Mr. Leslie 
 Stephen from whom I have them. The point about the Adventures 
 of a Younger Son is confirmed by the fact that the mottoes in that 
 work are mostly taken from the Keats MSS., then in Brown's hands, 
 especially Otho. 
 
76 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Keats, at an)' rate, declined his brother poet's invitation, in 
 order, as lie said, that he might have his own unfettered 
 scope. Later in the same summer, while his brothers were 
 away on a trip to Paris, he accepted an invitation of Bailey 
 to come to Oxford, and stayed there during the last five 
 or six weeks of the Long Vacation. Here he wrote the 
 third book of Endymion, working steadily every morning, 
 and composing with great facility his regular average of 
 fifty lines a day. The afternoons they would spend in 
 walking or boating on the Isis, and Bailey has feelingly 
 recorded the pleasantness of their days, and of their dis- 
 cussions on life, literature, and the mysteries of things. 
 He tells of the sweetness of Keats's temper and charm of 
 his conversation, and of the gentleness and respect with 
 which the hot young liberal and free-thinker would listen 
 to his host's exposition of his own orthodox convictions; 
 describes his enthusiasm in quoting Chatterton and in 
 dwelling on passages of Wordsworth's poetry, particularly 
 from the Tintern Abbey and the Ode on Immortality ; and 
 recalls his disquisitions on the harmony of numbers and 
 other technicalities of his art, the power of his thrilling 
 looks and low-voiced recitations, his vividness of inner life, 
 and intensity of quiet enjoyment during their field and 
 river rambles and excursions. 1 One special occasion of 
 pleasure was a pilgrimage they made together to Stratford- 
 on-Avon. From Oxford are some of the letters written 
 by Keats in his happiest vein : to Reynolds, and his sister 
 Miss Jane Reynolds, afterwards Mrs. Tom Hood ; to Play- 
 don ; and to his young sister Frances Mary, or Fanny, as 
 she was always called (now Mrs. Llanos). George Keats, 
 writing to this sister after John's death, speaks of the 
 times " when we lived with our grandmother at Edmon- 
 1 Houghton MSS. 
 
iv.] WITH BAILEY AT OXFORD. 11 
 
 ton, and John, Tom, and myself were always devising plans 
 to amuse you, jealous lest you should prefer either of us 
 to the others." Since those times Keats had seen little 
 of her, Mr. Abbey having put her to a boarding-school be- 
 fore her grandmother's death, and afterwards taken her 
 into his own house at Walthamstow, where the visits of 
 her poet brother were not encouraged. " He often," writes 
 Bailey, " spoke to me of his sister, who was somehow with- 
 holden from him, with great delicacy and tenderness of 
 affection ;" and from this time forward we find him main- 
 taining with her a correspondence which shows his charac- 
 ter in its most attractive light. He bids her keep all his 
 letters and he will keep hers — " and thus in the course of 
 time we shall each of us have a good bundle — which here- 
 after, when things may have strangely altered, and God 
 knows what happened, we may read over together and 
 look with pleasure on times past — that now are to come." 
 He tells her about Oxford and about his work, and gives 
 her a sketch of the story of Endymion — " but I dare say 
 you have read this and all other beautiful tales which have 
 come down to us from the ancient times of that beautiful 
 Greece." 
 
 Early in October Keats returned to Hampstead, whence 
 he writes to Bailey, noticing with natural indignation the 
 ruffianly first article of the Cockney School series, which 
 had just appeared in Blackwood' 's Magazine for that 
 month. In this the special object of attack was Leigh 
 Hunt, but there were allusions to Keats which seemed to 
 indicate that his own turn was coming. What made him 
 more seriously uneasy were signs of discord springing up 
 among his friends, and of attempts on the part of some of 
 them to set him against others. Haydon had now given 
 up his studio in Great Marlborough Street for one in Lis- 
 
78 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 son Grove ; and Hunt, having left the Vale of Health, was 
 living close by him at a lodging in the same street. " I 
 know nothing of anything in this part of the world," 
 writes Keats: "everybody seems at loggerheads." And 
 he goes on to say how Hunt and Haydon are on uncom- 
 fortable terms, and " live, pour ainsi dire, jealous neigh- 
 bours. Haydon says to me, ' Keats, don't show your 
 lines to Hunt on any account, or he will have done half 
 for you' — so it appears Hunt wishes it to be thought." 
 With more accounts of warnings he had received from 
 common friends that Hunt was not feeling or speaking 
 cordially about Endymion. " Now is not all this a most 
 paltry thing to think about? . . . This is, to be sure, but 
 the vexation of a day; nor would I say so much about it 
 to any but those whom I know to have my welfare and 
 reputation at heart." ! When, three months later, Keats 
 showed Hunt the first book of his poem in proof, the lat- 
 ter found many faults. It is clear he was to some extent 
 honestly disappointed in the work itself. He may also 
 have been chagrined at not having been taken more fully 
 into confidence during its composition ; and what he said 
 to others was probably due partly to such chagrin, partly 
 to nervousness on behalf of his friend's reputation : for of 
 double-facedncss or insincerity in friendship w r e know by 
 a hundred evidences that Hunt was incapable. Keats, 
 however, after what he had heard, was by no means with- 
 out excuse when he wrote to his brothers concerning Hunt 
 — not unkindly, or making much of the matter — " the fact 
 is, he and Shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not 
 having showed them the affair officiously; and from sev- 
 eral hints I have had, they appear much disposed to dis- 
 sect and anatomize any trip or slip I may have made. But 
 1 See Appendix, p. 222. 
 
IV -] OLD FRIENDS AT ODDS. 79 
 
 who's afraid ?" Keats was not the man to let this kind of 
 thing disturb seriously his relations with a friend; and 
 writing about the same time to Bailey, still concerning the 
 dissensions in the circle, he expounds the practical philoso- 
 phy of friendship with truly admirable good sense and 
 feeling : 
 
 "Things have happened lately of great perplexity; you must have . 
 heard of "them; Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating, 
 and parting forever. The same thing has happened between Haydon 
 and Hunt. It is unfortunate: men should bear with each other; 
 there lives not the man who may not be cut up, aye, lashed to pieces, 
 on his weakest side. The best of men have but a portion of good in 
 them— a kind of spiritual yeast in their frames, which creates the fer- 
 ment of existence— by which a man is propelled to act and strive, 
 and buffet with circumstance. The sure way, Bailey, is first to know 
 a man's faults, and then be passive. If after that he insensibly 
 draws you towards him, then you have no power to break the link. 
 Before I felt interested in either Reynolds or Haydon, I was well-read 
 in their faults ; yet, knowing them both, I have been cementing grad- 
 ually with both. I have an affection for them both, for reasons al- 
 most opposite ; and to both must I of necessity cling, supported al- 
 ways by the hope that when a little time, a few years, shall have tried 
 me more fully in their esteem, I may be able to bring them together. 
 This time must come, because they have both hearts ; and they will 
 recollect the best parts of each other when this gust is overblown." 
 
 Keats had, in the meantime, been away on another au- 
 tumn excursion into the country: this time to Burford 
 Bridge, near Dorking. Here he passed pleasantly the lat- 
 ter part of November, much absorbed in the study of 
 Shakspeare's minor poems and sonnets, and in the task of 
 finishing Endymion. He had thus all but succeeded in 
 carrying out the hope which he had expressed in the open- 
 ing passage of the poem : 
 
 " Many and many a verse I hope to write, 
 Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, 
 
80 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Hide in deep herbage ; and ere yet the bees 
 Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, 
 I must be near the middle of my story. 
 may no wintry season, bare and hoary, 
 See it half finished; but let Autumn bold, 
 With universal tinge of sober gold, 
 Be all about me when I make an end." 
 
 Returning to Harapstead, Keats spent the first part of the 
 winter in comparative rest from literary work. Ilis chief 
 occupation was in revising and seeing Endymion through 
 the press, with much help from the publisher, Mr. Taylor, 
 varied by occasional essays in dramatic criticism, and as 
 the spring began, by the composition of a number of mi- 
 nor incidental poems. In December he lost the compan- 
 ionship of his brothers, who went to winter in Devonshire 
 for the sake of Tom's health. But in other company he 
 was at this time mixing freely. The convivial gatherings 
 of the young men of his own circle were frequent, the fun 
 high, the discussions on art and literature boisterous, and 
 varied with a moderate, evidently never a very serious, 
 amount of card-playing, drinking, and dissipation. From 
 these gatherings Keats was indispensable, and more than 
 welcome in the sedater literary circle of his publishers, 
 Messrs. Taylor & Hessey, men as strict in conduct and 
 opinion as they were good-hearted. His social relations 
 began, indeed, in the course of this winter to extend them- 
 selves more than he much cared about, or thought con- 
 sistent with proper industry. We find him dining with 
 Horace Smith in company with some fashionable wits, con- 
 cerning whom he reflects : " They only served to convince 
 me how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment. 
 These men say things which make one start, without mak- 
 ing one feel ; they are all alike ; their manners are alike ; 
 
IV .] WINTER AT IIAMPSTEAD. 81 
 
 they all know fashionables ; they have all a mannerism in 
 their very eating- and drinking-, in their mere handling a 
 dceanter. They talked of Kean and his low company. 
 ' Would I were with that company instead of yours,' said 
 I to myself." Men of ardent and deep natures, whether 
 absorbed in the realities of experience or in the ideals of 
 art and imagination, are apt to be affected in this way by 
 the conventional social sparkle which is only struck from 
 and only illuminates the surface. Hear, on the other hand, 
 with what pleasure and insight, what sympathy of genius 
 for genius, Keats writes after seeing the great tragedian 
 last mentioned interpret the inner and true passions of the 
 soul : 
 
 " The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of Kean 
 
 His tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them 
 honeyless ! There is an indescribable gusto in his voice, by which we 
 feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while speak- 
 ing of the instant. When he says in Othello, 'Put up your bright 
 swords, for the dew will rust them,' we feel that his throat had com- 
 manded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk, he 
 speaks as though his body were unassailable. Again, his exclama- 
 tion of ' blood ! blood ! blood !' is direful and slaughterous to the last 
 degree ; the very words appear stained and gory. His nature hangs 
 over them, making a prophetic repast. The voice is loosed on them, 
 like the wild dogs on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we 
 can distinctly hear it ' gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.' 
 In Richard, ' Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk !' 
 came from him as through the morning atmosphere towards which 
 he yearns." 
 
 It was in the Christmas weeks of 1817-18 that Keats 
 undertook the office of theatrical critic for the Champion 
 newspaper in place of Reynolds, who was away at Exeter. 
 Early in January he writes to his brothers of the pleasure 
 he has had in seeino- their sister, who had been brought to 
 
82 KEAT.S. [chap. 
 
 London for the Christmas holidays, and tells them how he 
 has called on and been asked to dine by Wordsworth, whom 
 he had met on the 28th of December at a supper given by 
 Haydon. This is the famous Sunday supper, or "immor- 
 tal dinner," as Haydon calls it, which is described at length 
 in one of the most characteristic passages of the painter's 
 Autobiography. Besides Wordsworth and Keats and the 
 host, there were present Charles Lamb and Monkhouse. 
 "Wordsworth's fine intonation as he quoted Milton and 
 Virgil, Keats's eager inspired look, Lamb's quaint sparkle 
 of lambent humour, so speeded the stream of conversation," 
 says Haydon," that I never passed a more delightful time." 
 Later in the evening came in Ritchie, the African traveller, 
 just about to start on the journey to Fezzan on which he 
 died, besides a self-invited guest in the person of one King- 
 ston, Comptroller of Stamps, a foolish, good-natured gen- 
 tleman, recommended only by his admiration for Words- 
 worth. Presently Lamb, getting fuddled, lost patience with 
 the platitudes of Mr. Kingston, and began making fun of 
 him, with pranks and personalities which to Haydon ap- 
 peared hugely funny, but which Keats, in his letter to his 
 brothers, mentions with less relish, saying, " Lamb got tip- 
 sy and blew up Kingston, proceeding so far as to take the 
 candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show us 
 what a soft fellow he was." 1 Keats saw Wordsworth of- 
 ten in the next few weeks after their introduction at Hay- 
 don's, but has left us no personal impressions of the elder 
 poet, except a passing one of surprise at finding him one 
 day preparing to dine, in a stiff collar and his smartest 
 clothes, with his aforesaid unlucky admirer, Mr. Comptrol- 
 ler Kingston. W^e know from other sources that he was 
 once persuaded to recite to Wordsworth the Hymn to Pan 
 1 See Appendix, p. 222. 
 
it.] WORDSWORTH— LAMB— HAZLITT. 83 
 
 from Endymion. " A pretty piece of Paganism," remark- 
 ed Wordsworth, according to his usual encouraging way 
 with a brother poet; and Keats was thought to have 
 winced under the frigidity. Independently of their per- 
 sonal relations, the letters of Keats show that Words- 
 worth's poetry continued to be much in his thoughts 
 throughout these months, what he has to say of it varying 
 according to the frame of mind in which he writes. In 
 the enthusiastic mood he declares, and within a few days 
 again insists, that there are three things to rejoice at in 
 the present age : " The Excursion, Haydon's Pictures, and 
 Hazlitt's depth of Taste." This mention of the name of 
 Hazlitt brings us to another intellectual influence which 
 somewhat powerfully affected Keats at this time. On the 
 liberal side in politics and criticism there was no more ef- 
 fective or more uncertain free lance than that eloquent and 
 splenetic writer, with his rich, singular, contradictory gifts, 
 his intellect equally acute and fervid, his temperament both 
 enthusiastic and morose, his style at once rich and incisive. 
 The reader acquainted with Hazlitt's manner will easily 
 recognize its influence on Keats in the fragment of stage 
 criticism above quoted. Hazlitt was at this time delivering 
 his course of lectures on the English poets at the Surrey 
 Institution, and Keats was among his regular attendants. 
 With Hazlitt personally, as with Lamb, his intercourse at 
 Haydon's and elsewhere seems to have been frequent and 
 friendly, but not intimate; and Haydon complains that it 
 was only after the death of Keats that he could get Haz- 
 litt to acknowledge his genius. 
 
 Of Haydon himself, and of his powers as a painter, we 
 see by the words above quoted that Keats continued to 
 think as highly as ever. He had, as Severn assures us, a 
 keen natural instinct for the arts both of painting and mu- 
 
84 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 sic. Cowdcn Clarke's piano-playing had been a delight to 
 him at school, and he tells us himself how from a boy he 
 had in his mind's eye visions of pictures : " When a school- 
 boy, the abstract idea I had of an heroic painting was what 
 I cannot describe. I saw it somewhat sideways — large, 
 prominent, round, and coloured with magnificence — some- 
 what like the feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra. Or 
 of Alcibiades leaning on his crimson couch in his galley, 
 his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the sea." 
 In Haydon's pictures Keats continued to see, as the friends 
 and companions of every ardent and persuasive worker in 
 the arts are apt to see, not so much the actual performance 
 as the idea he had preconceived of it in the light of his 
 friend's intentions and enthusiasm. At this time Ilaydon, 
 who had already made several drawings of Keats's head in 
 order to introduce it in his picture of Christ entering Je- 
 rusalem, proposed to make another more finished, "to be 
 engraved," writes Keats, " in the first style, and put at the 
 head of my poem, saying, at the same time, he had never 
 done the thing for any human being, and that it must have 
 considerable effect, as he will put his name to it," Both 
 poet and publisher were delighted with this condescension 
 on the part of the sublime Haydon, who failed, however, 
 to carry out his promise. "My neglect," said Haydon, 
 long afterwards, " really gave him a pang, as it now does 
 me." 
 
 With Hunt, also, Keats's intercourse continued frequent, 
 while with Reynolds his intimacy grew daily closer. Both 
 of these friendships had a stimulating influence on his 
 poetic powers. "The Wednesday before last, Shelley, 
 Hunt, and I wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile," he 
 tells his brothers on the 16th of February, 1818. "I have 
 been writing at intervals many songs and sonnets, and I 
 
iv.] POETICAL ACTIVITY. 85 
 
 long to be at Teignmouth to read them over to you." With, 
 the help of Keats's manuscripts, or of the transcripts made 
 from them by his friends, it is possible to retrace the actual 
 order of many of these fugitive pieces. On the 16th of 
 January was written the humourous sonnet on Mrs. Reyn- 
 olds's cat; on the 21st, after seeing in Leigh Hunt's pos- 
 session a lock of hair reputed to be Milton's, the address 
 to that poet beginning " Chief of organic numbers !" 
 and on the 22d the sonnet, " golden-tongued Romance 
 with serene lute," in which Keats describes himself as lay- 
 ing aside (apparently) his Spenser in order to read again 
 the more rousing and human - passionate pages of Lear. 
 On the 31st he sends in a letter to Reynolds the lines to 
 Apollo beginning " Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port," 
 and in the same letter the sonnet beginning " When I have 
 fears that I may cease to be," which he calls his last. On 
 the 3d of February he wrote the spirited lines to Robin 
 Hood, suggested by a set of sonnets by Reynolds on Sher- 
 wood Forest; on the 4th the sonnet beginning "Time's 
 sea has been five years at its slow ebb," in which he re- 
 calls the memory of an old, otherwise unrecorded love- 
 fancy, and also the well-known sonnet on the Nile, written 
 at Hunt's in competition with that friend and with Shelley ; 
 on the 5th another sonnet postponing compliance for the 
 present with an invitation of Leigh Hunt's to compose 
 something in honour, or in emulation, of Spenser ; and on 
 the 8th the sonnet in praise of the colour blue, composed 
 by way of protest against one of Reynolds. About the 
 same time Keats agreed with Reynolds that they should 
 each write some metrical tales from Boccaccio, and pub- 
 lish them in a joint volume, and began at once for his 
 own part with Isabella or the Pot of Basil. A little later 
 in this so prolific month of February we find him rejoic- 
 
86 KEATS. ' [chap. 
 
 ing in the song of the thrush and blackbird, and melted 
 into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under 
 the influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. He 
 theorizes pleasantly in a letter to Reynolds on the virtues 
 and benefits of this state of mind, translating the thrush's 
 music into some blank-verse lines of a singular and haunt- 
 ing melody. In the course of the next fortnight we find 
 him in correspondence with Taylor about the corrections 
 to Endymion, and soon afterwards making a clearance 
 of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing to flit. His 
 brother George, who had been taking care of Tom at 
 Teignmouth since December, was now obliged to come to 
 town, bent on a scheme of marriage and emigration ; and 
 Tom's health having made a momentary rally, Keats was 
 unwilling that he should leave Teignmouth, and deter- 
 mined to join him there. He started in the second week 
 of March, and stayed almost two months. It was an un- 
 lucky season for weather — the soft -buffeting sheets and 
 misty drifts of Devonshire rain renewing themselves, in 
 the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know, 
 throughout almost the whole spring, and preventing him 
 from getting more than occasional tantalizing snatches of 
 enjoyment in the beauty of the scenery, the walks, and 
 flowers. His letters are full of objurgations against the 
 climate, conceived in a spirit which seems hardly compati- 
 ble, in one of his strong family feeling, with the tradition 
 which represents his father to have been a Devonshire 
 man : 
 
 " You may say what you will of Devonshire : the truth is, it is a 
 splashy, rain} 7 , misty, snowy, foggy, haify, floody, muddy, slipshod 
 county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em; 
 the primroses are out — but then you are in ; the cliffs are of a fine 
 deep colour, but then the clouds are continually vicing with them. . . . 
 
iv.] LETTER TO REYNOLDS. 87 
 
 I fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. I fancy the flowers, 
 all precocious, have an Acrasian spell about them ; I feel able to beat 
 off the Devonshire waves like soap-froth. I tnink it well for the 
 honour of Britain that Julius Caesar did not first land in this county. 
 A Devonshirer, standing on his native hills, is not a distinct object ; he 
 does not show against the light ; a wolf or two would dispossess him." 1 
 
 Besides his constant occupation in watching and cheer- 
 ing his invalid brother, who had a relapse just after he 
 came down, Keats was busy daring these Devonshire days 
 seeing through the press the last sheets of Endymion. He 
 also composed, with the exception of the few verses he 
 had begun at Hampstead, the whole of Isabella, the first 
 of his longer poems written with real maturity of art and 
 certainty of touch. At the same time he was reading and 
 appreciating Milton as he had never done before. With 
 the minor poems he had been familiar from a boy, but had 
 not been attracted by Paradise Lost until first Severn, and 
 then more energetically Bailey, had insisted that this was 
 a reproach to him ; and he now turned to that poem, and 
 penetrated with the grasp and swiftness of genius, as his 
 marginal criticisms show, into the very essence of its pow- 
 er and beauty. His correspondence with his friends, par- 
 ticularly Bailey and Reynolds, is, during this same time, 
 unusually sustained and full. It was in all senses mani- 
 festly a time with Keats of rapidly maturing power, and 
 in some degree also of threatening gloom. The mysteries 
 of existence and of suffering, and the " deeps of good and 
 evil/' were beginning for the first time to press habitually 
 on his thoughts. In that beautiful and interesting letter 
 to Reynolds, in which he makes the comparison of human 
 life to a mansion of many apartments, it is his own present 
 state which he thus describes : 
 
 'See Appendix, p. 222. 
 5 G 
 
88 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 " We no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall call the 
 Chamber of Maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the 
 light and the atmosphere. We see nothing but pleasant wonders, 
 and think of delaying there forever in delight. However, among the 
 effects this breathing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharpen- 
 ing one's vision into the heart and nature of man, of convincing one's 
 nerves that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sick- 
 ness, and oppression, whereby this Chamber of Maiden-thought be- 
 comes gradually darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, 
 many doors are set open — but all dark — all leading to dark passages. 
 We see not the balance of good and evil ; we are in a mist, we are in 
 that state, we feel the ' Burden of the Mystery.' " 
 
 A few weeks earlier, addressing to the same friend the last 
 of his rhymed Epistles, Keats had thus expressed the mood 
 which came upon him as he sat taking the beauty of the 
 evening on a rock at the sea's edge : 
 
 " 'Twas a quiet eve, 
 The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave 
 An untumultuous fringe of silver foam 
 Along the flat brown sand ; I was at home, 
 And should have been most happy — but I saw 
 Too far into the sea, where every maw 
 The greater or the less feeds evermore : 
 But I saw too distinct into the core 
 Of an eternal fierce destruction, 
 And so from happiness I far was gone. 
 Still am I sick of it, and tho' to-day 
 I've gathered young spring leaves, and flowers gay 
 Of periwinkle and wild strawberry, 
 Still do I that most fierce destruction see — 
 The Shark at savage prey, the Hawk at pounce, 
 The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce, 
 Ravening a worm. Away, ye horrid moods ! 
 Moods of one's mind !" 
 
 In a like vein, recalling to Bailey a chance saying of his, 
 " Why should woman suffer?" — "Aye, why should she?" 
 
iv.] EMIGRATION OF GEORGE KEATS. 89 
 
 writes Keats. " 'By heavens, I'd coin my very soul, and drop 
 my blood for drachmas.' These things are, and he who feels 
 how incompetent the most skyey knight-errantry is to heal 
 this bruised fairness, is like a sensitive leaf on the hot hand 
 of thought." And again, " Were it in my choice, I would 
 reject a Petrarchal coronation — on account of my dying- 
 day, and because women have cancers. I should not by 
 rights speak in this tone to you, for it is an incendiary 
 spirit that would do so." 
 
 Not the general tribulations of the race only, but par- 
 ticular private anxieties, were pressing in these days on 
 Keats's thoughts. The shadow of illness, though it had 
 hitherto scarcely touched himself, hung menacingly not 
 only over his brother but his best friends. He speaks of 
 it in a tone of courage and gayety which his real appre- 
 hensions, we can feel, belie. "Banish money "—he had 
 written in FalstafTs vein, at starting for the Isle of Wight 
 a year ago — "Banish sofas — Banish wine — Banish music; 
 but right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack 
 Health — Banish Health and Banish all the world." Writ- 
 ing now from Teignmouth to Reynolds, who was down 
 during these weeks with rheumatic fever, he complains 
 laughingly, but with an undercurrent of sad foreboding, 
 how he can go nowhere but Sickness is of the company, 
 and says his friends will have to cut that fellow, or he 
 must cut them. 
 
 Nearer and more pressing than such apprehensions was 
 the pain of a family break-up now imminent. George Keats 
 had made up his mind to emigrate to America, and em- 
 bark his capital, or as much of it as he could get posses- 
 sion of, in business there. Besides the wish to push his 
 own fortunes, a main motive of this resolve on George's 
 part was the desire to be in a position as quickly as possi- 
 
90 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 ble to help, or, if need be, support his poet-brother. He 
 persuaded the girl to whom he had long been attached, 
 Miss Wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was settled that 
 they were to be married and sail early in the summer. 
 Keats came up from Teignmouth in May to see the last 
 of his brother, and he and Tom settled again in their old 
 lodgings in Well Walk. He had a warm affection and re- 
 gard for his new sister-in-law, and was in so far delighted 
 for George's sake. But at the same time he felt life and 
 its prospects overcast. He writes to Bailey, after his out- 
 burst about the sufferings of women, that he is never alone 
 now without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death 
 — without placing his ultimate in the glory of dying for 
 a great human purpose. And after recounting his causes 
 of depression he recovers himself, and concludes : " Life 
 must be undergone; and I certainly derive some consola- 
 tion from the thought of writing one or two more poems 
 before it ceases." 
 
 With reference to his poem then just appearing, and 
 the year's work it represented, Keats was under no illusions 
 whatever. From an early period in its composition he 
 had fully realised its imperfections, and had written : " My 
 ideas of it are very low, and I would write the subject 
 thoroughly again but I am tired of it, and think the time 
 would be better spent in writing a new romance, which I 
 have in my eye for next summer. Rome was not built in 
 a day, and all the good I expect from my employment this- 
 summer is the fruit of experience which I hope to gather 
 in my next poem." * The habit of close self-observation 
 and self-criticism is in most natures that possess it allied 
 with vanity and egoism ; but it was not so in Keats, who, 
 without a shadow of affectation, judges himself, both in 
 his strength and weakness, as the most clear-sighted and 
 
iv.] DOUBTS OF SUCCESS. 91 
 
 disinterested friend might judge. He shows himself per- 
 fectly aware that in writing Endymion he has rather been 
 working off a youthful ferment of the mind than produc- 
 ing a sound or satisfying work of poetry ; and when the 
 time comes to write a preface to the poem, after a first at- 
 tempt lacking reticence and simplicity, and abandoned at 
 the advice of Reynolds, lie in the second quietly and beau- 
 tifully says of his own work all that can justly be said in 
 its dispraise. He warns the reader to expect "great inex- 
 perience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish 
 attempt rather than a deed accomplished ;" and adds most 
 unboastfully : "It is just that this youngster should die 
 away : a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that 
 while it is dwindling I may be plotting and fitting myself 
 for verses fit to live." 
 
 The apprehensions expressed in these words have not 
 been fulfilled ; and Endymion, so far from havino- died . 
 away, lives to illustrate the maxim conveyed in its own 
 now proverbial opening line. Immature as the poem truly 
 is in touch and method, superabundant and confused as 
 are the sweets which it offers to the mind, still it is a thing 
 of far too much beauty, or at least of too many beauties, 
 to perish. Every reader must take pleasure in some of its 
 single passages and episodes, while to the student of the 
 poetic art the work is interesting almost as much in its 
 weakness as its strength. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 Endymion. 
 
 In the old Grecian world, the myth of Endymion and 
 Selene was one deeply rooted in various shapes in the 
 popular traditions both of El is in the Peloponnese, and of 
 the Ionian cities about the Latmian gulf in Caria. The 
 central feature of the tale, as originally sung by Sappho, 
 was the nightly descent of the goddess to kiss her lover 
 where he lay spell-bound, by the grace of Zeus, in ever- 
 lasting sleep and everlasting youth on Mount Latinos. 
 The poem of Sappho is lost, and the story is not told at 
 length in any of our extant classical writings, but only by 
 way of allusion in some of the poets, as Theocritus, Apol- 
 lonius Rhodius, and Ovid, and of the late prose-writers, 
 as Lucian, Apollodorus, and Pausauias. Of such ancient 
 sources Keats, of course, knew only what he found in his 
 classical dictionaries. But references to the tale, as every 
 one knows, form part of the stock repertory of classical 
 allusion in modern literature; and several modern writers 
 before Keats had attempted to handle the subject at 
 length. In his own special range of Elizabethan readino- 
 he was probably acquainted with Lyly's court comedy of 
 Undimion, in prose, which had been edited, as it hap- 
 pened, by his friend Dilke a few years before ; but in it 
 he would have found nothing to his purpose. On the 
 other hand, I think he certainly took hints from the Man 
 
chap, v.] "ENDYMION." 93 
 
 in the Moon of Michael Drayton. In this piece Drayton 
 takes hold of two post-classical notions concerning the 
 Endyraion myth, both in the first instance derived from 
 Lucian— one, that which identifies its hero with the visible 
 "man in the moon" of popular fancy, the other, that 
 which rationalises his story, and explains him away as a 
 personification or mythical representative of early astron- 
 omy. These two distinct notions Drayton weaves togeth- 
 er into a short tale in rhymed heroics, which he puts into 
 the mouth of a shepherd at a feast of Pan. Like most 
 of his writings, the Man in the Moon has strong gleams 
 of poetry and fancy amidst much that is both puerile 
 and pedantic. Critics, so far as I know, have overlooked 
 Keats's debt to it ; but even granting that he may well 
 have got elsewhere, or invented for himself, the notion of 
 introducing bis story with a festival in honour of Pan, do 
 not, at any rate, the following lines of Drayton contain 
 evidently the hint for the wanderings on which Keats 
 sends his hero (and for which antiquity affords no war- 
 rant) through earth, sea, and air ? ! 
 
 " Endymion now forsakes 
 All the delights that shepherds do prefer, 
 And sets his mind so generally on her 
 That, all neglected, to the groves and springs 
 He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings 
 (As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers, 
 Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers 
 The silver Naides bathe them in the bracke. 
 Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back 
 Among the blue Nereides ; and when, 
 Weary of waters, goddess-like again 
 
 i In the extract I have modernized Drayton's spelling and endeav- 
 oured to mend his punctuation : his grammatical constructions are 
 past mending. 
 
94 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 She the high mountains actively assays,. 
 And there amongst the light Oriades, 
 That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort : 
 Sometime amongst those that with them comport 
 The Hamadriades doth the woods frequent ; 
 And there she stays not, but incontinent 
 Galls down the dragons that her chariot draw, 
 And with Endymion pleased that she saw, 
 
 ffounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye 
 tripping the winds — " 
 
 Fletcher, again — a writer with whom Keats was very 
 familiar, and whose inspiration in the idyllic and lyric 
 parts of his work is closely kindred to his own — Fletch- 
 er in the Faithful Shepherdess makes Chloe tell, in lines 
 beautifully paraphrased and amplified from Theocritu^ 
 
 " How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, 
 First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes 
 She took eternal fire that never dies ; 
 How she convey'd him softly in a sleep, 
 His temples bound with poppy, to the steep 
 Head of old Latraus, where she stoops each night, 
 Gilding the mountain with her brother's light, 
 To kiss her sweetest." 
 
 The subject thus touched by Drayton and Fletcher had 
 been long-, as we have seen already, in Keats's thoughts. 
 Not only had the charm of this old pastoral nature-myth 
 of the Greeks interwoven itself in his being with his natu- 
 ral sensibility to the physical and spiritual spell of moon- 
 light, but deeper and more abstract meanings than its 
 own had gathered about the story in his mind. The di- 
 vine vision which haunts Endymion in dreams is for 
 Keats symbolical of Beauty itself, and it is the passion of 
 the human soul for beauty which he attempts, more or less 
 
v.] "ENDYHION." 95 
 
 consciously, to shadow forth in the quest of the shepherd- 
 prince after his love. 1 
 
 The manner in which Keats set about relating the 
 Greek story, as he had thus conceived it, was as far from 
 being a Greek or "classical" manner as possible. He in- 
 deed resembles the Greeks, as we have seen, in his vivid 
 sense of the joyous and multitudinous life of nature ; and 
 he loved to follow them in dreaming of the powers of 
 nature as embodied in concrete shapes of supernatural 
 human activity and grace. Moreover, his intuitions for 
 every kind of beauty being admirably swift and true, when 
 he sought to conjure up visions of the classic past, or 
 images from classic fable, he was able to do so often mag- 
 ically well. To this extent Keats may justly be called, as 
 he has been so often called, a Greek, but no farther. The 
 rooted artistic instincts of that race, the instincts which 
 taught them in all the arts alike, during the years when 
 their genius was most itself, to select and simplify, reject- 
 ing all beauties but the vital and essential, and paring 
 away their material to the quick that the main masses 
 might stand out unconfused, in just proportions and with 
 outlines rigorously clear — these instincts had neither been 
 implanted in Keats by nature, nor brought home to him 
 by precept and example. Alike by his aims and his gifts, 
 he was in his workmanship essentially " romantic," Gothic, 
 English. A general characteristic of his favourite Eliza- 
 bethan poetry is its prodigality of incidental and super- 
 fluous beauties : even in the drama it takes the powers of 
 a Shakspeare to keep the vital play of character and pas- 
 sion unsmothered by them, and in most narrative poems 
 of the age the quality is quite unchecked. To Keats, at 
 
 1 Mrs. Owen was, I think, certainly right in her main conception of 
 an allegoric purpose vaguely underlying Keats's narrative. 
 5* 
 
96 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 the time when he wrote Endymion, such incidental and 
 secondary luxuriance constituted an essential, if not the 
 chief, charm of poetry. " I think poetry," he says, " should 
 surprise by a fine excess ;" and with reference to his own 
 poem during its progress, " It will be a test, a trial of 
 my powers of imagination, and chiefly of my invention — 
 which is a rare thing indeed — by which I must make 4000 
 lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry." 
 The " one bare circumstance " of the story was in the 
 result expanded through four long books of intricate and 
 flowery narrative, in the course of which the young poet 
 pauses continually to linger or deviate, amplifying every 
 incident into a thousand circumstances, every passion into 
 a world of subtleties. He interweaves with his central 
 Endymion myth whatever others pleased him best, as 
 those of Pan, of Venus and Adonis, of Cybele, of Alpheus 
 and Arethusa, of Glaucus and Scylla, of Circe, of Neptune, 
 and of Bacchus, leading us through labyrinthine trans- 
 formations, and on endless journeyings by subterranean 
 antres and aerial gulfs and over the floor of ocean. The 
 scenery of the tale, indeed, is often not merely of a Gothic 
 vastness and intricacy; there is something of Oriental 
 bewilderment — an Arabian Nights jugglery with space 
 and time — in the vague suddenness with which its changes 
 are effected. Such organic plan as the poem has can best 
 be traced by fixing our attention on the main divisions 
 adopted by the author of his narrative into books, and by 
 keeping hold at the same time, wherever we can, of the 
 thread of allegoric thought and purpose that seems to 
 run loosely through the whole. The first book, then, is 
 entirely introductory, and does no more than set forth the 
 predicament of the love-sick shepherd-prince, its hero, who 
 appears at a festival of his people held in honour of the 
 
v.] 
 
 ENDYMION." 9V 
 
 god Pan, and is afterwards induced by his sister Peona 1 
 to confide to her the secret of the passion which consumes 
 him. The account of the feast of Pan contains passages 
 which in the quality of direct nature - interpretation are 
 scarcely to be surpassed in poetry : 
 
 " Rain-scented eglantine 
 Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun ; 
 The lark was lost in him ; cold springs had run 
 To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass : 
 Man's voice was on the mountains ; and the mass 
 Of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold, 
 To feel this sun-rise and its glories old." 
 
 What can be more fresh and stirring? what happier in 
 rhythmical movement? or what more characteristic of 
 the true instinct by which Keats, in dealing with nature, 
 avoided word-painting and palette work, leaving all merely 
 visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and forms, 
 as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as 
 poetry alone is able to deal, with those delights which are 
 felt and divined rather than seen, with the living activities 
 and operant magic of the earth ? Not less excellent is the 
 realisation in the course of the same episode of the true 
 spirit of ancient pastoral life and worship : the hymn to 
 Pan, in especial, both expressing perfectly the meaning of 
 the Greek myth to Greeks, and enriching it with touches 
 of northern feeling that are foreign to, and yet most har- 
 monious with, the original. Keats having got from Dray- 
 ton, as I surmise, his first notion of an introductory feast 
 
 1 Lempriere (after Pausanias) mentions Paeon as one of the fifty 
 sons of Endymion (in the Elean version of the myth) ; and in Spen- 
 ser's Faerie Queene there is a Parana— the daughter of the giant 
 Corflambo in the fourth book. Keats probably had both of these 
 in mind when he gave Endymion a sister and called her Peona. 
 
98 
 
 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 of Pan, in his hymn to that divinity borrowed recogniza- 
 ble touches alike from Chapman's Homer's hymn, from 
 the sacrifice to Pan in Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, 1 
 and from the hymns in Ben Jonson's masque, Pan's Anni- 
 versary; but borrowed as only genius can, fusing and re- 
 fashioning whatever he took from other writers in the 
 strong glow of an imagination fed from the living sources 
 of nature : 
 
 " Thou whose mighty palace roof doth hang 
 From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth 
 Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death 
 Of unseen flowers in heavy peacef ulness ; 
 Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress 
 Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken ; 
 And through Avhole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken 
 The dreary melody of bedded reeds — 
 In desolate places where dank moisture breeds 
 The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth ; 
 Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth 
 Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx — do thou now, 
 By thy love's milky brow ! 
 By all the trembling mazes that she ran, 
 Hear us, great Pan ! 
 
 Hearkener to the loud-clapping shears, 
 While ever and anon to his shorn peers 
 A ram goes bleating : Winder of the horn, 
 When snouted wild-boars, routing tender corn, 
 Anger our huntsman : Breather round our farms, 
 To keep off mildews and all weather harms : 
 Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds 
 That come a-swooning over hollow grounds, 
 And wither drearily on barren moors : 
 Dread opener of the mysterious doors 
 
 1 Book 1, Song 4. The point about Browne has been made by 
 Mr. W. T. Arnold. 
 
v.] "ENDYMION." 99 
 
 Leading to universal knowledge — see, 
 Great son of Dryope, 
 
 The many that are come to pay their vows 
 With leaves about their brows ! " 
 
 In the subsequent discourse of Endymion and Peona 
 he tells her the story of those celestial visitations which 
 he scarce knows whether he has experienced or dreamed. 
 In Keats's conception of his youthful heroes there is at 
 all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and 
 physical softness, and the influence of passion he is apt to 
 make fever and unman them quite : as indeed a helpless 
 and enslaved submission of all the faculties to love proved, 
 when it came to the trial, to be a weakness of his own 
 nature. He partly knew it, and could not help it : but the 
 consequence is that the love-passages of Endymion, not- 
 withstanding the halo of beautiful tremulous imagery that 
 often plays about them, can scarcely be read with pleasure. 
 On the other hand, in matters of subordinate feeling he 
 shows not only a great rhetorical facility, but the signs 
 often of lively dramatic power ; as for instance in the re- 
 monstrance wherein Peona tries to make her brother 
 ashamed of his weakness : 
 
 " Is this the cause ? 
 This all ? Yet it is strange, and sad, alas ! 
 That one who through this middle earth should pass 
 Most like a sojourning demi-god, and leave 
 His name upon the harp-string, should achieve 
 No higher bard than simple maidenhood, 
 Sighing alone, and fearfully — how the blood 
 Left his young cheek ; and how he used to stray 
 He knew not where ; and how he would say, Nay, 
 If any said 'twas love : and yet 'twas love ; 
 What could it be but love ? How a ring-dove 
 
100 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path ; 
 And how he died : and then, that love doth scathe 
 The gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses. 
 And then the ballad of his sad life closes 
 With sighs, and an alas ! Endymion !" 
 
 In the second book the hero sets out in quest of his 
 felicity, and is led by obscure signs and impulses through 
 a mysterious and all but trackless region of adventure. 
 In the first vague imaginings of youth, conceptions of 
 natural and architectural marvels, unlocalized and half- 
 realized in mysterious space, are apt to fill a large part, 
 and to such imaginings Keats in this book lets himself go 
 without a check. A Naiad in the disguise of a butterfly 
 leads Endymion to her spring, and there reveals herself 
 and bids him be of good hope ; an airy voice next invites 
 him to descend " Into the sparry hollows of the world ;" 
 which done, he gropes his way to a subterranean temple 
 of dim and most un - Grecian magnificence, where he is 
 admitted to the presence of the sleeping Adonis, and 
 whither Venus herself presently repairing gives him en- 
 couragement. Thence, urged by the haunting passion 
 within him, he wanders on by dizzy paths and precipices, 
 and forests of leaping, ever-changing fountains. Through 
 all this phantasmagoria, engendered by a brain still teem- 
 ing with the rich first fumes of boyish fancy, and in great 
 part confusing and inappropriate, shine out at intervals 
 strokes of the true old-w r orld poetry, admirably felt and 
 expressed — 
 
 " He sinks adown a solitary glen, 
 Where there was never sound of mortal men, 
 Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences 
 Melting to silence, when upon the breeze 
 Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet 
 To cheer itself to Delphi," 
 
v.] "ENDYMION." 101 
 
 or presences of old religion strongly conceived and re- 
 alized : 
 
 " Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, 
 
 Came mother Cybele — alone — alone — ■ 
 
 In sombre chariot ; dark foldings thrown 
 
 About her majesty, and front death-pale, 
 
 With turrets crowned." 
 
 After seeing the vision of Cybele, Endymion, still travel- 
 ling through the bowels of the earth, is conveyed on an 
 eagle's back down an unfathomable descent, and alighting, 
 presently finds a "jasmine bower," whither his celestial 
 mistress again stoops to visit him. Next he encounters 
 the streams, and hears the voices of Arethusa and Alpheus 
 on their fabled flight to Ortygia ; as they disappear down 
 a chasm, he utters a prayer to his goddess in their behalf, 
 and then — 
 
 "He turn' d — there was a whelming sound — he stept, 
 There was a cooler light ; and so he kept 
 Towards it by a sandy path, and lo ! 
 More suddenly than doth a moment go, 
 The visions of the earth were gone and fled — 
 He saw the giant sea above his head." 
 
 Hitherto Endymion has been wholly absorbed in his 
 own passion and adventures, but now the fates of others 
 claim his sympathy : first, those of Alpheus and Arethusa, 
 and next, throughout nearly the whole of the third book, 
 those of Glaucus and Scylla. Keats handles this latter 
 legend with great freedom, omitting its main point, the 
 transformation of Scylla by Circe into a devouring mon- 
 ster, and making the enchantress punish her rival, not by 
 this vile metamorphosis, but by death ; or rather a trance 
 resembling death, from which, after many ages, Glaucus is 
 
102 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 enabled by Endymion's help to rescue her, and together 
 with her the whole sorrowful fellowship of true lovers 
 drowned at sea. From the point in the hero's submarine 
 adventures where he first meets Glaucus, 
 
 "He saw far in the green concave of the sea 
 An old man sitting calm and peacefully. 
 Upon a weeded rock this old man sat, 
 And his white hair was awful, and a mat 
 Of weeds was cold beneath his cold thin feet " 
 
 — from this passage to the end of the book, in spite of 
 redundance and occasional ugly flaws, Keats brings home 
 his version of the myth with strong and often exquisite 
 effect to the imagination. No picture can well be more 
 vivid than that of Circe pouring the magic phial upon her 
 victims, and no speech much more telling than that with 
 which the detected enchantress turns and .scathes her un- 
 happy lover. In the same book the description of the 
 sunk treasures cumbering the ocean floor challenges com- 
 parison, not all unequally, with the famous similar passage 
 in Shakspeare's Richard III. In the halls of Neptune 
 Endymion again meets Venus, and receives from her more 
 explicit encouragement than heretofore. Thence Nereids 
 bear him earthward in a trance, during which he reads in 
 spirit words of still more reassuring omen written in star- 
 light on the dark. Since, in his adventure with Glaucus, 
 he has allowed himself to be diverted from his own quest 
 for the sake of relieving the sorrows of others, the hope 
 which before seemed ever to .elude him draws at last 
 nearer to fulfilment. 
 
 It might seem fanciful to suppose that Keats had really 
 in his mind a meaning such as this, but for the conviction 
 he habitually declares that the pursuit of beauty as an aim 
 
v .-j "ENDYMION." 103 
 
 in life is only justified when it is accompanied by the idea 
 of devotion to human service. And in his fourth book 
 he leads his hero through a chain of adventures which 
 seem certainly to have a moral and allegorical meaning, or 
 none at all. Returning in that book to upper air, En- 
 dymion before long half forgets his goddess for the charms 
 of an Indian maiden, the sound of whose lamentations 
 reaches him while he is sacrificing in the forest, and who 
 tells him how she has come wandering in the train of 
 Bacchus from the east. This mysterious Indian maiden 
 proves in fact to be no other than his goddess herself in 
 disguise. But it is long before he discovers this, and in 
 the meantime he is conducted by her side through a be- 
 wildering series of serial ascents, descents, enchanted slum- 
 bers, and Olympian visions. All these, with his infidelity, 
 which is no infidelity after all, his broodings in the Cave 
 of Quietude, his illusions and awakenings, his final farewell 
 to mortality and to Peona, and reunion with his celestial 
 mistress in her own shape, make up a narrative inextric- 
 ably confused, which only becomes partially intelligible 
 when we take it as a parable of a soul's experience in 
 pursuit of the ideal. Let a soul enamoured of the ideal — 
 such would seem the argument — once suffer itself to for- 
 o-et its goal, and to quench for a time its longings in the 
 real, nevertheless it will be still haunted by that lost vision ; 
 amidst all intoxications, disappointment and lassitude will 
 still dog it, until it awakes at last to find that the reality 
 which has thus allured it derives from the ideal its power 
 to charm, that it is after all but a reflection from the ideal, 
 a phantom of it. What chiefly or alone makes the episode 
 poetically acceptable is the strain of lyric poetry which 
 Keats has put into the mouth of the supposed Indian 
 maiden when she tells her story. His later and more 
 H 
 
104 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 famous lyrics, though they are free from the faults and 
 immaturities which disfigure this, yet do not, to my mind at 
 least, show a command over such various sources of imag- 
 inative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many 
 chords of the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful 
 pathos like that of the best Elizabethan love-songs; a 
 sense as keen as Heine's of the immemorial romance of 
 India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and 
 perhaps partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest 
 weird and beautiful associations almost with 4 a word; clear 
 visions of Greek beauty and wild wood -notes of Celtic 
 imagination — all these elements come here commingled, 
 yet in a strain perfectly individual. Keats calls the piece 
 a "roundelay, a form," which it only so far resembles that 
 its opening measures are repeated at the close. It begins 
 with a tender invocation to sorrow, and then with a first 
 change of movement conjures up .image of a deserted 
 maidenhood beside Indian streams ; till suddenly with an- 
 other change comes the irruption of the Asian Bacchus on 
 his march ; next follows the detailed picture of the god 
 and of his rout, suggested in part by the famous Titian 
 at the National Gallery, and then, arranged as if for music, 
 the challenge of the maiden to the Maenads and Satyrs, 
 and their choral answers: 
 
 " ' Whence came ye, merry Damsels ! Whence came ye ! 
 So many, and so many, and such glee ? 
 Why have ye left your bowers desolate, 
 
 Your lutes, and gentler fate ?' 
 ' We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing, 
 
 A conquering ! 
 Bacchus, young Bacchus ! good or ill betide, 
 We dance before him through kingdoms wide : 
 Come hither, lady fair, and joined be 
 
 To our wild minstrelsy !' 
 
v.] "ENDYMION." 105 
 
 ' Whence came ye, jolly Satyrs ! Whence came ye ! 
 
 So many, and so many, and such glee ? 
 
 Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left 
 
 Your nuts in oak-tree cleft ?' — 
 1 For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree ; 
 For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms, 
 
 And cold mushrooms ; 
 For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth ; 
 Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth ! — > 
 Come hither, lady fair, and joined be 
 
 To our mad minstrelsy !' " 
 
 The strophes recounting the victorious journeys are very 
 
 unequal ; and finally, returning to the opening motive, the 
 
 lyric ends as it began, with an exquisite strain of lovelorn 
 
 pathos : 
 
 "Come then, sorrow ! 
 
 Sweetest sorrow ! 
 Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast : 
 
 I thought to leave thee, 
 
 And deceive thee, 
 But now of all the world I love thee best. 
 
 There is not one, 
 
 No, no, not one 
 But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid ; 
 
 Thou art her mother 
 
 And her brother, 
 Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade." 
 
 The high-water mark of poetry in Enclymion is thus 
 reached in the two lyrics of the first and fourth book. Of 
 these, at least, may be said with justice that which Jeffrey 
 was inclined to say of the poem as a whole, that the de- 
 gree to which any reader appreciates them will furnish as 
 good a test as can be obtained of his having in him " a 
 native relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its in- 
 trinsic charm." In the main body of the work beauties 
 
106 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 and faults are so bound up together that a critic may well 
 be struck almost as much by one as by the other. Ad- 
 mirable truth and charm of imagination, exquisite fresh- 
 ness and felicity of touch, mark such brief passages as we 
 have quoted above ; the very soul of "poetry breathes in 
 them and in a hundred others throughout the work; but 
 read farther, and you will in almost every case be brought 
 up by hardly tolerable blemishes of execution and of taste. 
 Thus in the tale told by Glaucus we find a line of strong 
 poetic vision, such as 
 
 "^Esea's isle was wondering at the moon," 
 
 standing alone in a passage of rambling and ineffective 
 over-honeyed narrative; or again, a couplet forced and vul- 
 gar like this, both in rhyme and expression: 
 
 " I look'd — 'twas Scylla ! Cursed, cursed Circe ! 
 vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy ?" 
 
 is followed three lines farther on by a masterly touch of 
 imagination and the heart : 
 
 " Cold, cold indeed 
 Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed 
 The sea-swell took her hair." 
 
 One, indeed, of the besetting faults of his earlier poetry 
 Keats lias shaken off — his muse is seldom tempted now to 
 echo the familiar sentimental chirp of Hunt's. But that 
 tendency which he by nature shared with Hunt, the ten- 
 dency to linger and luxuriate over every imagined pleasure 
 with an over-fond and doting relish, is still strong in him. 
 And to the weaknesses native to his own youth and tem- 
 perament are joined others derived from an exclusive de- 
 votion to the earlier masters of English poetry. The crea- 
 tive impulse of the Elizabethan age, in its waywardness 
 
v.] "ENDYMIOX." 107 
 
 and lack of discipline and discrimination, not less than in 
 its luxuriant strength and freshness, seems actually revived 
 in him. He outdoes even Spenser in his proneness to let 
 Invention ramble and loiter uncontrolled through what 
 wildernesses she will, with Imagination at her heels to dress 
 if possible in living beauty the wonders that she finds 
 there; and sometimes Imagination is equal to the task 
 and sometimes not : and even busy Invention herself occa- 
 sionally flags, and is content to grasp at any idle clue the 
 rhyme holds out to her : 
 
 " — a nymph of Dian'a 
 Wearing a coronal of tender scions " — 
 
 " Does yonder thrush, 
 Schooling its half-fledged little ones to brush 
 About the dewy forest, whisper tales ? — 
 Speak not of grief, young stranger, or cold snails 
 Will slime the rose to-night." 
 
 Chapman especially, among Keats's masters, had this trick 
 of letting thought follow the chance dictation of rhyme. 
 Spenser and Chapman — to say nothing of Chatterton — had 
 farther accustomed his ear to experimental and rash deal- 
 ings with their mother-tongue. English was almost as un- 
 settled a language for him as for them, and he strives to 
 extend its resources, and make them adequate to the range 
 and freshness of his imagery, by the use of compound and 
 other adjectival coinages in Chapman's spirit — " far-spoom- 
 ing Ocean," " eye-earnestly," " dead-drifting," " their surly 
 eyes brow-hidden," "nervy knees," "surgy murmurs" — 
 coinages sometimes legitimate or even happy, but often 
 fantastic and tasteless, as well as by sprinkling his nine- 
 teenth-century diction with such archaisms as " shent," 
 "sith," and "seemlihed" from Spenser, " eterne" from 
 Spenser and William Browne ; or with arbitrary verbal 
 
108 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 forms, as " to folly," " to monitor," " gordian'd up," to 
 " fragment up ;" or with neuter verbs used as active, as to 
 " travel " an eye, to " pace " a team of horses, and vice versa. 
 Hence even when in the other qualities of poetry his work 
 is good, in diction and expression it is apt to be lax and 
 wavering, and full of oddities and discords. 
 
 In rhythm Keats adheres in Endymion to the method 
 he had adopted in Sleep and Poetry, deliberately keeping 
 the sentence independent of the metre, putting full pauses 
 anywhere in his lines rather than at the end, and avoiding 
 any regular beat upon the rhyme. Leigh Hunt thought 
 Keats had carried this method too far, even to the negation 
 of metre. Some later critics have supposed the rhythm 
 of Endymion to have been influenced by the Pharonnida 
 of Chamberlayne : a fourth -rate poet, remarkable chiefly 
 for two things — for the inextricable trailing involution of 
 his sentences, exceeding that of the very worst prose of 
 his time, and for a perverse persistency in ending his he- 
 roic lines with the lightest syllables — prepositions, adverbs, 
 and conjunctions — on which neither pause nor emphasis is 
 possible. 1 
 
 But Keats, even where his verse runs most diffusely, 
 
 1 The following is a fair and characteristic enough specimen of 
 Chamberlayne : 
 
 " Upon the throne, in such a glorious state 
 As earth's adored favourites, there sat 
 The image of a monarch, vested in 
 The spoils of nature's robes, whose price had been 
 A diadem's redemption ; his large size, 
 Beyond this pigmy age, did equalize 
 The admired proportions of those mighty men 
 Whose cast-up bones, grown modern wonders, when 
 Found out, are carefully preserved to tell 
 Posterity how much these times are fell 
 From nature's youthful strength." 
 
v.] "ENDYMION." 109 
 
 rarely fails in delicacy of musical and metrical ear, or in 
 variety and elasticity of sentence structure. There is 
 nothing in his treatment of the measure for which prece- 
 dent may not be found in the work of almost every poet 
 who employed it during the half-century that followed its 
 brilliant revival for the purposes of narrative poetry by Mar- 
 lowe. At most, he can only be said to make a rule of that 
 which with the older poets was rather an exception ; and to 
 seek affinities for him among the tedious by-ways of pro- 
 vincial seventeenth-century verse seems quite superfluous. 
 
 As the best criticism on Keats's Endymion is in his own 
 preface, so its best defence is in a letter he wrote six 
 months after it was printed. " It is as good," he says, 
 " as I had power to make it by myself." Hunt had 
 warned him against the risks of a long poem, and Shelley 
 against those of hasty publication. From much in his 
 performance that was exuberant and crude the classical 
 training and now ripening taste of Shelley might doubt- 
 less have saved him, had he been willing to listen. But 
 he was determined that his poetry should at all times be 
 the true spontaneous expression of his mind. "Had I 
 been nervous," he goes on, " about its being a perfect 
 piece, and with that view asked advice, and trembled over 
 every page, it would not have been written ; for it is not 
 in my nature to fumble. I will write independently. I 
 have written independently ivithout judgment. I may 
 write independently and loith judgment hereafter. The 
 genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a 
 man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by 
 sensation and watchfulness in itself." How well Keats 
 was able to turn the fruits of experience to the benefit of 
 his art, how swift the genius of poetry in him was to work 
 out, as he says, its own salvation, we shall see when we 
 come to consider his next labours. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Northern Tour. — The Blackwood and Quarterly Reviews. — Death of 
 Tom Keats. — Removal to Wentworth Place.— Fanny Brawne.— Ex- 
 cursion to Chichester. — Absorption in Love and Poetry. — Haydon 
 and Money Difficulties. — Family Correspondence. — Darkening Pros- 
 pects. — Summer at Shanklin and Winchester. — Wise Resolutions. — 
 Return from Winchester. [June, 1818— October, 1819.] 
 
 While Keats, in the spring of 1818, was still at Teign- 
 moutb, with Entbjmion on the eve of publication, he had 
 been wavering between two different plans for the imme- 
 diate future. One was to go for a summer's walking tour 
 through Scotland with Charles Brown. "I have many 
 reasons," lie writes to Reynolds, " for going wonder-ways : 
 to make my winter chair free from spleen; to enlarge my 
 vision ; to escape disquisitions on poetry, and Kingston- 
 criticism ; to promote digestion and economize shoe-leath- 
 er. I'll have leather buttons and belt, and if Brown hold 
 his mind, ' over the hills we go.' If my books will keep 
 me to it, then will I take all Europe in turn, and see the 
 kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them." A fort- 
 night later we find him inclining to give up this purpose 
 under an over-mastering sense of the inadequacy of his 
 own attainments, and of the necessity of acquiring knowl- 
 edge, and ever more knowledge, to sustain the flight of 
 poetry : 
 
 " I was proposing to travel over the North this summer. There is 
 but one thing to prevent me. I know nothing — I have read nothing 
 
chap, vi.] NORTHERN TOUR. Ill 
 
 — and I mean to follow Solomon's directions, 'Get learning — get un- 
 derstanding.' I find earlier days are gone by — I find that I can have 
 no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge. I 
 find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to 
 the world. Some do it with their society ; some with their wit; some 
 with their benevolence ; some with a sort of power of conferring pleas- 
 ure and good-humour on all they meet — and in a thousand ways, all 
 dutiful to the command of great nature. There is but one way for 
 me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will 
 pursue it ; and for that end, purpose retiring for some years. I have 
 been hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the lux- 
 urious and a love for philosophy : were I calculated for the former I 
 should be glad ; but as I am not, I shall turn all my soul to the latter." 
 
 After he had come back to Hampstead in May, how- 
 ever, Keats allowed himself to be persuaded, no doubt part- 
 ly by considerations of health, and the recollection of 
 his failure to stand the strain of solitary thought a year 
 before, to resume his original intention. It was agreed 
 between him and Brown that they should accompany 
 George Keats and his bride as far as Liverpool, and then 
 start on foot from Lancaster. They left London accord- 
 ingly on Monday, June 22d. x The coach stopped for din- 
 ner the first day at Redbourn, near St. Albans, where 
 Keats's friend of medical-student days, Mr. Stephens, was 
 in practice. He came to shake hands with the travelling- 
 party at the poet's request, and many years afterwards 
 wrote an account of the interview, the chief point of which 
 is a description of Mrs. George Keats. " Rather short, not 
 what might be strictly called handsome, but looked like a 
 being whom any man of moderate sensibility might easily 
 love. She had the imaginative-poetical cast. Somewhat 
 singular and girlish in her attire. . . . There was something 
 original about her, and John seemed to regard her as a be- 
 1 See Appendix, p. 223. • 
 
 (5 
 
112 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 ing whom be delighted to honour, and introduced her with 
 evident satisfaction." 1 With no other woman or girl 
 friend was Keats ever on such easy and cordial terms of 
 intimacy as with this "Nymph of the downward smile 
 and side -long glance" of his early sonnet — " Sister 
 George," as she had now become ; and for that reason, and 
 on account of the series of charming playful affectionate 
 letters he wrote to her afterwards in America, the portrait 
 above quoted, such as it is, seems worth preserving. 
 
 The farewells at Liverpool over, Keats and Brown went 
 on by coach to Lancaster, and thence began their walk, 
 Keats taking for his reading one book only, the little 
 three-volume edition of Cary's Dante. " I cannot," writes 
 Brown, " forget the joy, the rapture of my friend when he 
 suddenly, and for the first time, became sensible to the full 
 effect of mountain scenery. It was just before our de- 
 scent to the village of Bowness, at a turn of the road, when 
 the lake of Windermere at once came into view. ... All 
 was enchantment to us both." Keats in his own letters 
 says comparatively little about the scenery, and that quite 
 simply and quietly, not at all with the descriptive enthusi- 
 asm of the modern picturesque tourist; nor indeed with 
 so much of that quality as the sedate and fastidious Gray 
 had shown in his itineraries fifty years before. The truth 
 is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like 
 his needs not for its exercise the stimulus of the continued 
 presence of beauty, but on a minimum of experience can 
 summon up and multiply for itself spirit sunsets, and glo- 
 ries of dream and lake and mountain, richer and more va- 
 ried than the mere receptive lover of scenery, eager to en- 
 joy but impotent to create, can witness in a life-time of 
 travel and pursuit. Moreover, whatever the effect on him 
 ' Houghton MSS. 
 
vi.] NORTHERN TOUR. 113 
 
 of that first burst of Windermere, it is evident that as 
 Keats proceeded northwards he found the scenery some- 
 what foreign to his taste. Besides the familiar home beau- 
 ties of England, two ideals of landscape, classic and mediae- 
 val, haunted and allured his imagination almost equally : 
 that of the sunny and fabled south, and that of the shad- 
 owed and adventurous north ; and the Scottish border, with 
 its bleak and moorish, rain-swept and cloud-empurpled hills, 
 and its unhomely cold stone villages, struck him at first as 
 answering to neither. " I know not how it is, the clouds, 
 the sky, the houses, all seem anti-Grecian and anti-Charle- 
 magnish." 
 
 A change, besides, was coming over Keats's thoughts 
 and feelings whereby scenery altogether was beginning to 
 interest him less, and his fellow-creatures more. In the 
 acuteness of childish and boyish sensation, among the sub- 
 urban fields or on sea-side holidays, he had unconsciously 
 absorbed images of nature enough for his faculties to work 
 on through a life-time of poetry ; and now, in his second 
 chamber of Maiden-thought, the appeal of nature yields in 
 his mind to that of humanity. " Scenery is fine," he had 
 already written from Devonshire in the spring, " but hu- 
 man nature is finer." In the Lake country, after climbing 
 Skiddaw one morning early, and walking to Treby the 
 same afternoon, where they watched with amusement the 
 exercises in a country dancing-school : " There was as fine 
 a row of boys and girls," says Keats, " as you ever saw; 
 some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never 
 felt so near the glory of patriotism, the glory of making, 
 by any means, a country happier. This is what I like bet- 
 ter than scenery." The same note recurs frequently in let- 
 ters of a later date. 
 
 From Lancaster the travellers walked first to Ambleside ; 
 
114 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 from Ambleside to the foot of Helvellyn, where they slept, 
 having called by the way on Wordsworth at Rydal, and 
 been disappointed to find him away electioneering. From 
 Helvellyn to Keswick, whence they made the circuit of 
 Derwentwater ; Keswick to Treby, Treby to Wigton, and 
 Wigton to Carlisle, where they arrived on the 1st of July. 
 Thence by coacli to Dumfries, visiting at the latter place 
 the tomb and house of Burns, to whose memory Keats 
 wrote a sonnet, by no means in his best vein. From Dum- 
 fries they started south-westwards for Galloway, a region 
 little frequented even now, and then hardly at all, by 
 tourists. Reaching the Kirkcudbrightshire coast, with its 
 scenery at once wild and soft, its embosomed inlets and 
 rocky tufted headlands, its views over the glimmering Sol- 
 way to the hazy hills of Man, Brown bethought him that 
 this was Guy Mannering's country, and began to tell Keats 
 about Meg Merrilies. Keats, who, according to the fashion 
 of his circle, was no enthusiast for Scott's poetry and of 
 the Waverley novels, had read the Antiquary but not Guy 
 Manneriny, was much struck ; and presently, writes Brown, 
 " there was a little spot, close to our pathway. l There,' 
 he said, ' in that very spot, without a shadow of doubt, has 
 old Meg Merrilies often boiled her kettle.' It was among 
 pieces of rock and brambles and broom, ornamented with 
 a profusion of honeysuckles and roses and foxgloves, and 
 all in the very blush and fulness of blossom." As they 
 went along, Keats composed on Scott's theme the spirited 
 ballad beginning " Old Meg, she was a gypsy," and stop- 
 ping to breakfast at Auchencairn, copied it out in a letter 
 which he was Writing to his young sister at odd moments, 
 and again in another letter which he began at the same 
 place to Tom. It was his way on his tour, and indeed al- 
 ways, thus to keep by him the letters he was writing, and 
 
tl] NORTHERN TOUR. 115 
 
 add scraps to them as the fancy took him. The system- 
 atic Brown, on the other hand, wrote regularly and uni- 
 formly in the evenings. "He affronts my indolence and 
 luxury," says Keats, " by pulling out of his knapsack, first 
 his paper, secondly his pens, and last his ink. Now I 
 would not care if he would change a little. I say now, 
 why not take out his pens first sometimes? But I might 
 as well tell a lien to hold up her head before she drinks, 
 instead of afterwards." 
 
 From Kirkcudbright they walked, on July 5th — skirting 
 the wild moors about the Water of Fleet, and passing 
 where Cairnsraore looks down over wooded slopes to the 
 steaming estuary of the Cree — as far as Newton Stewart; 
 thence across the Wigtonshire levels by Glenluce to Stran- 
 raer and Portpatrick. Here they took the Donaghadee 
 packet for Ireland, with the intention of seeing the Giant's 
 Causeway, but finding the distances and expense exceed 
 their calculation, contented themselves with a walk to Bel- 
 fast, and crossed again to Portpatrick on the third day. 
 In letters written during and immediately after this excur- 
 sion, Keats has some striking passages of human observa- 
 tion and reflection : 
 
 " These Kirk-men have done Scotland good. They have made 
 men, women, old men, young men, old women, young women, hags, 
 girls, and infants, all careful ; so they are formed into regular 
 phalanges of savers and gainers. . . . These Kirk-men have done 
 Scotland harm ; they have banished puns, love, and laughing. To re- 
 mind you of the fate of Burns — poor, unfortunate fellow ! his dispo- 
 sition was Southern! How sad it is when a luxurious imagination 
 is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity and in 
 things attainable, that it may not have leisure to go mad after things 
 that are not ! ... I would sooner be a wild deer than a girl under the 
 dominion of the Kirk ; and I would sooner be a wild hog than be the 
 occasion of a poor creature's penance before those execrable elders." 
 
H6 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 "On our return from Belfast we met a sedan — the Duchess of 
 Dunghill. It was no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst 
 dog-kennel you ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fenc- 
 ing. In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like 
 an ape half-starved from a scarcity of biscuit in its passage from 
 Madagascar to the Cape, with a pipe in her mouth, and looking out 
 with a round-eyed, skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal 
 idiotic movement of her head : squat and lean she sat, and puffed 
 out the smoke, while two ragged, tattered girls carried her along. 
 What a thing would be a history of her life and sensations !" 
 
 From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns's 
 country, walking along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, 
 Kirkoswald, and Maybole, to Ayr, with the lonely mass of 
 Ailsa Crag, and presently the mountains of Arran, loom- 
 ing ever above the Atlantic floor on the left; and here 
 again we find Keats taking a keen pleasure in the mingled 
 richness and wildness of the coast scenery. They went to 
 Kirk Alloway, and he was delighted to find the home of 
 Burns amid scenes so fair. He had made up his mind to 
 write a sonnet in the cottage of that poet's birth, and did 
 so, but was worried by the prate of the man in charge — 
 "a mahogany -faced old jackass who knew Burns: he 
 ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him " — 
 " his gab hindered my sublimity : the flat dog made me 
 write a flat sonnet." And again, as they journeyed on 
 towards Glasgow he composed with considerable pains (as 
 Brown particularly mentions) the lines beginning ' There 
 is a charm in footing slow across a silent plain.' They 
 were meant to express the temper in which his pilgrimage 
 through the Burns country had been made, but in spite of 
 an occasional striking breadth and concentration of im- 
 agery, are on the whole forced and unlike himself. 
 
 From Ayr Keats and Brown tramped on to Glasgow, 
 and from Glasgow by Dumbarton through the Lady of the 
 
TL ] NORTHERN TOUR. 117 
 
 Lake country, which they found vexatiously full of tour- 
 ists, to Inverary, and thence by Loch Awe to Oban. At 
 Inverary Keats was amused and exasperated by a perform- 
 ance of The Stranger to an accompaniment of bagpipe 
 music. Bathing in Loch Fyne the next morning, he got 
 horribly bitten by gadflies, and vented his smart in a set 
 of doggerel rhymes. The walk along the shores of Loch 
 Awe impressed him greatly, and for once he writes of it 
 something like a set description, for the benefit of his 
 brother Tom. At the same point occur for the first time 
 complaints, slight at first, of fatigue and discomfort. At 
 the beginning of his tour Keats had written to his sister 
 of its effects upon his sleep and appetite ; telling her how 
 he tumbled into bed " so fatigued that when I am asleep 
 you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me 
 round the town, like a hoop, without waking me. Then I 
 get so hungry a ham goes but a very little way, and fowls 
 
 are like larks to me I can eat a bull's head as easily as 
 
 I used to do bull's eyes." Presently he writes that he is 
 getting used to it, and doing his twenty miles or more a 
 day without inconvenience. But now in the remoter parts 
 of the Highlands the coarse fare and accommodation, and 
 rough journeys and frequent drenchings, begin to tell upon 
 both him and Brown, and he grumbles at the perpetual 
 diet of oatcake and eggs. Arrived at Oban, the friends 
 undertook one journey in especial which proved too much 
 for Keats's strength. Finding the regular tourist route by 
 water to Staffa and Iona too expensive, they were per- 
 suaded to take the ferry to the hither side of the island of 
 Mull, and then with a guide cross on foot to the farther 
 side opposite Iona : a wretched walk, as Keats calls it, of 
 some thirty-seven miles, over difficult ground and in the 
 very roughest weather. By good luck the sky lifted at 
 
US KEATS. [chap- 
 
 the critical' moment, and the travellers had a favourable 
 view of Staffa. By the power of the past and its associa- 
 tions in the one "illustrious island," and of nature's archi- 
 tecture in the other, Keats shows himself naturally much 
 impressed. Fingal's Cave in especial touched his imagina- 
 tion, and on it and its profanation by the race of tourists 
 he wrote, in the seven-syllable metre which no writer since 
 Ben Jonson has handled better or more vigorously, the 
 lines beginning " Not Aladdin Magian." Avoiding mere 
 epithet-work and description, like the true poet he is, he 
 begins by calling up for comparison the visions of other 
 fanes or palaces of enchantment, and then, bethinking him- 
 self of Milton's cry to Lycidas 
 
 " — where'er thy bones are hurl'd, 
 Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides " — 
 
 imagines that lost one to have been found by the divinity 
 of Ocean, and put by him in charge of this cathedral of 
 his building. In his priestly character Lycidas tells his 
 latter-day visitant of the religion of the place, complains 
 of the violation of its solitude, and ends with a fine ab- 
 ruptness which is the most effective stroke of art in the 
 
 piece : ^ 
 
 " So for ever I will leave 
 
 Such a taint, and soon unweave 
 
 All the magic of the place ! l 
 
 So saying, with a spirit's glance 
 He dived." 
 
 From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on 
 his Scotch tour, and especially in this Mull expedition, are 
 to be traced the first distinct and settled symptoms of fail- 
 ure in Keats's health, and of the development of his hered- 
 1 See Appendix, p. 223. 
 
vi.] NORTHERN TOUR. IVJ 
 
 itary tendency to consumption. In the same letter to his 
 brother Tom which contains the transcript of the Fino-al 
 poem, he speaks of a " slight sore throat," and of being- 
 obliged to rest for a day or two at Oban. Thence they 
 pushed on in bad weather to Fort William, made the as- 
 cent of Ben Nevis in a dissolving mist, and so by the 6th 
 of August to Inverness. Keats's throat had in the mean 
 time been getting worse ; the ascent, and especially the de- 
 .scent, of Ben Nevis had, as he confesses, tried him : fever- 
 ish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at 
 Inverness thought his condition threatening, and forbade 
 him to continue his tour. Accordingly he took passage 
 on the 8th or 9th of August from the port of Cromarty 
 for London, leaving his companion to pursue his journey 
 alone — "much lamenting," to quote Brown's own words, 
 " the loss of his beloved intelligence at my side." Keats 
 in some degree picked up strength during a nine days' sea 
 passage, the humours of which he afterwards described 
 pleasantly in a letter to his brother George. But his 
 throat trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really 
 or for any length of time left him afterwards. On the 
 18th of August he arrived at Hampstead, and made his 
 appearance among his friends the next day, " as brown 
 and as shabby as you can imagine," writes Mrs. Dilke ; 
 " scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn at the back, a 
 fur cap, a great plaid, and his knapsack. I cannot tell 
 what he looked like." When he found himself seated, for 
 the first time after his hardships, in a comfortable stuffed 
 chair, we are told how he expressed a comic enjoyment of 
 the sensation, quoting at himself the words in which Quince 
 the carpenter congratulates his gossip the weaver on his 
 metamorphosis. 1 
 
 1 Severn in Houghton MSS. 
 6* I 
 
120 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Simultaneously almost with Keats's return from the 
 North appeared attacks on him in Blackwood's Magazine 
 and the Quarterly Review. The Blackwood article, be- 
 ing No, IV. of a series bearing the signature "Z" on the 
 "Cockney School of Poetry," was printed in the August 
 number of the magazine. The previous articles of the 
 same series, as well as a letter similarly signed, bad been 
 directed against Leigh Hunt, in a strain of insult so pre- 
 posterous as to be obviously inspired by the mere wan- 
 tonness of partisan licence. It is not quite certain who 
 wrote them, but there is every reason to believe that they 
 were the work of Wilson, suggested and perhaps revised 
 by the publisher, William Blackwood, at this time his own 
 sole editor. Not content with attacking Hunt's opinions, 
 or his real weaknesses as a writer or a man, his Edinburgh 
 critics must needs heap on him the grossest accusations of 
 vice and infamy. In the course of these articles allusion 
 had several times been made to " Johnny Keats " as an 
 " amiable bardling " and puling satellite of the arch-offend- 
 er and king of Cockaigne, Hunt. When now Keats's own 
 turn came his treatment was mild in comparison with 
 that of his supposed leader. The strictures on his work 
 are idle and offensive, but not more so than is natural to 
 unsympathetic persons full of prejudice and wishing to 
 hurt. " Cockney " had been in itself a fair enough label 
 for a hostile critic to fasten upon Hunt; neither was it 
 altogether inapplicable to Keats, having regard to the facts 
 of his origin and training — that is, if we choose to forget 
 that the measure of a man is not his experience, but the 
 use he is able to make of it. The worst part of the Keats 
 review was in its personalities — " so back to the shop, Mr. 
 John, stick to ' plasters, pills, ointment boxes,' etc." — and 
 what made these worse was the manner in which the ma- 
 
VI -| THE REVIEWS: BLACKWOOD. 121 
 
 terials for them had been obtained. Keats's friend Bailey 
 had by this time taken his degree, and after publishing 
 a friendly notice of Endymion in the Oxford Herald for 
 June, had left the University and gone to settle in a cu- 
 racy in Cumberland. In the course of the summer he 
 staid at Stirling, at the house of Bishop Gleig, whose 
 son, afterwards the well-known writer and Chaplain-gen- 
 eral to the forces, was his friend, and whose daughter (a 
 previous love-affair with one of the Reynold sisters having 
 fallen through) he soon afterwards married. Here Bailey 
 met Lockhart, then in the hey-day of his brilliant and 
 bitter youth, lately admitted to the intimacy of Scott, 
 and earning on the staff of Blackwood and otherwise the 
 reputation and the nickname of " Scorpion." Bailey, anx- 
 ious to save Keats from the sort of treatment to which 
 Hunt had already been exposed, took the opportunity of 
 telling Lockhart in a friendly way his circumstances and 
 history, explaining at the same time that his attachment 
 to Leigh Hunt was personal and not political, pleading 
 that he should not be made an object of party denuncia- 
 tion, and ending with the request that, at any rate, what 
 had been thus said in confidence should not be used to his 
 disadvantage. To which Lockhart replied that certainly 
 it should not be so used by him. Within three weeks 
 the article appeared, making use, to all appearance, and to 
 Bailey's great indignation, of the very facts he had thus 
 confidentially communicated. 
 
 To the end of his life Bailey remained convinced that 
 whether or not Lockhart himself wrote the piece, he must, 
 at any rate, have prompted and supplied the materials for 
 it. 1 It seems, in fact, all but certain that he actually wrote 
 
 1 Houghton MSS. 
 
122 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 it. 1 If so, it was a felon stroke on Lockhart's part, and to 
 forgive him we must needs remember all the gratitude 
 that is his due for his filial allegiance to, and his immor- 
 tal biography of, Scott. But even in that connection our 
 grudge against him revives again, since, in the party vio- 
 lence of the time and place, Scott himself was drawn into 
 encouraging the savage polemics of his young Edinburgh 
 friends, and that he was in some measure privy to the 
 Cockney School outrages seems certain. Such, at least, 
 was the impression prevailing at the time; 2 and when 
 Severn, who did not know it, years afterwards innocently 
 approached the subject of Keats and his detractors in con- 
 versation with Scott at Rome, he observed both in Scott 
 and his daughter signs of pain and confusion which he 
 could only interpret in the same sense. 8 It is hard to say 
 whether the thought of the great-hearted Scott, the soul 
 most free from jealousy or harshness, thus associated with 
 an act of stupid cruelty to genius, is one to make us the 
 more indignant against those who so misled him, or the 
 more patient of mistakes committed by commoner spirits 
 among the distracting cries and blind collisions of the 
 world. 
 
 The Quarterly article on Enclymion followed in the 
 last week of September (in the number dated April), and 
 was in an equally contemptuous strain, the writer pro- 
 
 1 Dilkc (in a MS. note to his copy of Lord Houghton's Life and 
 Letters, ed. 1848) states positively that Lockhart afterwards owned 
 as much; and there are tricks of style — e.g., the use of the Spanish 
 Sangrado for doctor — which seem distinctly to betray his hand. 
 
 2 Leigh Hunt at first believed that Scott himself was the writer, 
 and Haydon to the last fancied it was Scott's faithful satellite, the 
 actor Terry. 
 
 8 Severn in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. ii., p. 401. 
 
VI j THE REVIEWS. 123 
 
 fessing to Lave been unable to read beyond the first canto, 
 or to make bead or tail of that. In tins case again the 
 question of authorship must remain uncertain ; but Gif- 
 ford as editor, and an editor who never shrank from cut- 
 ting a contributor's work to his own pattern, must bear 
 the responsibility with posterity. The review is quite in 
 his manner, that of a man insensible to the higher charm 
 of poetry, incapable of judging it except by mechanical 
 rule and precedent, and careless of the pain he gives. 
 Considering the perfect modesty and good judgment with 
 which Keats had, in his preface, pointed out the weaknesses 
 of his own work, the attacks are both alike inexcusable. 
 They had the effect of promptly rousing the poet's friends 
 in his defence. Reynolds published a warm rejoinder to 
 the Quarterly reviewer in a West-country paper, the Al- 
 fred; an indignant letter on the same side appeared in 
 the Morning Chronicle with the initials J. S.— those prob- 
 ably of John Scott, then editor of the London Magazine, 
 and soon afterwards killed by a friend of Lockhart's in a 
 duel arising out of these very Blackwood brawls, in which 
 it was thought that Lockhart himself ought to have come 
 forward. Leigh Hunt reprinted Reynolds's letter, with 
 some introductory words, in the Examiner, and later in 
 his life regretted that he had not done more. But he 
 could not have done more to any purpose. He was not 
 himself an enthusiastic admirer of LJndymion, and had 
 plainly said so to Keats and to his friends. Reynolds's 
 piece, which he reprinted, was quite effective and to the 
 point; and, moreover, any formal defence of Keats by 
 Hunt would only have increased the virulence of his ene- 
 mies, as they both perfectly well knew ; folly and spite 
 being always ready to cry out that praise of a friend by a 
 friend must needs be interested or blind. 
 
124 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Neither was Keats's demeanour under the lash such as 
 could make his friends suppose him particularly hurt. 
 Proud iu the extreme, he had no irritable vanity ; and aim- 
 ing in his art, if not always steadily, yet always at the high- 
 est, he rather despised than courted such success as he saw 
 some of his contemporaries enjoy. " I hate," he says, " a 
 mawkish popularity." Even in the hopes of permanent 
 fame which he avowedly cherished, there was nothing in- 
 temperate or impatient, and he was conscious of perceiving 
 his own shortcomings at least as clearly as his critics. Ac- 
 cordingly he took his treatment at their hands more coolly 
 than older and less sensitive men had taken the like. Hunt 
 had replied indignantly to his Blackwood traducers, repel- 
 ling scorn with scorn. Hazlitt endeavoured to have the 
 law of them. Keats at the first sting declared, indeed, that 
 he would write no more poetry, but try to do what good 
 he could to the world in some other way. Then quickly 
 recovering himself, he with great dignity and simplicity 
 treated the annoyance as one merely temporary, indifferent, 
 and external. When Mr. Hessey sent for his encourage- 
 ment the extracts from the papers in which he had been 
 defended, he wrote : 
 
 "I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken 
 my part. As for the rest, I begin to get a little acquainted with my 
 own strength and weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary 
 effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a 
 severe critic on his own works. My own domestic criticism has giv- 
 en me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quar- 
 terly could possibly inflict ; and also when I feel I am right, no ex- 
 ternal praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary repercep- 
 tion and ratification of what is fine." 
 
 And again : " There have been two letters in my defence in the 
 Chronicle and one in the Examiner, copied from the Exeter paper, 
 and written by Reynolds. I don't know who wrote those in the Chron- 
 
vi.] DEATH OF TOM KEATS. 125 
 
 icle. This is a mere matter of the moment : I think I shall be among 
 the English Poets after my death. Even as a matter of present in- 
 terest, the attempt to crush me in the Quarterly has only brought me 
 more into notice, and it is a common expression among bookmen, 'I 
 wonder the Quarterly should cut its own throat.' " 
 
 In point of fact an unknown admirer from the West 
 Country sent Keats about this time a letter and sonnet of 
 sympathy, with which was enclosed a further tribute in the 
 shape of a £25 note. Keats w 7 as both pleased and dis- 
 pleased. " If I had refused it," he says, " I should have 
 behaved in a very braggadocio, dunderheaded manner, and 
 yet the present galls me a little." About the same time 
 he received, through his friend Richard Woodhouse, a 
 young barrister who acted in some sort as literary adviser 
 or assistant to Messrs. Taylor & Hessey, 1 a glowing letter 
 of sympathy and encouragement from Miss Porter, " of 
 Romance celebrity," by which he shows himself in his re- 
 ply not more flattered than politeness demands. 
 
 Keats was really living, during the stress of these Black- 
 wood and Quarterly storms, under the pressure of another 
 and far more heartfelt trouble. His Hampstead friends, 
 before they heard of his intended return from Scotland, 
 had felt reluctantly bound to write and summon him home 
 on account of the alarming condition of his brother Tom. 
 He had left the invalid behind in their lodgings at Well 
 Walk, and found that he had grown rapidly worse during 
 his absence. In fact the case was desperate, and for the 
 next few months Keats' s chief occupation was the harrow- 
 ing one of watching and ministering to this dying brother. 
 In a letter written in the third week of September he 
 speaks thus of his feelings and occupations : " I wish I 
 could say Tom was better. His identity presses upon me 
 1 See Preface, p. vii. 
 
126 KEATS. 
 
 1CUAP 
 
 so all day that I am obliged to go out ; and although I had 
 intended to have given some time to study alone, I am 
 obliged to write and plunge into abstract images to ease 
 myself of his countenance, his voice, and feebleness, so 
 that I live now in a continual fever. It must be poison- 
 ous to life, although I feel well. Imagine 'the hateful 
 siege of contraries ;' if I think of fame, of poetry, it seems 
 a crime to me, and yet I must do so or suffer." And 
 again, about the same time, to Reynolds : " I never was in 
 love, yet the voice and shape of a woman have haunted me 
 these two days — at such a time, when the relief, the fever- 
 ous relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. This morn- 
 ing poetry has conquered ; I have relapsed into those ab- 
 stractions which are my only life ; I feel escaped from a 
 new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am thankful 
 for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a 
 load of immortality." As the autumn wore on, the task 
 of the watcher grew ever more sorrowful and absorbing. 1 
 On the 29th of October Keats wrote to his brother and 
 sister-in-law in America, warning them, in language of a 
 beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to be prepared 
 for the worst. For the next month his time was almost 
 wholly taken up by the sick-bed, and in the first week of 
 December the end came. "Early one morning," writes 
 Brown, " I was awakened in my bed by a pressure on my 
 hand. It was Keats, who came to tell me that his brother 
 was no more. I said nothing, and we both remained silent 
 for a while, my hand fast locked in his. At length, my 
 thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said, 
 'Have nothing more to do with those lodgings — and 
 alone, too! Had you not better live with me?' He 
 paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied, 'I think 
 1 See Appendix, p. 224. 
 
vl] REMOVAL TO WENT WORTH PLACE. 127 
 
 it would be better.' From that moment lie was my in- 
 mate." 1 
 
 Brown, as has been said already, had built and lived "in 
 one part — the smaller eastern part — of the block of two 
 semi-detached houses near the bottom of John Street, 
 Hampstead, to which Dilke, who built and occupied the 
 other part, had given the name of Wentworth Place. 2 The 
 accommodation in Brown's quarters included a front and 
 back sitting-room on the ground floor, with a front and 
 back bedroom over them. The arrangement with Keats 
 was that he should share household expenses, occupying 
 the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. 
 As soon, relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and 
 friendship had in some measure alleviated his grief, Keats 
 became gradually once more absorbed in poetry, his special 
 task being Hyperion, at which he had already begun to 
 work before his brother died. But not wholly absorbed, 
 for there was beginning to wind itself about his heart a 
 new spell more powerful than that of poetry itself. It 
 was at this time that the flame caught him which he had 
 always presciently sought to avoid " lest it should burn him 
 up." With his quick self-knowledge he had early realised, 
 not to his satisfaction, his own peculiar mode of feeling 
 towards womankind. Chivalrously and tremulously de- 
 voted to his mind's ideal of the sex, he found himself only 
 too critical of the real women that he met, and too ready 
 to perceive or suspect faults in them. Conscious, at the 
 same time, of the fire of sense and blood within him, he 
 
 1 Houghton MSS. 
 
 2 The house is now known as Lawn Bank, the two blocks having 
 been thrown into one, with certain alterations and additions which in 
 the summer of 1885 were pointed out to me in detail by Mr. William 
 Dilke, the then surviving brother of Keats's friend. 
 
128 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 had thought himself partly fortunate in being saved from 
 the entanglements of passion by his sense of this differ- 
 ence between the reality and his ideal. The set of three 
 sonnets in his first volume, beginning, " Woman, when I 
 beheld thee flippant, vain," had given expression half grace- 
 fully, half awkwardly, to this state of mind. Its persist- 
 ency is affirmed often in his letters. 
 
 " I am certain," he wrote to Bailey from Scotland, " I have not a 
 right feeling towards women — at this moment I am striving to be 
 just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my 
 boyish imagination ? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair wom- 
 an a pure goddess ; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of 
 them slept, though she knew it not. I have no right to expect more 
 than their reality. I thought them ethereal, above men. I find 
 them perhaps equal — great by comparison is very small. ... Is it 
 not extraordinary ? — when among men I have no evil thoughts, no 
 malice, no spleen ; I feel free to speak or to be silent ; I can listen, 
 and from every one I can learn ; my hands are in my pockets, I am 
 free from all suspicion, and comfortable. When I am among wom- 
 en I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen ; I cannot speak, or be si- 
 lent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am 
 in a hurry to be gone. ... I must absolutely get over this — but 
 how ?" 
 
 In a fine passage of a letter to his relatives in America 
 he alleges this general opinion of women, and with it his 
 absorption in the life, or rather the hundred lives, of im- 
 agination, as reasons for hoping that he will never marry : 
 
 " The roaring of the wind is my wife, and the stars through my 
 window-panes are my children; the mighty abstract idea of Beauty 
 in all things I have stifles the more divided and minute domestic 
 happiness. An amiable wife and sweet children I contemplate as 
 part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful 
 particles to fill up my heart. I feel more and more every day, as my 
 imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but 
 
vi.] FANNY BRAWNE. 129 
 
 in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic 
 greatness are stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office 
 which is equivalent to a King's Body-guard: 'then Tragedy with 
 scepter'd pall comes sweeping by.' According to my state of mind 
 I am with Achilles shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in 
 the vales of Sicily ; or throw my whole being into Troilus, and, re- 
 peating those lines, 'I wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, 
 staying for waftage,' I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so del- 
 icate that I am content to be alone. These things, combined with 
 the opinion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear 
 to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than 
 my time, form a barrier against matrimony that I rejoice in." 
 
 But now Keats's hour was come. Since his return from 
 Scotland, in the midst of his watching by his brother's 
 sick-bed, we have seen him confessing himself haunted al- 
 ready by the shape of a woman. This was a certain Miss 
 Charlotte Cox, a West - Indian cousin of Reynolds's, to 
 whom he did not think the Reynolds sisters were quite 
 kind. A few days later he writes again how he has been 
 attracted by her rich Eastern look and grace. Very soon, 
 however, the attraction passed, and this " Charmian " left 
 him fancy-free, but only to find his fate elsewhere. A 
 Mrs. Brawne, a widow lady of some little property, with 
 a daughter just grown up and two younger children, had 
 taken Brown's house for the summer while he was away 
 in Scotland. Here the Brawnes had naturally become ac- 
 quainted with the Dilkes, living next door ; the acquaint- 
 ance was kept up when they moved from Brown's house 
 to one in Downshire Street close by; and it was at the 
 Dilkes' that Keats met Miss Fanny Brawne after his re- 
 turn. Her ways and presence at first irritated and after 
 a little while completely fascinated him. From his first 
 sarcastic account of her written to his brother, as well as 
 from Severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure 
 
130 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 in Titian's picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from 
 the full-length silhouette of her that has been preserved, it 
 is not difficult to realise her aspect and presence. A brisk 
 and blooming very young beauty, of the far from uncom- 
 mon English hawk blonde type, with aquiline nose and 
 retreating forehead, sharp-cut nostril and gray-blue eye, a 
 slight, shapely figure rather short than tall, a taking smile, 
 and good hair, carriage and complexion — such was Fan- 
 ny Brawne externally, but of her character we have little 
 means of judging. She was certainly high-spirited, inex- 
 perienced, and self - confident ; as certainly, though kind 
 and constant to her lover, in spite of prospects that before 
 Jong grew dark, she did not fully realise what manner of 
 man he was. Both his men and women friends, without 
 thinking unkindly of her, were apparently of one opinion 
 in holding her no mate for him either in heart or mind, 
 and in regarding the attachment as unlucky. 
 
 So it assuredly was ; so, probably, under the circum- 
 stances, must any passion for a woman have been. Stroke 
 on stroke of untoward fortune had in truth begun to fall 
 on Keats, as if in fulfilment of the constitutional misgiv- 
 ings of his darker moods. First the departure of his 
 brother George had deprived him of his chief friend, to 
 whom almost alone he had from boyhood been accustomed 
 to turn for relief in hours of despondency. Next the 
 exertions of his Scotch tour had over-taxed his strength, 
 and unchained, though as yet he knew it not, the deadly 
 hereditary enemy in his blood. Coming back, he had found 
 the grasp of that enemy closed inexorably upon his brother 
 Tom, and in nursing him had lived in spirit through all his 
 pains. At the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little 
 as they might touch his inner self, came to teach him the 
 harshness and carelessness of the world's judgments, and 
 
vi.] CHICHESTER : " THE EVE OF ST. AGNES." 131 
 
 the precariousness of his practical hopes from literature. 
 Last were added the pangs of love — love requited, indeed, 
 but having no near or sure prospect of fruition ; and even 
 love disdained might have made him suffer less. The pas- 
 sion wrought fiercely in his already fevered blood ; its alter- 
 nations of doubt and torment and tantalising rapture sapped 
 his powers, and redoubled every strain to which bereave- 
 ment, shaken health, and anticipations of poverty, exposed 
 them. Within a year the combined assault proved too 
 much for his strength, and he broke down. But in the 
 meantime he showed a brave face to the world, and while 
 anxiety gnawed and passion wasted him, was able to throw 
 himself into the labours of his art with a fruitful, if a fitful, 
 energy. During the first few weeks of winter following 
 his brother's death he wrote, indeed, as he tells Haydon, 
 "only a little now and then, but nothing to speak of — be- 
 ing discontented, and as it were moulting." Yet such work 
 as Keats did at this time was done at the very height of 
 his powers, and included parts both of Hyperion and The 
 Eve of St. Agnes. 
 
 Within a month of the date of the above extract the 
 latter piece was finished, having been written out during a 
 visit which Keats and Brown paid in Sussex in the latter 
 part of January (1819). They staid for a few days with 
 the father of their friend Dilke in Chichester, and for near- 
 ly a fortnight with his sister and brother-in-law, the Snooks, 
 at Bedhampton, close by. Keats liked his hosts and re- 
 ceived pleasure from his visit ; but his health kept him 
 much indoors, his only outings being to "a couple of dow- 
 ager card-parties," and to a gathering of country clergy on 
 a wet day, at the consecration of a chapel for converted 
 Jews. The latter ceremony jarred on his nerves, and caused 
 him to write afterwards to his brother an entertainin<r 
 
182 KEATS. ' [chap. 
 
 splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiogno- 
 my. Daring- his stay at Chichester he also seems to have 
 begun, or at any rate conceived, the poem on theJSve of St 
 Mark, which he never finished, and which remains so in- 
 teresting a pre-Raphaelite fragment in his work. 
 
 Returning at the beginning of February, Keats resumed 
 his life at Hampstead under Brown's roof. He saw much 
 less society than the winter before, the state of his throat 
 compelling him, for one thing, generally to avoid the night 
 air. But the chief cause of his seclusion was no doubt the 
 passion which was beginning to engross him, and to dead- 
 en his interest in the other relations of life. The stages 
 by which it grew on him we cannot follow. His own ac- 
 count of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he had 
 written himself her vassal within a week of their first meet- 
 ing. His real first feeling for her, as we can see by his let- 
 ters written at the time, had been one— the most perilous 
 indeed to peace of mind — of strong mixed attraction and 
 aversion. He might seem to have got no farther by the 
 14th of February, when he writes to his brother and sister- 
 in-law in America, " Miss Brawne and I have every now 
 and then a chat and a tiff ;" but this is rather to be taken 
 as an instance of his extreme general reticence on the sub- 
 ject, and it is probable that by this time, if not sooner, the 
 attachment was in fact avowed and the engagement made. 
 The secret violence of Keats' s passion, and the restless 
 physical jealousy which accompanied it, betray themselves 
 in the verses addressed To Fanny, which belong apparent- 
 ly to this date. They are written very unequally, but with 
 his true and brilliant felicity of touch here and there. The 
 occasion is the presence of his mistress at some dance : 
 
 " Who now with greedy looks, eats up my feast ? 
 What stare outfaces now my silver moon ? 
 
vi.] ABSORPTION IN LOVE AND POETRY. 133 
 
 Ah ! keep that hand unravished at the least ; 
 Let, let the amorous burn — 
 But, pr'ythee, do not turn 
 The current of your heart from me so soon, 
 ! save, in charity, 
 The quickest pulse for me. 
 
 Save it for me, sweet love ! though music breathe 
 
 Voluptuous visions into the warm air, 
 Though swimming through the dance's dangerous wreath ; 
 Be like an April day, 
 Smiling and cold and gay, 
 A temperate lily, temperate as fair ; 
 Then, Heaven ! there will be 
 A warmer June for me." 
 
 If Keats thus found in verse occasional relief from the 
 violence of his feelings, lie sought for none in his corre- 
 spondence either with his brother or his friends. Except 
 in the lightest passing allusion, he makes no direct men- 
 tion of Miss Brawne in his letters ; partly, no doubt, from 
 mere excess of sensitiveness, dreading to profane his treas- 
 ure ; partly because he knew, and could not bear the 
 thought, that both his friends and hers, in so far as they 
 guessed the attachment, looked on it unfavourably. Brown 
 after a little while could hardly help being in the secret, 
 inasmuch as when the Dilkes left Ilampstead in April, and 
 went to live at Westminster, the Brawnes again took their 
 house; so that Keats and Brown thenceforth had the 
 young lady and her family for next-door neighbours. Dilke 
 himself, but apparently not till many months later, writes : 
 " It is quite a settled thing between John Keats and Miss 
 Brawne, God help them. It's a bad thing for them. The 
 mother says she cannot prevent it, and her only hope is 
 that it will go off. He don't like any one to look at her 
 or speak to her." Other friends, including one so inti- 
 
134 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 mate and so affectionate as Severn, never realised until 
 Keats was on his death-bed that there had been an engage- 
 ment, or that his relations with Miss Brawne had been oth- 
 er than those of ordinary intimacy between neighbours. 
 
 Intense and jealous as Keats's newly awakened passion 
 was, it seemed at first to stimulate rather than distract him 
 in the exercise of his now ripened poetic gift. The spring 
 of this year, 1819, seems to repeat in a richer key the his- 
 tory of the last ; fits of inspiration succeeding to fits of 
 lassitude, and growing more frequent as the season ad- 
 vanced. Between the beginning of February and the be- 
 ginning of June he wrote many of his best shorter poems, 
 including apparently all except one of his six famous odes. 
 About the middle of February he speaks of having taken a 
 stroll among the marbles of the British Museum, and the 
 ode On Indolence and the ode On a Grecian Urn, written 
 two or three months later, show how the charm of ancient 
 sculpture was at this time working in his mind. The fit 
 of morning idleness which helped to inspire the former 
 piece is recorded in his correspondence under the date of 
 March 19th. The lines beginning "Bards of passion and of 
 mirth" are dated the 26th of the same month. On the 
 15th of April he sends off to his brother, as the last poem 
 he has written, the ode To Psyche, only less perfect and 
 felicitous than that On a Grecian Urn. About a week 
 later the nightingale would be beginning to sing. Present- 
 ly it appeared that one had built her nest in Brown's gar- 
 den, near his house. 
 
 "Keats," writes Brown, "felt a tranquil and continual joy in her 
 song ; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to 
 the grass-plot under a plum, where he sat for two or three hours. 
 When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of pa- 
 per in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. 
 
vi.] HAYDON AND MONEY DIFFICULTIES. 135 
 
 On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained 
 his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. The^writing was 
 not well legible, and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so 
 many scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his Ode 
 to a NigMingale. . . . Immediately afterwards I searched for more of 
 his (in reality) fugitive pieces, in which task, at my request, he again 
 assisted me. . . . From that day he gave me permission to copy any 
 verses he might write, and I fully availed myself of it. He cared so 
 little for them himself, when once, as it appeared to me, his imagina- 
 tion was released from their influence, that he required a friend at 
 hand to preserve them " 
 
 The above account perfectly agrees with what Keats had 
 written towards the end of the summer before : " I feel 
 assured I should write from the mere yearning and fond- 
 ness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's 'labours 
 should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever rest upon 
 them." And yet for these odes Keats seems to have had 
 a partiality ; with that to Psyche, he tells his brother he 
 has taken more pains than with anything he had ever 
 written before; and Haydon has told how thrillingly, "in 
 his low tremulous under-tone," he recited to him that to 
 the nightingale as they walked one day in the Kilburn 
 meadows. 
 
 During the winter and spring, while his faculties were 
 thus absorbed between love and poetry, Keats had suf- 
 fered his correspondence to flag, except only with Hay- 
 don, with his young sister Fanny, and with his brother 
 and sister-in-law in America. About Christmas, Haydon, 
 whose work had been interrupted by a weakness of the 
 eyes, and whose borrowing powers were for the time being 
 exhausted, had turned in his difficulties to Keats, of all 
 men. With his usual generosity Keats had promised, 
 only asking him to try the rich lovers of art first, that if 
 the worst came to the worst he would help him with all 
 K 
 
136 KEATS. . [chap. 
 
 he bad. Haydon in a few weeks returns to the charge : 
 " My dear Keats — now I feel the want of your promised 
 assistance. . . . Before the 20th, if you could help me, it 
 would be nectar and manna and all the blessings of grati- 
 fied thirst." Keats had intended for Hay don's relief 
 some of the money due to him from his brother Tom's 
 share in their grandmother's gift, which he expected his 
 guardian to make over to him at once on his application. 
 But difficulties of all sorts were raised, and after much cor- 
 respondence, attendance in bankers' and solicitors' offices, 
 and other ordeals harassing to the poetic mind, lie had the 
 annoyance of rinding himself unable to do as he had 
 hoped. When, by-and-by, Haydon writes, in the true bor- 
 rower's vein, reproaching him with his promise, and his 
 failure to keep it, Keats replies with perfect temper, ex- 
 plaining that he had supposed himself to have the neces- 
 sary means in his hand, but has been baffled by unforeseen 
 difficulties in getting possession of his money. Moreover, 
 he finds that even if all he had were laid on the table, the 
 intended loan would leave him barely enough to live on 
 for two years. 1 Incidentally he mentions that he has 
 already lent sums to various friends amounting in all to 
 near £200, of which he expects the repayment late, if ever. 
 The upshot of the matter was that Keats contrived some- 
 how to lend Haydon thirty pounds. Three months later 
 a law-suit, threatened by the widow of Captain Jennings 
 against Mr. Abbey, in connection with the administration 
 of the trust, had the effect for a time of stopping his sup- 
 plies from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very 
 gently asks Haydon to make an effort to repay his loan ; 
 who not only made none — "he did not," says Keats, 
 " seem to care much about it, but let me go without my 
 1 See Appendix, p. 224. 
 
VL ] FAMILY CORRESPONDENCE. 137 
 
 money almost with nonchalance." This was too much 
 even for Keats's patience. He declares that he shall never 
 count Haydon a friend again ; nevertheless he, by-and-by, 
 let old affection resume its sway, and entered into the 
 other's interests, and endured his exhortations as kindly 
 as ever. 
 
 To his young sister Keats's letters during the same 
 period are full of playful brotherly tenderness and careful 
 advice ; of regrets that she is kept so much from him by 
 the scruples of Mr. and Mrs. Abbey ; and of plans for 
 coming over to see her at Walthamstow when the weather 
 and his throat allow. He thinks of various little presents 
 to please her — a selection of Tassie's pretty, and then 
 popular, paste imitations of ancient gems — flowers — 
 drawing materials — 
 
 "anything but live stock. Though I will not now be very severe 
 on it, remembering how fond I used to be of Goldfinches, Tomtits, 
 Minnows, Mice, Ticklebacks, Dace, Cock Salmons, and all the whole 
 tribe of the Bushes and the Brooks ; but verily they are better in 
 the trees and the water— though I must confess even now a partialL 
 ty for a handsome globe of gold-fish— then I would have it hold ten 
 pails of water, and be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe, with 
 another pipe to let through the floor— well ventilated they would pre- 
 serve all their beautiful silver and crimson. Then I would put it 
 before a handsome painted window, and shade it all round with Myr- 
 tles and Japonicas. I should like the window to open on to the 
 Lake of Geneva— and there I'd sit and read all day, like the picture 
 of somebody reading." 
 
 For some time, in these letters to his sister, Keats ex- 
 presses a constant anxiety at getting no news from their 
 brother George at the distant Kentucky settlement whither 
 he and his bride had at their last advices been bound. In 
 the middle of April news of them arrives, and he there- 
 
138 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 upon sends off to them a long journal-letter which he has 
 been writing up at intervals during the last two months. 
 Among all the letters of Keats, this is perhaps the richest 
 and most characteristic. It is full of the varied matter of 
 his thoughts, excepting always his thoughts of love : these 
 are only to be discerned in one trivial allusion, and more 
 indistinctly in the vaguely passionate tenor of two son- 
 nets which he sends among other specimens of his latest 
 work in verse. One is that beginning " Why did I laugh 
 to-night?" the other that, beautiful and moving despite 
 flaws of execution, in which he describes a dream suggest- 
 ed by the Paolo and Francesca passage in Dante. For the 
 rest he passes disconnectedly as usual — " it being an im- 
 possibility in grain," as Keats once wrote to Reynolds, 
 "for my ink to stain otherwise" — from the vein of fun 
 and freakislmess to that of poetry and. wisdom, with pas- 
 sages now of masterly intuition, and now of wandering and 
 uncertain, almost always beautiful, speculative fancy, inter- 
 spersed with expressions of the most generous spirit of 
 family affection, or the most searching and unaffected 
 disclosures of self-knowledge. Poetry and Beauty were 
 the twin powers his soul had ever worshipped ; but his 
 devotion to poetry seemed thus far to promise him no re- 
 ward either in fame or bread, while beauty had betrayed 
 her servant, and become to him a scorching instead of a 
 sustaining power, since his love for the beautiful in general 
 had turned into a craving passion for the beauty of a partic- 
 ular girl. As his flesh began to faint in the service of these 
 two, his soul turned often with a sense of comfort, at times 
 even almost of ecstacy, towards the milder divinity of Death, 
 whose image had never been unfamiliar to his thoughts : 
 
 "Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, 
 But Death intenser — Death is Life's high meed." 
 
vi.] DARKENING PROSPECTS. 139 
 
 When ho came down from these heights of feeling, and 
 brought himself soberly to face the facts of his existence, 
 Keats felt himself compelled, in those days while he was 
 producing, " out of the mere yearning and fondness he 
 had for the beautiful, "..poem after poem that are among 
 the treasures of the English language, to consider whether 
 as a practical matter he could or ought to continue to ap- 
 ply himself to literature at all. In spite of his magnani- 
 mous first reception of the Blackwood and Quarterly gibes, 
 we can see that as time went on he began more and more 
 to feel both his pride wounded and his prospects darkened 
 by them. Reynolds had hit the mark, as to the material 
 harm which the reviews were capable of inflicting, when 
 he wrote, the year before : " Certain it is that hundreds 
 of fashionable and flippant readers will henceforth set 
 down this young poet as a pitiable and nonsensical writ- 
 er, merely on the assertions of some single heartless critic 
 who has just energy enough to despise what is good." 
 Such in fact was exactly the reputation which Blackwood 
 and the Quarterly had succeeded in making for Keats, 
 except among a small private circle of admirers. Of 
 praise and the thirst for praise he continues to speak in as 
 manly and sane a tone as ever, especially in the two son- 
 nets On Fame ; and in the Ode to Indolence declares — 
 
 " For I would not be dieted with praise, 
 A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce." 
 
 Again in the same ode he speaks of his " demon Poesy " 
 as " a maiden most unmeek," whom he loves the better the 
 more blame is heaped on her. At the same time he shows 
 his sense of the practical position which the reviews had 
 made for him when he writes to his brother : " These re- 
 views are getting more and more powerful, especially the 
 
140 KEATS. [ciiap. 
 
 Quarterly. ... I was in hopes that as people saw, as they 
 must do, all the trickery and iniquity of these plagues, they 
 would scout them ; but no, they are like the spectators 
 at the AVestminster cockpit, and do not care who wins or 
 loses." And as a consequence he adds, presently, " I have 
 been, at different times, turning it in my head whether I 
 should go to Edinburgh and study for a physician. I am 
 afraid I should not take kindly to it; I am sure I could 
 not take fees; and yet I should like to do so; it is not 
 worse than writing poems, and hanging them up to be fly- 
 blown on the Review shambles." A little later he men- 
 tions to his sister Fanny an idea he has of taking a voy- 
 age or two as surgeon on board an East Indiaman. But 
 Brown, more than ever impressed during these last months 
 with the power and promise of his friend's genius, would 
 not hear of this plan, and persuaded him to abandon it and 
 throw himself again upon literature. Keats being for the 
 moment unable to get at any of his money, Brown ad- 
 vanced him enough to live on through the summer; and 
 it was agreed that he should go and work in the country, 
 and that Brown should follow him. 
 
 Towards the end of July Keats accordingly left Hamp- 
 stead, and went first to join his friend Rice in lodgings at 
 Shanklin. Rice's health was at this time worse than ever, 
 and Keats himself was far from well — his chest weak, his 
 nerves unstrung, his heart, as we can see by his letters to 
 Fanny Brawne, incessantly distracted between the pains 
 and joys of love. These love-letters of Keats are written 
 with little or none of the bright ease and play of mind 
 which make his correspondence with his friends and fami- 
 ly so attractive. Pleasant passages, indeed, occur in them, 
 but in the main they are constrained and distressing, show- 
 ing him a prey, despite his efforts to master himself and 
 
VL ] SHANKLIN. 141 
 
 be reasonable, to an almost abject intensity and fretfulness 
 of passion. An enraptured but an untrustful lover, alter- 
 nately rejoicing and chafing at his bondage, and passing 
 through a hundred conflicting extremes of feeling in an 
 hour, he found in the fever of work and composition his 
 only antidote against the fever of his love-sickness. As 
 long as Rice and he were together at Shanklin, the two ail- 
 ing and anxious men, firm friends as they were, depressed 
 and did each other harm. It was better when Brown with 
 his settled health and spirits came to join them. Soon 
 afterwards Rice left, and Brown and Keats then got to 
 work diligently at the task they had set before themselves, 
 that of writing a tragedy suitable for the stage. What 
 other struggling man of letters has not at one time or an- 
 other shared the hope which animated them, that this way 
 lay the road to success and competence? Brown, whose 
 Russian opera had made a hit in its day, and brought him 
 in £500, was supposed to possess the requisite stage expe- 
 rience, and to him were assigned the plot and construction 
 of the play, while Keats undertook to compose the dia- 
 logue. The subject was one taken from the history of 
 the Emperor Otho the Great. The two friends sat oppo- 
 site each other at the same table, and Keats wrote scene 
 after scene as Brown sketched it out to him, in each case 
 without enquiring what was to come next, until the end of 
 the fourth act, when he took the conduct of the rest into 
 his own hands. Besides the joint work by means of which 
 he thus hoped, at least in sanguine hours, to find an escape 
 from material difficulties, Keats was busily engaged by 
 himself in writing a new Greek tale in rhymed heroics, 
 Lamia. But a cloud of depression continued to hang 
 over him. The climate of Shanklin was against him : 
 their lodgings were under the cliff, and from the south- 
 east, as he afterwards wrote, "came the damps of the sea, 
 
142 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 which having no egress, the air would for days together 
 take on an unhealthy idiosyncrasy altogether enervating 
 and weakening as a city smoke." After a stay of five or 
 six weeks the friends made up their minds to change their 
 quarters, and went in the second week of August to Win- 
 chester. The old cathedral city, with its peaceful closes 
 breathing antiquity, its clear-coursing streams and beauti- 
 ful elm-shadowed meadow walks, and the nimble and pure 
 air of its surrounding downs, exactly suited Keats, who 
 quickly improved both in health and spirits. The days 
 which he spent here, from the middle of August to the 
 middle of October, were the last good days of his life. 
 Working with a steady intensity of application, he man- 
 aged to steel himself for the time being against the im- 
 portunity of his passion, although never without a certain 
 feverishness in the effort. 
 
 His work continued to be chiefly on Lamia, with the 
 concluding part of Otho and the beginning of a new trag- 
 edy on the story of King Stephen ; in this last he laboured 
 alone, without accepting help from Brown. Early in Sep- 
 tember Brown left AVinchester to go on a visit to Bed- 
 hampton. Immediately afterwards a letter from America 
 compelled Keats to go to town and arrange with Mr. Ab- 
 bey for the despatch of fresh remittances to his brother 
 George. Ho dared not, to use his own words, " venture 
 into the fire " by going to see his mistress at Hampstead, 
 but staid apparently with Mr. Taylor in Fleet Street, and 
 was back on the fourth day at Winchester, where he spent 
 the following ten days or fortnight in solitude. During 
 this interval he took up Hyperion again, but made up his 
 mind to go no farther with it, having got to feel its style 
 and method too Miltonic and artificial. Lamia he had fin- 
 ished, and his chief present occupation was in revising the 
 Eve of St. Agnes, studying Italian in the pages of Ariosto, 
 
VL ] WINCHESTERr-WISE RESOLUTIONS. 143 
 
 and writing up one of his long and full journal-letters to 
 brother and sister George. The season was fine, and the 
 beauty of the walks and the weather entering into his 
 spirit," prompted also in these days the last, and one cer^ 
 tainly of the happiest of his odes, that To Autumn. To 
 the fragment of St. Mark's Eve, begun or planned, as we 
 have seen, the January before, he now added lines inspired 
 at once by the spirit of city quietude, which his lettera 
 show to have affected him deeply here at Winchester, and 
 by the literary example of Chatterton, for whom his old 
 admiration had of late returned in full force. 
 
 The wholesome brightness of the early autumn continu- 
 ing to sustain and soothe him, Keats made in these days a 
 vigorous effort to rally his moral powers, to banish over- 
 passionate and morbid feelings, and to put himself on a 
 right footing with the world. The letter to America al- 
 ready mentioned, and others written at the same time to 
 Reynolds, Taylor, Dilke, Brown, and Haydon, are full of 
 evidences of this spirit. The ill success of his brother in 
 his American speculations shall serve, he is determined, as 
 a spur to his own exertions; and now that real troubles are 
 upon them, he will show that he can bear them better than 
 those of imagination. The imaginary nail a man down 
 for a sufferer, as on a cross; the real spur him up into an 
 agent. He has been passing his time between reading, 
 writing, and fretting; the last he now intends to give up, 
 and stick to the other two. He does not consider he has 
 any just cause of complaint against the world; he has 
 done nothing as yet except for the amusement of a few 
 people predisposed for sentiment, and is convinced that 
 anything really fine will make its way. "What reviewers 
 can put a hindrance to must be a nothing— or mediocre, 
 which is worse." With reference to his own plans for the 
 
144 KEATS. [chap. yi. 
 
 future, lie is determined to trust no longer to mere hopes 
 of ultimate success, whether from plays or poems, but to 
 turn to the natural resource of a man "fit for nothing but 
 literature," and needing to support himself by his pen : the 
 resource, that is, of journalism and reviewing. " I will 
 write, on the liberal side of the question, for whoever will 
 pay me. I have not known yet what it is to be diligent. 
 I purpose living in town in a cheap lodging, and endeav- 
 ouring, for a beginning, to get the theatricals of some pa- 
 per. When I can afford to compose deliberate poems, I 
 w T ill." These words are from a letter written to Brown on 
 the 22d of September ; and further on in the same letter 
 we find evidence of the honourable spirit of independence 
 and unselfishness towards his friends which went together 
 in Keats, as it too rarely does, with an affectionate willing- 
 ness to accept their services at a pinch. He had been liv- 
 ing since May on a loan from Brown and an advance from 
 Taylor, and was uneasy at putting the former to a sacrifice. 
 The subject, he says, is often in his mind, 
 
 "and the end of my speculations is always an anxiety for your 
 happiness. This anxiety will not be one of the least incitements to 
 the plan I propose pursuing. I had got into a habit of mind of look- 
 ing towards you as a help in all difficulties. You will see it is a duty I 
 owe myself to break the neck of it. I do nothing for my subsistence 
 — make no exertion. At the end of another year you shall applaud 
 me, not for verses, but for conduct." 
 
 Brown, returning to Winchester a few days later, found 
 his friend unshaken in the same healthy resolutions, and 
 however loth to lose his company, and doubtful of his pow- 
 er to live the life he proposed, respected their motives too 
 much to contend against them. It was accordingly settled 
 that the two friends should part, Brown returning to his 
 own house at Hampstead, while Keats went to live by him- 
 self in London, and look out for employment on the press. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Isabella. — Hyperion. — The Eve of St. Agnes. — The Eve of St. Mark. — 
 La Belle Dame Sans Merci. — Lamia. — The Odes. — The Plays. 
 
 During the twenty months ending with his return from 
 Winchester, as last narrated, Keats had been able, even 
 while health and peace of mind and heart deserted him, to 
 produce in quick succession the series of poems which 
 give us the true measure of his powers. In the sketches 
 and epistles of his first volume we have seen him begin- 
 ning, timidly and with no clearness of aim, to make trial 
 of his poetical resources. A year afterwards he had leapt, 
 to use his own words, headlong into the sea, and boldly 
 tried his strength on the composition of a long mythologi- 
 cal romance — half romance, half parable of that passion 
 for universal beauty of which he felt in his own bosom 
 the restless and compulsive workings. In the execution 
 he had done injustice to the power of poetry that was in 
 him by letting both the exuberance of fancy and inven- 
 tion, and the caprice of rhyme, run away with him, and by 
 substituting for the worn-out verbal currency of the last 
 century a semi-Elizabethan coinage of his own, less accept- 
 able by habit to the literary sense, and often of not a whit 
 greater real poetic value. The experiment was rash, but 
 when he next wrote, it became manifest that it had not 
 been made in vain. After Endymion his work threw off, 
 not indeed entirely its faults, but all its weakness and in- 
 
146 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 effectiveness, and shone for the first time with a full " ef- 
 fluence" (the phrase is Landor's) " of power and light." 1 
 
 His next poem of importance was Isabella, planned and 
 begun, as we saw, in February, 1818, and finished in the 
 course of the next two months at Teignmouth. The sub- 
 ject is taken from the well-known chapter of Boccaccio 
 which tells of the love borne by a damsel of Messina for a 
 youth in the employ of her merchant -brothers, with its 
 tragic close and pathetic sequel. 2 Keats for some reason 
 transfers the scene of the story from Messina to Florence. 
 Nothing can be less sentimental than Boccaccio's temper, 
 nothing more direct and free from superfluity than his 
 style. Keats, invoking him, asks pardon for his own work 
 as what it truly is — " An echo of thee in the North-wind 
 sung." Not only does the English poet set the southern 
 story in a framework of northern landscape, telling us of 
 the Arno, for instance, how its stream 
 
 " Gurgles through straitened banks, and still doth fan 
 Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream 
 Keeps head against the freshets," 
 
 he further adorns and amplifies it in a northern manner, 
 enriching it with tones of sentiment and colours of romance, 
 and brooding over every image of beauty or passion as he 
 calls it up. These things he docs — but no longer inordi- 
 nately, as heretofore. His powers of imagination and of 
 
 1 See Appendix, p. 224. 
 
 2 Decctmcrone, Giorn., iv. nov. 5. A very different metrical treat- 
 ment of the same subject was attempted and published, almost simul- 
 taneously with that of Keats, by Barry Cornwall in his Sicilian Story 
 (1820). Of the metrical tales from Boccaccio which Reynolds had 
 agreed to write concurrently with Keats (see above, p. 85), two were 
 finished and published by him after Keats's death in the volume called 
 A Garden of Florence (1821). 
 
vil] "ISABELLA." 147 
 
 expression have alike gained strength and discipline ; and 
 through the shining veils of his poetry his creations make 
 themselves seen and felt in living shape, action, and motive. 
 False touches and misplaced beauties are indeed not want- 
 ing. For example, in the phrase 
 
 "his erewhile timid lips grew bold 
 And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme," 
 
 we have an effusively false touch, in the sugared taste not 
 infrequent in his earliest verses. And in the call of the 
 wicked brothers to Lorenzo — 
 
 " To-day we purpose, aye this hour we mount 
 To spur three leagues towards the Apennine. 
 Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count 
 His dewy rosary on the eglantine" — 
 
 the last two lines are a beauty, indeed, and of the kind 
 most characteristic of the poet, yet a beauty (as Leigh 
 Hunt long ago pointed out) misplaced in the mouths that 
 utter it. Moreover, the language of Isabella is still occa- 
 sionally slipshod, and there are turns and passages where 
 we feel, as we felt so often in Endymion, that the poetic 
 will has abdicated to obey the chance dictation or sugges- 
 tion of the rhyme. But these are the minor blemishes of 
 a poem otherwise conspicuous for power and charm. 
 
 For his Italian story Keats chose an Italian metre, the 
 octave stanza introduced in English by Wyatt and Sidney, 
 and naturalised before long by Daniel, Drayton, and Ed- 
 ward Fairfax. Since their day the stanza had been little 
 used in serious poetry, though Frere and Byron had lately 
 revived it for the poetry of light narrative and satire, the 
 purpose for which the epigrammatic snap and suddenness 
 of the closing couplet in truth best fit it, Keats, however, 
 contrived generally to avoid this effect, and handles the 
 
148 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 measure flowingly and well in a manner suited to his tale 
 of pathos. Over the purely musical and emotional re- 
 sources of his art he shows a singular command in stanzas 
 like that beginning, " Melancholy, linger here awhile," 
 repeated with variations as a kind of melodious interlude 
 of the main narrative. And there is a brilliant alertness 
 of imagination in such episodical passages as that where 
 he pauses to realise the varieties of human toil contribut- 
 ing to the wealth of the merchant brothers. But the true 
 test of a poem like this is that it should combine, at the 
 essential points and central moments of action and passion, 
 imaginative vitality and truth with beauty and charm. 
 This test Isabella admirably bears. For instance, in the 
 account of the vision which appears to the heroine of her 
 lover's mouldering corpse : 
 
 " Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy-bright 
 With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof 
 From the poor girl by magic of their light." 
 
 With what a true poignancy of human tenderness is the 
 story of the apparition invested by this touch, and all its 
 charnel horror and grimness mitigated ! Or again in the 
 stanzas describing Isabella's actions at her lover's burial- 
 place : 
 
 " She gazed into the fresh thrown mould, as though 
 One glance did fully all its secrets tell ; 
 Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know, 
 
 Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well ; 
 Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow, 
 
 Like to a native lily of the dell : 
 Then with her knife, all sudden, she began 
 To dig more fervently than misers can. 
 
 " Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon 
 Her silk had play'd in purple phantasies ; 
 
vil] " ISABELLA." 149 
 
 She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone, 
 And put it in her bosom, where it dries 
 
 And freezes utterly unto the bone 
 
 Those dainties made to still an infant's cries : 
 
 Then 'gan she work again ; nor stay'd her care, 
 
 But to throw back at times her veiling hair." 
 
 The lines are not all of equal workmanship, but the scene 
 is realised with unerring vision. The swift despairing 
 gaze of the girl, anticipating with too dire a certainty the 
 realisation of her dream ; the simile in the third and 
 fourth lines, emphasizing the clearness of that certainty, 
 and at the same time relieving its terror by an image of 
 beauty ; the new simile of the \i\y, again striking the note 
 of beauty, while it intensifies the impression of her rooted 
 fixity of posture and purpose ; the sudden solution of that 
 fixity, with the final couplet, into vehement action, as she 
 begins to dig " more fervently than misers can " (what a 
 commentary on the relative strength of passions might be 
 drawn from this simple text!) ; then the first reward of her 
 toil, in the shape of a relic, not ghastly, but beautiful both 
 in itself and for the tenderness of which it is a token ; her 
 womanly action in kissing it and putting it in her bosom, 
 while all the woman and mother in her is in the same 
 words revealed to us as blighted by the tragedy of her 
 life; then the resumption and continuance of her labours, 
 with gestures once more of vital dramatic truth as well as 
 grace — to imagine and to write like this is the privilege of 
 the best poets only, and even the best have not often com- 
 bined such concentrated force and beauty of conception 
 with such a limpid and flowing ease of narrative. Poetry 
 had always come to Keats, as he considered it ought to 
 come, as naturally as leaves to a tree ; and now that it 
 came of a quality like this, he had fairly earned the right, 
 
150 KEATS.' [chap. 
 
 which his rash youth had too soon arrogated, to look down 
 on the fine artificers of the school of Pope. In compari- 
 son with the illuminating power of true imaginative poe- 
 try, the closest rhetorical condensations of that school seem 
 loose and thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms 
 dull; nay, those who admire them most justly will know 
 better than to think the two kinds of writing comparable. 
 After the completion of Isabella followed the Scotch 
 tour, of which the only poetic fruits of value were the 
 lines on Meg Merrilies and those on Fingal's Cave. Re- 
 turning in shaken health to the bedside of a brother mor- 
 tally ill, Keats plunged at once into the most arduous 
 poetic labour he had yet undertaken. This was the com- 
 position of Hyperion. 1 The subject had been long in his 
 mind, and both in the text and the preface of Endymion 
 he indicated his intention to attempt it. At first he 
 thought of the poem to be written as a " romance ;" but 
 under the influence of Paradise Lost, and no doubt also 
 considering the height and vastness of the subject, his 
 plan changed to that of a blank verse epic in ten books. 
 His purpose was to sing the Titanoraachia, or warfare of 
 the earlier Titanic dynasty with the later Olympian dy- 
 nasty of the Greek gods; and in particular one episode 
 of that warfare, the dethronement of the sun-god Hyperi- 
 on and the assumption of his kindgom by Apollo. Crit- 
 ics, even intelligent critics, sometimes complain that Keats 
 should have taken this and other subjects of his art from 
 what they call the " dead " mythology of ancient Greece. 
 As if that mythology could ever die ; as if the ancient 
 fables, in passing out of the transitory state of things be- 
 
 1 As to the date when Hyperion was written, see Appendix, p. 
 225 ; and as to the error by which Keats's later recast of his work 
 has been taken for an earlier draft, ibid,, p. 226. 
 
vlI j "HYPERION." 151 
 
 lieved into the state of things remembered and cherished 
 in imagination, had not put on a second life more endur- 
 ing and more fruitful than the first. Faiths as faiths per- 
 ish one after another, but each in passing away bequeaths 
 for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements 
 it has contained of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. 
 The polytheism of ancient Greece, embodying the instinct- 
 ive effort of the brightliest-gifted human race to explain 
 its earliest experiences of nature and civilization, of the 
 thousand moral and material forces, cruel or kindly, which 
 environ and control the life of man, on earth, is rich be- 
 yond measure in such elements ; and if the modern world 
 at any time fails to value them, it is the modern mind 
 which is in so far dead, and not they. One of the great 
 symptoms of returning vitality in the imagination of Eu- 
 rope towards the close of the last century, was its awaken- 
 ing to the forgotten charm of past modes of faith and 
 life. When men, in the earlier part of that century, spoke 
 of Greek antiquity, it was in stale and borrowed terms 
 which showed that they had never felt its power; just as, 
 when they spoke of nature, it was in set phrases that 
 showed that they had never looked at her On matters 
 of daily social experience the gifts of observation and of 
 reason were brilliantly exercised, but all the best thoughts 
 of the time were thoughts of the street, the mart, and the 
 assembly. The human genius was for the time being like 
 some pilgrim long detained within city walls, and unused 
 to see or think of anything beyond them. At length re- 
 suming its march, it emerged on open ground, where it 
 fell to enjoying with a forgotten zest the beauties of the 
 earth and sky, and whence, at the same time, it could turn 
 back to gaze on regions it had long left behind, discerning 
 with new clearness and a new emotion here, under cloud 
 L 
 
152 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 and rainbow, the forests and spired cities of the Middle 
 Age, there, in serener light, the hills and havens and level 
 fanes of Hellas. 
 
 The great leader and pioneer of the modern spirit on 
 this new phase of its pilgrimage was Goethe, who with de- 
 liberate effort and self-discipline climbed to heights com- 
 manding an equal survey over the mediasval and the classic 
 past. We had in England had an earlier, shyer, and far 
 less effectual pioneer in Gray. As time went on, poet 
 after poet arose and sang more freely, one the glories of 
 nature, another the enchantments of the Middle Age, an- 
 other the Greek beauty and joy of life. Keats, when his 
 time came, showed himself, all young and untutored as he 
 was, freshly and powerfully inspired to sing of all three 
 alike. He does not, as we have said, write of Greek things 
 in a Greek manner. Something, indeed, in Hyperion — at 
 least in the first two books — he has caught from Paradise 
 Lost of the high restraint and calm which was common to 
 the Greeks and Milton. But to realise how far he is in 
 workmanship from the Greek purity and precision of out- 
 line, and firm definition of individual images, we have 
 only to think of his palace of Hyperion, with its vague, 
 far-dazzling pomps and phantom terrors of coming doom. 
 This is the most sustained and celebrated passage of the 
 poem. Or let us examine one of its most characteristic 
 images from nature : 
 
 "As when, upon a tranced summer night, 
 Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, 
 Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, 
 Dream, and so dream all night without a stir." 
 
 Not to the simplicity of the Greek, but to the complexity 
 of the modern sentiment of nature, it belongs to try and 
 
tii. J "HYPERION." 153 
 
 express, by such a concourse of metaphors and epithets, 
 every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which a forest 
 scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-emi- 
 nence of the oaks among the other trees — their aspect of 
 human venerableness — their verdure, unseen in the dark- 
 ness — the sense of their preternatural stillness and sus- 
 pended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with 
 mvsterious influences communicated between earth and 
 sky. 1 
 
 Bat though Keats sees the Greek world from afar, he 
 sees it truly. The Greek touch is not his, but in his own 
 rich and decorated English way he writes with a sure in- 
 sight into the vital meaning of Greek ideas. For the story 
 of the war of Titans and Olympians he had nothing to 
 guide him except scraps from the ancient writers, princi- 
 pally Hesiod, as retailed by the compilers of classical dic- 
 tionaries; and from the scholar's point of view his version, 
 we can see, would at many points have been arbitrary, mix- 
 ing up Latin conceptions and nomenclature with Greek, 
 and introducing much new matter of his own invention. 
 But as to the essential meaning of that warfare and its 
 result — the dethronement of an older and ruder worship 
 by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of 
 ethics and of arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature 
 and her brute powers — as to this, it could not possibly be 
 divined more truly, or illustrated with more beauty and 
 force, than by Keats in the speech of Oceanus in the Sec- 
 
 1 If we want to see Greek themes treated in a Greek manner by 
 predecessors or contemporaries of Keats, we can do so— though only 
 on a cameo scale — in the best idyls of Chenier in France, as ISAveu- 
 gle, or Le Jeune Malade, or of Landor in England, as the Hamadryad, 
 or Enallos and Cymodamia; poems which would hardly have been 
 written otherwise at Alexandria in the days of Theocritus. 
 
154 
 
 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 ond Book. Again, in conceiving and animating these 
 colossal shapes of early gods, with their personalities be- 
 tween the elemental and the human, what masterly justice 
 of instinct does he show — to take one point only — in the 
 choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate 
 sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realise 
 their voices. Thus of the assembled gods when Saturn is 
 about to speak : 
 
 " There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines 
 When Winter lifts his voice ; there is a noise 
 Among immortals when a God gives sign, 
 With hushing finger, how he means to load 
 His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, 
 With thunder, and with music, and with pomp : 
 Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines." 
 
 Again, of Oceanus answering his fallen chief : 
 
 " So ended Saturn ; and the God of the Sea, 
 Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove, 
 But cogitation in his watery shades, 
 Arose, with locks not oozy, and began 
 In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue 
 Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands." 
 
 And once more, of Clymene followed by Enceladus in 
 
 debate : 
 
 " So far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook 
 That, lingering along a pebbled coast, 
 Doth fear to meet the sea ; but sea it met, 
 And shudder'd ; for the overwhelming voice 
 Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath ; 
 The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves 
 In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, 
 Came booming thus." 
 
vil] "HYPERION." 155 
 
 This second book of Hyperion, relating the council of the 
 dethroned Titans, has neither the sublimity of the first, 
 where the solemn opening vision of Saturn fallen is fol- 
 lowed by the resplendent one of Hyperion threatened in 
 his " lucent empire," nor the intensity of the unfinished 
 third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive 
 change under the afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put 
 on the full powers of his godhead. But it has a rightness 
 and controlled power of its own which places it, to my 
 mind, quite on a level with the other two. 
 
 With a few slips and inequalities, and one or two in- 
 stances of verbal incorrectness, Hyperion, as far as it was 
 written, is indeed one of the grandest poems in our lan- 
 guage, and in its grandeur seems one of the easiest and 
 most spontaneous. Keats, however, had never been able 
 to apply himself to it continuously, but only by fits and 
 starts. Partly this was due to the distractions of bereave- 
 ment, of material anxiety, and of dawning passion amid 
 which it was begun and continued ; partly (if we may trust 
 the statement of the publishers) to disappointment at the 
 reception of Endymion; and partly, it is clear, to some- 
 thing not wholly congenial to his powers in the task itself. 
 When, after letting the poem lie by through the greater 
 part of the spring and summer of 1819, he in September 
 made up his mind to give it up, he wrote to Reynolds ex- 
 plaining his reasons as follows : " There were too many 
 Miltonic inversions in it — Miltonic verse cannot be written 
 but in an artful, or rather artist's, humour. I wish to give 
 myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept 
 up." In the same connection he declares that Chatterton 
 is the purest writer in the English language. " He has 
 no French idiom or particles, like Chaucer; it is genuine 
 English idiom in English words." In writing about the 
 
156 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 same time to his brother, he again expresses similar opin- 
 ions both as to Milton and Chatterton. 
 
 The influence, and something of the majesty, of Para- 
 dise Lost are in truth to be found in Hyperion ; and the 
 debate of the fallen Titans in the second book is obviously 
 to some extent modelled on the debate of the fallen angels. 
 But Miltonic the poem hardly is in any stricter sense. 
 Passing by those general differences that arise from the 
 contrast of Milton's age with Keats's youth, of his austeri- 
 ty with Keats's luxuriance of spirit, and speaking of palpa- 
 ble and technical differences only, in the matter of rhythm 
 Keats's blank verse has not the flight of Milton's. Its 
 periods do not wheel through such stately evolutions to 
 so solemn and far-foreseen a close, though it indeed lacks 
 neither power nor music, and ranks unquestionably with 
 the finest blank-verse written since Milton — beside that of 
 Shelley's Alastor, perhaps a little below that of Words- 
 worth, when Wordsworth is at his infrequent best. As to 
 diction and the poetic use of words, Keats shows almost as 
 masterly an instinct as Milton himself; but while of Milton's 
 diction the characteristic colour is derived from reading and 
 meditation, from an impassioned conversance with the con- 
 tents of books, the characteristic colour of Keats's diction is 
 rather derived from conversance with nature and with the 
 extreme refinements of physical sensation. He is no match 
 for Milton in a passage of this kind : 
 
 " Eden stretcli'd her line 
 From Auran eastward to the royal towers 
 Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian kings, 
 Or where the sons of Eden long before 
 Dwelt in Telassar." 
 
 But then neither is Milton a match for Keats in work like 
 this : 
 
vii.] " HYPERION." 157 
 
 " Throughout all the isle 
 There was no covert, no retired cave 
 Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, 
 Though scarcely heard in many a green l'ecess." 
 
 After the pomp and glow of learned allusion, the second 
 chief technical note of Milton's style is his partiality for a 
 Latin use of the relative pronoun and the double negative, 
 and for scholarly Latin turn and constructions generally. 
 Already in Isabella Keats is to be found attempting both 
 notes, thus : 
 
 " With duller steel than the Persean sword 
 They cut away no formless monster's head." 
 
 Similar Miltonic echoes occur in Hyperion, as in the intro- 
 duction already quoted to the speech of Oceanus ; or again 
 
 thus : 
 
 " Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope 
 In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes, 
 Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet 
 And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies." 
 
 But they are not frequent, nor had Keats adopted as much 
 of Milton's technical manner as he seems to have supposed ; 
 yet he had adopted more of it than was natural to him or 
 than he cared to maintain. 
 
 In turning away from Milton to Chatterton, he was go- 
 ing back to one of his first loves in literature. What he 
 says of Chatterton's words and idioms seems paradoxical 
 enough, as applied to the archaic jargon concocted by the 
 Bristol boy out of Kersey's Dictionary} But it is true 
 that through that jargon can be discerned, in the Rowley 
 
 1 We are not surprised to hear of Keats, with his instinct for the 
 best, that what he most liked in Chatterton's work was the minstrel's 
 song in JElla, that fantasia, so to speak, executed really with genius 
 on the theme of one of Ophelia's songs in Hamlet. 
 
158 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 poems, not only an ardent feeling for romance and an ex- 
 traordinary facility in composition, but a remarkable gift 
 of plain and flowing construction. And after Keats had 
 for some time moved, not perfectly at his ease, though 
 with results to us so masterly, in the paths of Milton, we 
 find him in fact tempted aside on an excursion into the 
 regions beloved by Chatterton. We know not how much 
 of Hyperion had been written when he laid it aside in Jan- 
 uary to take up the composition of St. Agnes' s Eve, that 
 unsurpassed example — nay, must we not rather call it un- 
 equalled? — of the pure charm of coloured and romantic 
 narrative in English verse. As this poem does not attempt 
 the elemental grandeur of Hyperion, so neither does it ap- 
 proach the human pathos and passion of Isabella. Its 
 personages appeal to us, not so much humanly and in 
 themselves as by the circumstances, scenery, and atmos- 
 phere amidst which we see them move. Herein lies the 
 strength, and also the weakness, of modern romance — its 
 strength, inasmuch as the charm of the mediaeval colour 
 and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at all ; its 
 weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm 
 both writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for 
 human and moral truth; and without these no great liter- 
 ature can exist. 
 
 Keats takes in this poem the simple, almost threadbare 
 theme of the love of an adventurous youth for the daugh- 
 ter of a hostile house — a story wherein something of Ro- 
 meo and Juliet is mixed with something of young Loch- 
 invar — and brings it deftly into association with the old 
 popular belief as to the way a maiden might on this anni- 
 versary win sight of her lover in a dream. Choosing hap- 
 pily for such a purpose the Spenserian stanza, he adds to 
 the melodious grace, the "sweet-slipping movement," as it 
 
til] "THE EVE OF ST. AGNES." 159 
 
 has been called, of Spenser, a transparent ease and direct- 
 ness of construction ; and with this ease and directness 
 combines (wherein lies the great secret of his ripened art) 
 a never-failing richness and concentration of poetic mean- 
 ino- and suggestion. From the opening stanza, which 
 makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones — telling 
 us first of its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood 
 and field, and next how the frozen breath of the old beads- 
 man in the chapel aisle " scem'd taking flight for heaven, 
 without a death " — from thence to the close, where the 
 lovers make their way past the sleeping porter and the 
 friendly bloodhound into the night, the poetry seems to 
 throb in every line with the life of imagination and beauty. 
 It indeed plays in great part about the external circum- 
 stances and decorative adjuncts of the tale. But in hand- 
 ling these Keats's method is the reverse of that by which 
 some writers vainly endeavour to rival in literature the ef- 
 fects of the painter and sculptor. He never writes for the 
 eye merely, but vivifies everything he touches, telling even 
 of dead and senseless things in terms of life, movement, 
 and feeling. Thus the monuments in the chapel aisle are 
 brought before us, not by any effort of description, but 
 solely through our sympathy with the shivering fancy of 
 the beadsman : 
 
 " Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, 
 He passetb by ; and his weak spirit fails 
 To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails." 
 
 Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels in the ban- 
 queting hall the poet strikes life : 
 
 " The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, 
 Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, 
 With wings blown back, and hands put cross -wise on their 
 breasts." 
 8 
 
160 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of try- 
 ing to pick out their beauties in detail, he calls 
 
 " Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes 
 As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings " 
 
 — a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the 
 colour -imagination of the reader, giving it at the same 
 time a sufficient clue by the simile drawn from a particu- 
 lar specimen of nature's blazonry. In the last line of the 
 same stanza — 
 
 "A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings " 
 
 — the word " blush " makes the colour seem to come and 
 go, while the mind is at the same time sent travelling from 
 the maiden's chamber on thoughts of her lineage and an- 
 cestral fame. Observation, I believe, shows that moon- 
 light has not the power to transmit the hues of painted 
 glass as Keats in this celebrated passage represents it. Let 
 us be grateful for the error, if error it is, which has led 
 him to heighten, by these saintly splendours of colour, the 
 sentiment of a scene wherein a voluptuous glow is so ex- 
 quisitely attempered with chivalrous chastity and awe. 
 When Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would 
 have dwelt on their lustre or other visible qualities; Keats 
 puts those aside, and speaks straight to our spirits in an 
 epithet breathing with the very life of the wearer — " her 
 warmed jewels." When Lorenzo spreads the feast of dain- 
 ties beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how 
 those ideal and rare sweets of ssnse surround and minister 
 to her, not only with their own natural richness, but with 
 the associations and the homage of all far countries whence 
 they have been gathered — 
 
 " From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon." 
 
til] "THE EVE OF ST. AGNES." 161 
 
 If the unique charm of the Eve of St. Agnes lies thus 
 in the richness and vitality of the accessory and decorative 
 images, the actions and emotions of the personages are 
 hardly less happily conceived, as far as they go. What 
 can be better touched than the figures of the beadsman 
 and the nurse, who live just long enough to share in the 
 wonders of the night, and die quietly of age when their 
 parts are over: 1 especially the debate of old Angela with 
 Lorenzo, and her gentle treatment by her mistress on the 
 stair? Madeline is exquisite throughout, but most of all, 
 I think, at two moments: first when she has just entered 
 her chamber — 
 
 " No uttered syllable, or, woe betide : 
 But to her heart, her heart was voluble, 
 Paining with eloquence her balmy side " — 
 
 and afterwards when, awakening, she finds her lover beside 
 her, and contrasts his bodily presence with her dream — 
 
 " ' Ah Porphyro !' said she, ' but even now 
 Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear 
 Made tunable with every sweetest vow ; 
 And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear. 
 How changed thou art ! how pallid, chill, and drear.' " 
 
 Criticism may urge, indeed, that in the " growing faint " 
 of Porphyro, and in his " warm unnerved arm," we have 
 
 1 A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the deaths of 
 
 the beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the 
 exigencies of rhyme. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the 
 first : that of the beadsman in the lines, 
 
 "But no — already had his death-bell rung; 
 The joys of all his life were said and sung ;" 
 that of Angela where she calls herself 
 
 "A poor, weak, palsy-stricken church-yard thing, 
 "Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll." 
 
162 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 a touch of that swooning abandonment to which Keats's 
 heroes are too subject, But it is the slightest possible ; 
 and after all the trait belongs not more to the poet indi- 
 vidually than to his time. Lovers in prose romances of 
 that date are constantly overcome in like manner. And 
 we may well pardon Porphyro his weakness, in considera- 
 tion of the spirit which has led him to his lady's side in 
 defiance of her " whole bloodthirsty race," and will bear 
 her safely, this night of happy marvels over, to the home 
 "beyond the southern moors" that he has prepared for 
 her. 1 
 
 Nearly allied with the Eve of St. Agnes is the fragment 
 in the four-foot ballad metre which Keats composed on 
 the parallel popular belief connected with the eve of St. 
 Mark. This piece was planned, as we saw, at Chichester, 
 and written, it appears, partly there and partly at Win- 
 chester six months later: the name of the heroine, Bertha, 
 seems farther to suggest associations with Canterbury. Im- 
 pressions of all these three cathedral cities which Keats 
 knew are combined, no doubt, in the picture of which the 
 frao-ment consists. I have said picture, but there are two : 
 one the out-door picture of the city streets in their spring 
 freshness and Sabbath peace ; the other the in-door picture 
 of the maiden reading in her quaint fire-lit chamber. Each 
 in its way is of an admirable vividness and charm. The 
 belief about St. Mark's Eve was that a person stationed 
 near a church porch at twilight on that anniversary would 
 see entering the church the apparitions of those about to 
 die, or be brought near death, in the ensuing year. Keats's 
 fragment breaks off before the story is well engaged, and 
 it is not easy to see how his opening would have led up to 
 incidents illustrating this belief. Neither is it clear wheth- 
 1 Sec Appendix, p. 225. 
 
vii.] " THE EVE OF ST. MARK." 163 
 
 er he intended to place them in mediaeval or in relatively 
 modern times. The demure Protestant air which he gives 
 the Sunday streets, the Oriental furniture and curiosities 
 of the lady's chamber, might seem to indicate the latter; 
 but we must remember that he was never strict in his 
 archaeology — witness, for instance, the line which tells 
 how "the long carpets rose along the gusty floor" in the 
 Eve of St. Agnes. The interest of the St. Mark's frag- 
 ment, then, lies not in moving narrative or the promise 
 of it, but in two things : first, its pictorial brilliance and 
 charm of workmanship ; and second, its relation to, and 
 influence on, later English poetry. Keats in this piece 
 anticipates in a remarkable degree the feeling and method 
 of the modern pre-Raphaelite schools. The in-door scene 
 of the girl over her book, in its insistent delight in vivid 
 colour and the minuteness of far- sought suggestive and 
 picturesque detail, is perfectly in the spirit of Rossetti 
 (whom we know that the fragment deeply impressed and 
 interested) — of his pictures even more than of his poems ; 
 while in the out-door work we seem to find forestalled the 
 very tones and cadences of Mr. Morris in some tale of the 
 Earthly Paradise : 
 
 " The city streets were clean and fair 
 From wholesome drench of April rains ; 
 And on the western window panes 
 The chilly sunset faintly told 
 Of unmatured green valleys cold, 
 Of the green thorny bloomless hedge, ♦ 
 Of rivers new with springtide sedge." 
 
 Another poem of the same period, romantic in a differ- 
 ent sense, is La Belle Dame sans Merci. The title is taken 
 from that of a poem by Alain Chartier — the secretary and 
 court poet of Charles VI. and Charles VII. of France — of 
 
164 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 which an English translation used to be attributed to Chau- 
 cer, and is included in the early editions of his works. This 
 title had caught Keats's fancy, and in the Eve of St. Agnes 
 he makes Lorenzo waken Madeline by playing beside her 
 
 bed 
 
 " an ancient ditty, long since mute, 
 In Provence call'd 'La belle dame sans merci.' " 
 
 The syllables continuing to haunt him, lie wrote in the 
 course of the spring or summer (1819) a poem of his own 
 on the theme, which has no more to do with that of Char- 
 tier than Chartier has really to do with Provence. 3 Keats's 
 ballad can hardly be said to tell a story, but rather sets 
 before us, with imagery drawn from the mediaeval world 
 of enchantment and knight-errantry, a type of the wasting 
 power of love, when either adverse fate or deluded choice 
 makes of love not a blessing but a bane. The plight which 
 the poet thus shadows forth is partly that of his own soul 
 in thraldom. Every reader must feel how truly the ima- 
 gery expresses the passion ; how powerfully, through these 
 fascinating old-world symbols, the universal heart of man 
 is made to speak. To many students (of whom the pres- 
 ent writer is one.) the union of infinite tenderness with a 
 weird intensity, the conciseness and purity of the poetic 
 form, the wild yet simple magic of the cadences, the per- 
 fect " inevitable " union of sound and sense, make of La 
 Belle Dame sans Merci the master-piece, not only among 
 the shorter poems of Keats, but even (if any single mas- 
 ter-piece must be chosen) among them all. 
 
 1 Chartier was born at Bayeux. His Belle Dcone sans Herd is a 
 poem of over eighty stanzas, the introduction in narrative and the rest 
 in dialogue, setting forth the obduracy shown by a lady to her wooer, 
 and his consequent despair and death. (For the date of composition 
 of Keats's poem, see Appendix, p. 226.) 
 
TIL] 
 
 1 LAMIA." 165 
 
 Before finally giving up Hyperion, Keats had conceived 
 and written, during his summer months at Shanklin and 
 Winchester, another narrative poem on a Greek subject, 
 but one of those where Greek life and legend come nearest 
 to the mediaeval, and give scope both for scenes of wonder 
 and witchcraft, and for the stress and vehemence of pas- 
 sion. I speak, of course, of Lamia, the story of the ser- 
 pent-lady, both enchantress and victim of enchantments, 
 who loves a youth of Corinth, and builds for him by her 
 art a palace of delights, until their happiness is shattered 
 by the scrutiny of intrusive and cold-blooded wisdom. 
 Keats had found the germ of the story, quoted from Phi- 
 lostratus, in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. In versi- 
 fying it he went back once more to rhymed heroics, han- 
 dling them, however, not as in Endymion, but in a manner 
 founded on that of Dryden, with a free use of the Alexan- 
 drine, a more sparing one of the overflow and the irregular 
 pause, and of disyllabic rhymes none at all. In the meas- 
 ure as thus treated by Keats there is a fire and grace of 
 movement, a lithe and serpentine energy, well suited to the 
 theme, and as effective in its way as the victorious march 
 of Dryden himself. Here is an example where the poetry 
 of Greek mythology is finely woven into the rhetoric of 
 
 " Leave thee alone ! Look back ! Ah, goddess, see 
 Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee ! 
 For pity do not this sad heart belie — 
 Even as thou vanishest so I shall die. 
 Stay ! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay ! 
 To thy far wishes will thy streams obey ; 
 Stay ! though the greenest woods be thy domain, 
 Alone they can drink up the morning rain ; 
 Though a descended Pleiad, will not one 
 Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune 
 Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?" 
 
166 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 And here an instance of the power and reality of scenic 
 imagination : 
 
 "Ay men talk in a dream, so Corinth all, 
 Throughout her palaces imperial, 
 And all her populous streets and temples lewd, 
 Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd, 
 To the wide-spreaded night above her towers. 
 Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours, 
 Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white, 
 Companion'd or alone; while many a light 
 Flar'd, here and there, from wealthy festivals, 
 And threw their moving shadows on the walls, 
 Or found them cluster'd in the cornic'd shade 
 Of some arch'd temple door, or dusty colonnade." 
 
 No one can deny the truth of Kcats's own criticism on 
 Lamia when he says, " I am certain there is that sort of 
 fire in it which must take hold of people in some way — 
 give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation." There 
 is, perhaps, nothing in all his writing so vivid, or that so 
 burns itself in upon the mind, as the picture of the serpent- 
 woman awaiting the touch of Hermes to transform her, 
 followed by the agonized process of the transformation it- 
 self. Admirably told, though perhaps somewhat dispro- 
 portionately for its place in the poem, is the introductory 
 episode of Hermes and his nymph ; admirably again the 
 concluding scene, where the merciless gaze of the philoso- 
 pher exorcises his pupil's dream of love and beauty, and 
 the lover in forfeiting his illusion forfeits life. This thrill- 
 ing vividness of narration in particular points, and the 
 fine melodious vigour of much of the verse, have caused 
 some students to give Lamia almost the first, if not the 
 first, place among Keats's narrative poems. But surely 
 for this it is in some parts too feverish and in others too 
 
vil] "LAMIA." 167 
 
 unequal. It contains descriptions not entirely successful, 
 as, for instance, that of the palace reared by Lamia's magic, 
 which will not bear comparison with other and earlier 
 dream-palaces of the poet's building*. And it has reflective 
 passages, as that in the first book beginning, " Let the 
 mad poets say whate'er they please," and the first fifteen 
 lines of the second, where, from the winning and truly 
 poetic ease of his style at its best, Keats relapses into some- 
 thing too like Leigh Hunt's and his own early strain of 
 affected ease and fireside triviality. He shows, at the 
 same time, signs of a return to his former rash experi- 
 ments in language. The positive virtues of beauty and fe- 
 licity in his diction had never been attended by the nega- 
 tive virtue of strict correctness. Thus, in the Eve of St. 
 Agnes we had to " brook " tears for to check or forbear 
 them ; in Hyperion, " portion' d " for " proportion'd," eyes 
 that " fever out," a chariot " foam'd along." Some of these 
 verbal licences possess a force that makes them pass, but 
 not so in Lamia the adjectives " psalterfan " and " piaz- 
 zian," the verb "to labyrinth," and the participle "daft," 
 as if from an imaginary active verb meaning to daze. 
 
 In the moral which the tale is made to illustrate there is, 
 moreover, a weakness. Keats himself gives us fair warn- 
 ing against attaching too much importance to any opinion 
 which in a momentary mood we may find him uttering. 
 But the doctrine he sets forth in Lamia is one which, from 
 the reports of his conversation, we know him to have held 
 with a certain consistency: 
 
 " Do not all charms fly 
 
 At the mere touch of cold philosophy ? 
 
 There was an awful rainbow once in heaven ; 
 
 We know her woof, her texture ; she is given 
 
 In the dull catalogue of common things. 
 
 Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, 
 8* M 
 
168 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
 Empty the haunted air and gnorned mine — 
 Unweave a rainbow, as it erewliile made 
 The tender-persoifd Lamia melt into a shade." 
 
 Campbell has set forth the same doctrine more fully in 
 The Rainbow; but one sounder, braver, and of better hope, 
 by which Keats would have done well to stand, is preached 
 by Wordsworth in his famous Preface. 
 
 Passing now from the narrative to the reflective portion 
 of Keats's work during this period — it was on the odes, 
 we saw, that he was chiefly occupied in the spring months 
 of 1819, from the completion of St. Agnes s Eve at Chi- 
 chester in January until the commencement of Lamia and 
 Otho the Great at Shanklin in June. These odes of Keats 
 constitute a class apart in English literature, in form and 
 manner neither lineally derived from any earlier, nor much 
 resembling any contemporary, verse. In what he calls the 
 " roundelay " of the Indian maiden in Endymion he had 
 made his most elaborate lyrical attempt until now ; and 
 while for once approaching Shelley in lyric ardour and 
 height of pitch, had equalled Coleridge in touches of wild 
 musical beauty and far-sought romance. His new odes are 
 comparatively simple and regular in form. They are writ- 
 ten in a strain intense, indeed, but meditative and brooding, 
 and quite free from the declamatory and rhetorical elements 
 which we are accustomed to associate with the idea of an 
 ode. Of the five composed in the spring of 1819, two, 
 those on Psyche and the Grecian Urn, are inspired by the 
 old Greek world of imagination and art; two, those on 
 Melancholy and the Nightingale, by moods of the poet's 
 own mind ; while the fifth, that on Indolence, partakes in 
 a weaker degree of both inspirations. 
 
 In the Psyche (where the stanza is of a lengthened type 
 
vn.] THE ODES. 169 
 
 approaching those of Spenser's nuptial odes, but not reg- 
 ularly repeated) Keats recurs to a theme of which he 
 had long been enamoured, as we know by the lines in the 
 opening poem of his first book, beginning, 
 
 " So felt he, who first told how Psyche went 
 On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment." 
 
 Following these lines, in his early piece, came others dis- 
 figured by cloying touches of the kind too common in 
 his love-scenes. Nor are like touches quite absent from 
 the ode; but they are more than compensated by the 
 exquisite freshness of the natural scenery where the myth- 
 ic lovers are disclosed — " Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers 
 fragrant-eyed." What other poet has compressed into a 
 sino-le line so much of the true life and charm of flowers, 
 of their power to minister to the spirit of man through 
 all his senses at once ? Such felicity in compound epithets 
 is by this time habitual with Keats ; and of Spenser, with 
 his " sea-shouldering whales," he is now in his own manner 
 the equal. The " azure-lidded sleep " of the maiden in St. 
 Agnes' s Eve is matched in this ode by the " moss - lain 
 Dryads "a-nd the " soft- conched ear" of Psyche, though 
 the last epithet perhaps jars on us a little with a sense of 
 oddity, like the "cirque-couchant" snake in Lamia. For 
 the rest there is certainly something strained in the turn 
 of thought and expression whereby the poet offers him- 
 self and the homage of his own mind to the divinity he 
 addresses in lieu of the worship of antiquity for which 
 she came too late ; and especially in the terms of the 
 metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza : 
 
 " Yes, I will be thy priest and build a fane 
 In some untrodden region of my mind, 
 Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain, 
 Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind." 
 
170 KEATS. [ciiap. 
 
 Yet over such difficulties the true lover of poetry will find 
 himself swiftly borne, until he pauses breathless and de- 
 lighted at the threshold of the sanctuary prepared by the 
 "gardener Fancy," his ear charmed by the glow and music 
 of the verse, with its hurrying pace and artfully iterated 
 vowels towards the close, his mind enthralled by the beauty 
 of the invocation and the imagery. 
 
 Less glowing, but of finer conception and more rare 
 poetic value, is the Ode on a Grecian Urn. Instead of 
 the long and unequal stanza of the Psyche, it is written 
 in a regular stanza of five rhymes, the first two arranged 
 in a quatrain, and the second three in a sestet : a plan to 
 which Keats adhered in the rest of his odes, only varying 
 the order of the sestet, and in one instance — the ode to 
 Melancholy — expanding it into a septet. The sight, or 
 the imagination, of a piece of ancient sculpture had set 
 the poet's mind at work, on the one hand conjuring up 
 the scenes of ancient life and worship which lay behind 
 and suggested the sculptured images ; on the other, spec- 
 ulating on the abstract relations of plastic art to life. 
 The opening invocation is followed by a string of ques- 
 tions which flash their own answer upon us out of the 
 darkness of antiquity — interrogatories which are at the 
 same time pictures — "What men or gods are these, 
 what maidens loth," etc. The second and third stan- 
 zas express with perfect poetic felicity and insight the 
 vital differences between life, which pays for its unique 
 prerogative of reality by satiety and decay, and art, 
 which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange perma- 
 nence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined 
 experiences even richer than the real. Then the ques- 
 tioning begins again, and yields the incomparable choice 
 of pictures — 
 
vii'.] THE ODES. 171 
 
 " What little town by river or sea shore, 
 
 Or mountain built with peaceful citadel, 
 Is emptied of its folk, this quite morn ?" 
 
 In the answering lines — 
 
 " And, little town, thy streets for evermore 
 Will silent be ; and not a soul to tell 
 Why thou art desolate, can e'er return " — 
 
 in these lines there seems a dissonance, inasmuch as they 
 speak of the arrest of life as though it were an infliction 
 in the sphere of reality, and not merely, like the instances 
 of such arrest given farther back, a necessary condition 
 in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own com- 
 pensations. But it is a dissonance which the attentive 
 reader can easily reconcile for himself ; and none but an 
 attentive reader will notice it. Finally, dropping the airy 
 play of the mind backward and forward between the two 
 spheres, the poet consigns the work of ancient skill to the 
 
 future, to remain, 
 
 " in midst of other woe 
 Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 
 Beauty is truth, truth beauty ;" 
 
 thus proclaiming in the last words what, amidst the grop- 
 ings of reason and the flux of things, is to the poet and 
 artist — at least to one of Keats's temper — an immutable 
 law. 
 
 It seems clear that no single extant work of antiquity 
 can have supplied Keats with the suggestion for this 
 poem. There exists, indeed, at Holland House an urn 
 wrought with just such a scene of pastoral sacrifice as is 
 described in his fourth stanza :* and of course no subject 
 
 1 This has been pointed out by my colleague, Mr. A. S. Murray 
 (see Forman, Works, vol. iii., p. 115, note; and W. T. Arnold, Poetical 
 Works, etc., p. xxii., note). 
 
172 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 is commoner in Greek relief-sculpture than a Bacchana- 
 lian procession. But the two subjects do not, so far as I 
 know, occur together on any single work of ancient art ; 
 and Keats probably imagined his urn by a combination 
 of sculptures actually seen in the British Museum, with 
 others known to him only from engravings, and particu- 
 larly from Piranesi's etchings. Lord Holland's urn is duly 
 figured in the Vast e Candelabri of that admirable mas- 
 ter. From the old Leigh Hunt days Keats had been fond 
 of what he calls 
 
 " the pleasant flow 
 Of words at opening a portfolio ;" 
 
 and in the scene of sacrifice in Endymion (Book I., 136- 
 163) we may perhaps already find a proof of familiarity 
 with this particular print, as well as an anticipation of the 
 more masterly poetic rendering of the subject in the ode. 
 
 The ode On Indolence stands midway, not necessarily 
 in date of composition, but in scope and feeling, between 
 the two Greek and the two personal odes, as I have above 
 distinguished them. In it Keats again calls up the image 
 of a marble urn, but not for its own sake, only to illustrate 
 the guise in which he feigns the allegoric presences of 
 Love, Ambition, and Poetry to have appeared to him in 
 a day-dream. This ode, less highly wrought and more 
 unequal than the rest, contains the imaginative record of 
 a passing mood (mentioned also in his correspondence) 
 when the wonted intensity of his emotional life was sus- 
 pended under the spell of an agreeable physical languor. 
 Well had it been for him had such moods come more fre- 
 quently to give him rest. Most sensitive among the sons 
 of men, the sources of joy and pain lay close together in 
 his nature, and unsatisfied passion kept both sources filled 
 
til] THE ODES. 173 
 
 to bursting. One of the attributes be assigns to bis en- 
 chan tress Lamia is a 
 
 " sciential brain 
 To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain." 
 
 In the fragmentary ode On Melancholy (wbicb has no 
 proper beginning, its first stanza having been discarded) he 
 treats the theme of Beaumont and of Milton in a manner 
 entirely his own, expressing his experience of the habitual 
 interchange and alternation of emotions of joy and pain 
 with a characteristic easy magnificence of imagery and 
 style : 
 
 "Aye, in the very Temple of Delight 
 
 Veil'd Melancholy has her sovereign shrine, 
 
 Though known to none save him whose strenuous tongue 
 Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine : 
 His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, 
 And be among her cloudy trophies hung." 
 
 The same crossing and intermingling of opposite cur- 
 rents of feeling finds expression, together with unequalled 
 touches of the poet's feeling for nature and romance, in 
 the Ode to a Nightingale. Just as his Grecian urn was no 
 single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not 
 the particular nightingale he had heard singing in the 
 Hampstead garden that he in his poem invokes, but a type 
 of the race imagined as singing in some far-off scene of 
 woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow 
 her; first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage — a 
 spell which he makes us realise in lines redolent of the 
 southern richness and joy. Then follows a contrasted vi- 
 sion of all his own and mankind's tribulations, which he 
 will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid of Bac- 
 chus — Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment 
 
174 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 he mistrusts her power, but the next moment finds himself 
 where he would be, listening to the imagined song in the 
 imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness, by that 
 gift whereby his mind is a match for nature, all the secrets 
 of the season and the night. In this joy he remembers 
 how often the thought of death has seemed welcome to 
 him, and thinks it would be more welcome now than ever. 
 The nightingale would not cease her song — and here, by a 
 breach of logic which is also, I think, a flaw in the poetry, 
 he contrasts the trausitoriness of human life, meaning the 
 life of the individual, with the permanence of the song- 
 bird's life, meaning the life of the type. This last thought 
 leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those 
 memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary romance 
 in the stanza closing with the words, " in faery lands for- 
 lorn ;" and then, catching up his own last word, " forlorn," 
 with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he returns to 
 daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest 
 dream the poem closes. In this group of the odes it takes 
 rank beside the Grecian Urn in the other. Neither is 
 strictly faultless, but such revealing imaginative insight and 
 such conquering poetic charm, the touch that in striking 
 so lightly strikes so deep, who does not prefer to faultless- 
 ness? Both odes are among the veriest glories of our poe- 
 try. Both are at the same time too long and too well 
 known to quote. Let us therefore place here, as an exam- 
 ple of this class of Keats's work, the ode To Autumn. 
 which is the last he wrote, and contains the record of his 
 quiet September days at Winchester. It opens out, indeed, 
 no such far-reaching avenues of thought and feeling as the 
 two last mentioned, but in execution is perhaps the com- 
 gletest of them all. In the first stanza the bounty, in the 
 last the pensiveness, of the time are expressed in words so 
 
VIL ] THE ODES. 175 
 
 transparent and direct that we almost forget they are words 
 at all, and nature herself and the season seem speaking to 
 us ; while in the middle stanza the touches of literary art 
 and Greek personification have an exquisite congruity and 
 
 lightness : 
 
 " Season of mists and mellow f ruitf ulness, 
 
 Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun ; 
 Conspiring with him now to load and bless . 
 
 With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run ; 
 To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, 
 
 And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core ; 
 To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 
 
 With a sweet kernel ; to set budding more, 
 And still more, later flowers for the bees, 
 Until they think warm days will never cease, 
 
 For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 
 
 " Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store ? 
 Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find 
 Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, 
 
 Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind ; 
 Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, 
 
 DrowsM with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 
 Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers : 
 And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep 
 Steady thy laden head across a brook ; 
 Or by a cider-press, with patient look, 
 Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. 
 
 " Where are the songs of Spring ? Ay, where are they ? 
 Think not of them, thou hast thy music too— 
 While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, 
 And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue ; 
 Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn 
 Among the river sallows, borne aloft 
 
 Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies ; 
 And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn ; 
 
1*76 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Hedge-crickets sing ; and now with treble soft 
 The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft ; 
 And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." 
 
 To pass from our poet's work at this time in the several 
 fields of romance, epic, ballad, and ode, to those in the 
 field of drama, is to pass from a region of happy and as- 
 sured conquest to one of failure, though of failure not 
 unredeemed by auguries of future success, had any future 
 been in store for him. At his age no man has ever been 
 a master in the drama; even by the most powerful intui- 
 tive genius neither human nature nor the difficulties of the 
 art itself can be so early mastered. The manner in which 
 Keats wrote his first play, merely supplying the words to a 
 plot contrived as they went along by a friend of gifts rad- 
 ically inferior to his own, was moreover the least favoura- 
 ble that he could have attempted. He brought to the task 
 the mastery over poetic colour and diction which we have 
 seen: he brought an impassioned sentiment of romance, 
 and a mind prepared to enter by sympathy into the hearts 
 of men and women ; while Brown contributed his ama- 
 teur stage-craft, such as it was. But these things were 
 not enough. The power of sympathetic insight had not 
 yet developed in Keats into one of dramatic creation ; and 
 the joint work of the friends is confused in order and 
 sequence, and far from masterly in conception. Keats, in- 
 deed, makes the characters speak in lines flashing with all 
 the hues of poetry. But in themselves they have the 
 effect only of puppets inexpertly agitated : Otho, a pup- 
 pet type of royal dignity and fatherly affection ; Ludolph, 
 of febrile passion and vacillation ; Erminia, of maidenly 
 purity ; Conrad and Auranthe, of ambitious lust and treach- 
 ery. At least until the end of the fourth act these strict- 
 ures hold good. From that point Keats worked alone, 
 
til] THE PLAYS. 177 
 
 and the fifth act, probably in consequence, shows a great 
 improvement. There is a real dramatic effect, of the 
 violent kind affected by the old English drama, in the 
 disclosure of the body of Auranthe, dead indeed, at the 
 moment when Ludolph in his madness vainly imagines 
 himself to have slain her; and some of the speeches in 
 which his frenzy breaks forth remind us strikingly of Mar- 
 lowe, not only by their pomp of poetry and allusion, but 
 by the tumult of the soul and senses expressed in them. 
 Of the second historical play, King Stephen, which Keats 
 began by himself at Winchester, too little was written to 
 afford matter for a safe judgment. The few scenes he 
 finished are not only marked by his characteristic splen- 
 dour and felicity of phrase, they are full of a spirit of 
 heady action and the stir of battle ; qualities which he had 
 not shown in any previous work, and for which we might 
 have doubted his capacity had not this fragment been pre- 
 served. 
 
 But in the mingling of his soul's and body's destinies 
 it had been determined that neither this nor any other of 
 his powers should be suffered to ripen farther upon earth. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Returji to "Wentworth Place. — Autumn occupations: The Cap and 
 Bells; Kecast of Hyperion. — Growing despondency. — Visit of 
 George Keats to England. — Attack of illness in February. — Rally 
 in the Spring. — Summer in Kentish Town. — Publication of the 
 Lamia volume. — Relapse.— Ordered South. — Voyage to Italy, Na- 
 ples, Rome. — Last Days and Death. [October, 1819 — February, 
 1821.] 
 
 We left Keats at Winchester, with Otho, Lamia, and the 
 Ode to Autumn just written, and with his mind set on 
 trying to face life sanely, and take up arms like other men 
 against his troubles, instead of letting imagination magnify 
 and passion exasperate them as heretofore. At his request 
 Dilke took for him a lodging in his own neighbourhood 
 in Westminster (25 College Street), and here Keats came 
 on the 8th of October to take up his quarters. But alas ! 
 his blood proved traitor to his will, and the plan of life 
 and literary work in London broke down at once on trial. 
 The gain of health and composure which he thought he 
 had made at Winchester proved illusory, or at least could 
 only be maintained at a distance from the great perturb- 
 ing cause. Two days after his return he went to Hamp- 
 stead — "into the fire" — and in a moment the flames had 
 seized him more fiercely than ever. It was the first time 
 he had seen his mistress for four- months. He found her 
 kind, and from that hour was utterly passion's slave again. 
 
chap, viii.] RETURN TO WENTWORTH PLACE. 119 
 
 In the solitude of his London lodging he found that he 
 could not work nor rest nor fix his thoughts. He must send 
 her a line, he writes to Fanny Brawne two days later, " 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. ... 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 absorb'd me." A 
 three days' visit at her mother's house, followed by anoth- 
 er of a day or two at the Dilkes', ended in his giving up 
 all resistance to the spell. Within ten days, apparently, 
 of his return from Winchester, he had settled again at 
 Hampstead under Brown's roof, next door to the home of 
 his joy and torment. lie writes with a true foreboding : 
 " I shall be able to do nothing. I should like to cast the 
 die for Love or Death — I have no patience with anything 
 else." 
 
 It was for death that the die was cast, and from the 
 date of his return to Wentworth Place, in October, 1819, 
 begins the melancholy closing chapter of Keats's history. 
 Of the triple flame which was burning away his life, the 
 flame of genius, of passion, and of disease, while the last 
 kept smouldering in secret, the second burnt every day 
 more fiercely, and the first began from this time forth to 
 sink. Not that he was idle during the ensuing season of 
 autumn and early winter ; but the work he did was mark- 
 ed both by infirmity of purpose and failure of power. 
 For the present he determined not to publish Lamia, Isa- 
 bella, and the other poems written since Endymion. He 
 preferred to await the result of Brown's attempt to get 
 Otho brought on the stage, thinking, no doubt justly, that 
 a success in that field would help to win a candid hearing 
 for his poetry. In the meantime the scoffs of the party 
 
180 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 critics had brought him so low in estimation that Brown 
 in sending- in the play thought it best to withhold his 
 friend's name. The great hope of the authors was that 
 Kean would see an opportunity for himself in the part of 
 Ludolph. In this they were not disappointed ; the play 
 was accepted, but Elliston, the manager, proposing to keep 
 it back till the next season, or the next but one, Keats and 
 Brown objected to the delay, and about Christmas trans- 
 ferred the offer of their MS. to Covent Garden, where 
 Macready, under Harris's management, was at this time 
 beginning to act the leading parts. It was after a while 
 returned unopened, and with that the whole matter seems 
 to have dropped. 
 
 In the meanwhile tragedy was still the goal towards 
 which Keats bent his hopes. " One of my ambitions," 
 he had written to Bailey from Winchester, " is to make 
 as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean 
 has done in acting." And now, in a letter to Mr. Taylor 
 of November 17th, he says that to write a few fine plays 
 is still his greatest ambition, when he does feel ambitious, 
 which is very seldom. The little dramatic skill he may as 
 yet have, however badly it might show in a drama, would, 
 he conceives, be sufficient for a poem ; and what he wishes 
 to do next is " to diffuse the colouring of St. Agnes' 's Eve 
 throughout a poem in which character and sentiment 
 would be the figures to such drapery." Two or three such 
 poems would be, he thinks, the best gradus to the Parnas- 
 sum altissimum of true dramatic writing. Meantime he 
 is for the moment engaged on a task of a different nature. 
 "As the marvellous is the most enticing, and the surest 
 guarantee of harmonious numbers, I have been endeavour- 
 ing to persuade myself to untether Fancy, and to let her 
 manage for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this 
 
vin.] "THE CAP AND BELLS." IS I 
 
 at all." The piece to which Keats here alludes is evident- 
 ly the satirical fairy poem of the Cap and Bells, on which 
 we know him to have been at this time busy. Writing 
 of the autumn days immediately following their return to 
 Wentworth Place, Brown says : 
 
 "By chance our conversation turned on the idea of a comic faery 
 poem in the Spenser stanza, and I was glad to encourage it. He had 
 not composed many stanzas before he proceeded in it with spirit. It 
 was to be published under the feigned authorship of " Lucy Vaughan 
 Lloyd," and to bear the title of the Cap and Belh, or, which he pre- 
 ferred, the Jealousies. This occupied his mornings pleasantly. He 
 wrote it with the greatest facility ; in one instance I remember hav- 
 ing copied (for I copied as he wrote) as many as twelve stanzas be- 
 fore dinner." l 
 
 Excellent friend as Brown was to Keats, he was not the 
 most judicious adviser in matters of literature, and the 
 attempt made in the Cap and Bells to mingle with the 
 strain of fairy fancy a strain of worldly flippancy and sa- 
 tire was one essentially alien to Keats's nature. As long- 
 as health and spirits lasted, he was often full, as we have 
 seen, of pleasantry and nonsense ; but his wit was essen- 
 tially amiable, 2 and he was far too tender-hearted ever to 
 be a satirist. Moreover, the spirit of poetry in him was 
 too intense and serious to work hand -in -hand with the 
 spirit of banter, as poetry and banter had gone hand- 
 in-hand in some of the metrical romances of the Italian 
 Renaissance, and again with unprecedented dexterity and 
 brilliance in the early cantos of Don Juan. It was partly 
 
 i Houghton MSS. 
 
 2 "He never spoke of any one," says Severn (Houghton MSS.), 
 " but by saying something in their favour, and this always so agree- 
 ably and cleverly, imitating the manner to increase your favourable 
 impression of the person he was speaking of." 
 
182 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 the influence of the facetious Brown, who was a great stu- 
 dent of Pulci and Boiardo, partly that of his own recent 
 Italian studies, and partly the dazzling example of Byron's 
 success, that now induced Keats to make an attempt in 
 the same dual strain. Having already employed the meas- 
 ure most fit for such an attempt, the ottava rima of the 
 Italians, in his serious poem of Isabella, he now, by what 
 seems an odd technical perversity, adopted for his comic 
 poem the grave Spenserian stanza, with its sustained and 
 involved rhymes and its long-drawn close. Working thus 
 in a vein not truly his own, and hampered moreover by 
 his choice of metre, Keats nevertheless manages his transi- 
 tions from grave to gay with a light hand, and the move- 
 ment of the Cap and Bells has much of his characteristic 
 suppleness and grace. In other respects the poem is not 
 a success. The story, which appears to have been one of 
 his own and Brown's invention, turned on the perverse 
 loves of a fairy emperor and a fairy princess of the East. 
 The two are unwillingly betrothed, each being meanwhile 
 enamoured of a mortal. The eighty-eight stanzas, which 
 were all that Keats wrote of the poem, only carry us as 
 far as the flight of the emperor Elfinan for England, which 
 takes place at the moment when his affianced bride alights 
 from her aerial journey to his capital. Into the Elfinan 
 part of the story Keats makes it clear that he meant some- 
 how to weave in the same tale which had been in his mind 
 when he began the fragment of St. Mark's Eve at the be- 
 ginning of the year — the tale of an English Bertha living 
 in a minster city, and beguiled in some way through the 
 reading of a magic book. With this and other purely 
 fanciful elements of the story are mixed up satirical allu- 
 sions to the events of the day. It was in this year, 1819, 
 that the quarrels between the Prince Regent and his wife 
 
viil] RECAST OF "HYPERION." 183 
 
 were drawing to a head; the public mind was full ot 
 the subject, and the general sympathy was vehemently 
 aroused on the side of the scandalous lady in opposition 
 to her thrice scandalous husband. The references to these 
 royal quarrels and intrigues in the Cap and Bells are gen- 
 eral rather than particular, although here and there indi- 
 vidual names and characters are glanced at, as when " Es- 
 quire Biancopany " stands manifestly, as Mr. Forman has 
 pointed out, for Whitbread. But the social and personal 
 satire of the piece is in truth aimless and w T eak enough. 
 As Keats had not the heart, so neither had he the worldly 
 experience, for this kind of work ; and beside the blaze of 
 the Byronic wit and devilry his raillery seems but child's 
 play. Where the fun is of the purely fanciful and fairy 
 kind, he shows abundance of adroitness and invention, and 
 in passages not humourous is sometimes really himself, his 
 imagination becoming vivid and alert, and his style taking 
 on its own happy, light and colour, but seldom for more 
 than a stanza or half-stanza at a time. 
 
 Besides his morning task in Brown's company on the 
 Cap and Bells, Keats had other work on hand during this 
 November and December. " In the evenings," writes 
 Brown, "at his own desire, he occupied a separate apart- 
 ment, and was deeply engaged in re-modelling the frag- 
 ment of Hyperion into the form of a Vision." The result 
 of this attempt, which has been preserved, is of a singular 
 and pathetic interest in Keats's history. We have seen 
 how, in the previous August, he had grown discontented 
 with the style and diction of Hyperion, as being too artifi- 
 cial and Miltonic. Now, in the decline of his powers, he 
 took the poem up again, 1 and began to re-write and great- 
 ly amplify it ; partly, it would seem, through a mere re- 
 1 See Appendix, p. 220. 
 9 N 
 
J 84 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 lapse into his old fault of overloading, partly through a 
 desire to give expression to thoughts and feelings which 
 were pressing on his mind. His new plan was to relate 
 the fall of the Titans, not, as before, in direct narrative, but 
 in the form of a vision revealed and interpreted to him by 
 a goddess of the fallen race. The reader remembers how 
 he had broken off his work on Hyperion at the point 
 where Mnemosyne is enkindling the brain of Apollo with 
 the inspiration of her ancient wisdom. Following a clue 
 which he had found in a Latin book of mythology he had 
 lately bought, 1 he now identifies this Greek Mnemosyne, 
 the mother of the Muses, with the Roman Moneta, and 
 (being possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta 
 on the Capitol at Rome was not far from that of Saturn) 
 makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess and guardian 
 of Saturn's temple. His vision takes him first into a grove 
 or garden of delicious fruits, having eaten of which he 
 sinks into a slumber, and awakes to find himself on the 
 floor of a huge primeval temple. Presently a voice, the 
 voice of Moneta, whose form he cannot yet see for the 
 fumes of incense, summons him to climb the steps leading 
 to an image beside which she is offering sacrifice. Obey- 
 ing her with difficulty, he questions her concerning the 
 mysteries of the place, and learns from her, among other 
 knowledge, that he is standing in the temple of Saturn. 
 Then she withdraws the veils from her face, at sight of 
 which he feels an irresistible desire to learn her thoughts; 
 and thereupon finds himself conveyed in a trance by her 
 
 i Auctores Mythographi Lalini, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742. 
 Keats's copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and passed af- 
 ter his death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Arch- 
 deacon Bailey (Houghton MSS.). The passage about Moneta which 
 had wrought in Keats's mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hygiuus. 
 
viil] RECAST OF "HYPERION." 185 
 
 side to the ancient scene of Saturn's overthrow. "Deep 
 in the shady sadness of a vale," etc. — from this point Keats 
 begiife to weave into the new tissue of his Vision the 
 text of the original Hyperion, with alterations which are 
 in almost all cases for the worse. Neither does the new 
 portion of his work well match the old. Side by side 
 with impressive passages, it contaius others where both 
 rhythm and diction flag, and in comparison depends for 
 its beauty far more on single lines and passages, and less 
 on sustained effects. Keats has indeed imagined nothing 
 richer or purer than the feast of fruits at the opening of 
 the Vision; and of supernatural presences he has perhaps 
 conjured up none of such melancholy beauty and awe as 
 that of the priestess when she removes her veils. But the 
 especial interest of the poem lies in the light which it 
 throws on the inward distresses of his mind, and on the 
 conception he had by this time come to entertain of the 
 poet's character and lot. "When Moneta bids him mount 
 the steps to her side, she warns him that if he fails to do 
 so he is bound to perish utterly where he stands. In fact, 
 he all but dies before he reaches the stair, but reviving, as- 
 cends and learns from her the meaning of the ordeal : 
 
 "None can usurp this height," returned that shade, 
 
 "But those to whom the miseries of the world 
 
 Are misery, and will not let them rest. 
 
 All else who find a haven in the world, 
 
 Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, 
 
 If by a chance into this fane they come, 
 
 Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half." 
 
 " Are there not thousands in the world," said I, 
 
 Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade, 
 
 " Who love their fellows even to the death, 
 
 Who feel the giant agony of the world, 
 
 And more, like slaves to poor humanity, 
 
186 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Labour for mortal good ? I sure should see 
 
 Other men here, but I am here alone." 
 
 " Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries/' 
 
 Rejoin' d that voice ; " they are no dreamers weak ; 
 
 They seek no wonder but the human face, 
 
 No music but a happy-noted voice : 
 
 They come not here, they have no thought to come ; 
 
 And thou art here, for thou art less than they. 
 
 What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, 
 
 To the great world ? Thou art a dreaming thing, 
 
 A fever of thyself : think of the earth — 
 
 What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee ? 
 
 What haven ? Every creature hath its home, 
 
 Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, 
 
 Whether his labours be sublime or low — 
 
 The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct : 
 
 Only the dreamer venoms all his days, 
 
 Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. 
 
 Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shared, 
 
 Such things as thou art are admitted oft 
 
 Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile, 
 
 And suffer'd in these temples." 1 
 
 Tracing the process of Keats's thought through this 
 somewhat obscure imagery — the poet, he means, is one 
 who to indulge in dreams withdraws himself from the 
 wholesome activities of ordinary men. At first he is lulled 
 to sleep by the sweets of poetry (the fruits of the garden); 
 awakening, he finds himself on the floor of a solemn tem- 
 ple, with Mnemosyne, the mother and inspirer of song, en- 
 throned all but inaccessibly above him. If he is a trifler, 
 indifferent to the troubles of his fellow men, he is con- 
 demned to perish swiftly and be forgotten ; he is suffered 
 to approach the goddess, to commune with her and catch 
 
 1 Mrs. Owen was the first of Keats's critics to call attention to this 
 passage, without, however, understanding the special significance it 
 derives from the date of its composition. 
 
VIIL ] RECAST OF "HYPERION." 187 
 
 her inspiration, only on condition that he shares all those 
 troubles and makes them his own. And even then his por- 
 tion is far harder and less honourable than that of com- 
 mon men. In the conception Keats here expresses of the 
 human mission and responsibility of his art there is noth- 
 ing new. Almost from the first dawning of his ambition 
 he had looked beyond the mere sweets of poetry towards 
 
 " a nobler life ; 
 Where I may find the agonies, the strife 
 Of human hearts." 
 
 What is new is the bitterness with which he speaks of the 
 poet's lot even at its best : 
 
 " Only the dreamer venoms all his days, 
 Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve." 
 
 Through what a circle must the spirit of Keats, when 
 this bitter cry broke from him, have travelled since the 
 days, only three years before, when he was never tired of 
 singing by anticipation the joys and glories of the poetic 
 
 life: 
 
 " These are the living pleasures of the bard, 
 
 But richer far posterity's award. 
 
 What shall he murmur with his latest breath, 
 
 When his proud eye looks through the film of death ?" 
 
 His present cry in its bitterness is in truth a cry not so 
 much of the spirit as of the flesh, or rather of the spirit 
 vanquished by the flesh. The wasting of his vital powers 
 by latent disease was turning all his sensations and emo- 
 tions into pain— at once darkening the shadow of impend- 
 ing poverty, increasing the natural importunity of ill-bod- 
 ing instincts at his heart, and exasperating into agony the 
 unsatisfied cravings of his passion. In verses at this time 
 
188 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 addressed, though doubtless not shown, to his mistress, he 
 exclaims once and again in tones like this : 
 
 " Where shall I learn to get my peace again ?" 
 
 " for some sunny spell 
 To dissipate the shadows of this hell ;" 
 
 or at the conclusion of a piteous sonnet: 
 
 " Yourself— your soul— in pity give me all, 
 
 Withhold no atom's atom or I die, 
 Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall, 
 
 Forget, in the mist of idle misery, 
 Life's purposes — the palate of the mind 
 Losing its gust, and my ambition blind." 
 
 That he might win peace by marriage with the object 
 of his passion does not seem to have occurred to Keats 
 as possible in the present state of his fortunes. " How- 
 ever selfishly I may feel," he had written to her some 
 months earlier, " I am sure I could never act selfishly." 
 The Brawnes on their part were comfortably off, but what 
 his instincts of honour and independence forbade him to 
 ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly be expected 
 to offer. As the autumn w r ore into winter, Keats's suffer- 
 ings, disguise them as he might, could not escape the no- 
 tice of his affectionate comrade Brown. Without under- 
 standing the cause, Brown was not slow to perceive the 
 effect, and to realise how vain were the assurances Keats 
 had given him at Winchester, that the pressure of real 
 troubles would stiffen him against troubles of imagination, 
 and that he was not and would not allow himself to be un- 
 happy. 
 
 "1 quickly perceived," writes Brown, "that he was more so than 
 I had feared ; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind, and, 
 frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great un- 
 
viii.] GROWING DESPONDENCY. . 189 
 
 easiness. He was unwilling to speak on the subject ; and I could do 
 no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding that 
 word however. . . . All that a friend could say, or offer, or urge was 
 not enough to heal his many wounds. He listened, and in kindness, 
 or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend 
 could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. He was 
 too thoughtful, or too unquiet, and he began to be reckless of health. 
 Among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times, 
 a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spirits. It was discovered 
 by accident, and without delay revealed to me. He needed not to be 
 warned of the danger of such a habit ; but I rejoiced at his promise 
 never to take another drop without my knowledge ; for nothing could 
 induce him to break his word when once given — which was a dif- 
 ficulty. Still, at the very moment of my being rejoiced, this was 
 an additional proof of his rooted misery." 1 
 
 Some of the same symptoms were observed by Hay don, 
 and have been described by him with his usual reckless 
 exaggeration, and love of contrasting another's weakness 
 with his own strength. 2 To his friends in general Keats 
 bore himself as affectionately as ever, but they began to 
 notice that he had lost his cheerfulness. One of them, 
 Severn, at this time competed for and carried off (De- 
 cember 9, 1819) the annual gold medal of the Academy 
 for a historical painting, which had not been adjudged 
 for several years. The subject was Spenser's " Cave of 
 Despair." We hear of Keats flinging out in anger from 
 among a company of elder artists where the deserts of 
 the winner were disparaged ; and we find him making an 
 appointment with Severn to go and see his prize picture — 
 adding, however, parenthetically, from his troubled heart, 
 " You had best put me into your Cave of Despair." In 
 December his letters to his sister make mention several 
 times of ill health, and once of a suggestion which had 
 1 Houghton MSS. 2 See p. 191, note. 
 
190 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 been made to him by Mr. Abbey, and which for a mo- 
 ment he was willing to entertain, that he should take ad- 
 vantage of an opening in the tea-broking line in connection 
 with that gentleman's business. Early in January, 1820, 
 George Keats appeared on a short visit to London. He 
 was now settled with his wife and child in the far West, 
 at Louisville, on the Ohio. Here his first trading ad- 
 venture had failed, owing, as he believed, to the dishonesty 
 of the naturalist Audubon, who was concerned in it, and 
 he was brought to England by the necessity of getting 
 possession from the reluctant Abbey of a further portion 
 of the scanty funds still remaining to the brothers from 
 their grandmother's gift. His visit lasted only three weeks, 
 during which John made no attempt to unbosom himself 
 to him as of old. " He was not the same being," wrote 
 George, looking back on the time some years afterwards ; 
 " although his reception of me was as warm as heart could 
 wish, he did not speak with his former openness and unre- 
 serve, he had lost the reviving custom of venting his griefs." 
 In a letter which the poet wrote to his sister-in-law while 
 her husband was in England, he attempts to keep up the 
 old vein of lively affectionate fun and spirits, but soon 
 falls involuntarily into one of depression and irritation 
 against the world. Of his work he says nothing, and it is 
 clear from Brown's narrative that both his morning and 
 his evening task — the Cap and Bells and the Vision — 
 had been dropped some time before this, 1 and left in the 
 fragmentary state in which we possess them. 
 
 George left for Liverpool on Friday, January 28th. A 
 few days later Keats was seized by the first overt attack 
 of the fatal mischief which had been set up in his consti- 
 
 1 "Interrupted," says Brown, oracularly, in Houghton MSS., " by a 
 circumstance which it is needless to mention." 
 
tiil] ATTACK OF ILLNESS. 191 
 
 tution by the exertions of his Scotch tour, and which 
 recent agitations, and perhaps imprudences, had aggra- 
 vated. 
 
 " One night," writes Brown — it was on the Thursday, February 3d 
 — "at eleven o'clock, he came into the house in a state that looked 
 like fierce intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impos- 
 sible ; J it therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, ' What 
 is the matter? you are fevered.' 'Yes, yes,' he answered, 'I was 
 on the outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled 
 —but now I don't feel it. Fevered !— of course, a little.' He mild- 
 ly and instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, 
 to my request that he should go to bed. I followed with ike best 
 immediate remedy in my power. I entered his chamber as he leapt 
 into bed. On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the 
 pillow, he slightly coughed, and I heard him say, ' That is blood 
 from my mouth.' I went towards him ; he was examining a single 
 drop of blood upon the sheet. ' Bring me the candle, Brown, and 
 let me see this blood.' After regarding it steadfastly, he looked up 
 in my face with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, 
 and said, ' I know the colour of that blood — it is arterial blood — I 
 cannot be deceived in that colour — that drop of blood is my death- 
 warrant — I must die.' I ran for a surgeon ; my friend was bled; 
 and at five in the morning I left him after he had been some time 
 in a quiet sleep." 
 
 Keats knew his case, and from the first moment had 
 foreseen the issue truly. He survived for twelve months 
 longer, but the remainder of his life was but a life - in- 
 death. How many are there among us to whom such 
 lacrymae rerum come not home ? Happy, at least, are 
 they whose lives this curse consumption has not darkened 
 w T ith sorrow unquenchable for losses past, with appre- 
 hensions never at rest for those to come — who know 
 
 1 This passing phrase of Brown, who lived with Keats in the 
 closest daily companionship, by itself sufficiently refutes certain 
 statements of Haydon. But see Appendix, p. 228. 
 9* 
 
192 KEATS. [chaf 
 
 not what it is to watch, in some haven of delusive hope 
 under Mediterranean palms, or amid the glittering winter 
 peace of Alpine snows, their dearest and their brightest 
 perish. The malady in Keats's case ran through the 
 usual phases of deceptive rally and inevitable relapse. 
 The doctors would not admit that his lungs were injured, 
 and merely prescribed a lowering regimen and rest from 
 mental excitement. The weakness and nervous prostra- 
 tion of the patient were at first excessive, and he could 
 bear to see nobody but Brown, who nursed him affection- 
 ately day and night. After a week or so he was able to 
 receive little daily visits from his betrothed, and to keep 
 up a constant interchange of notes with her. A hint, 
 which his good feelings wrung from him, that under the 
 circumstances he ought to release her from her engage- 
 ment, was not accepted, and for a time he became quieter 
 and more composed. To his sister at Walthamstow he 
 wrote often and cheerfully from his sick-bed, and pleasant 
 letters to some of his men friends; among them one to 
 James Rice, which contains this often quoted and touclp 
 ing picture of his state of mind : 
 
 " I may say that for six months before I was taken ill I had not 
 passed a tranquil day. Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suf- 
 fering under passionate feeling, or if I turned to versify some, that acer- 
 bated the poison of either sensation. The beauties of nature had lost 
 their power over me. How astonishingly (here I must premise that 
 illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my mind 
 of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive 
 things in a truer light) — how astonishingly does the chance of leaving 
 the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us ! Like 
 poor Falstaff, though I do not ' babble,' I think of green fields ; I 
 muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from 
 my infancy — their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had 
 just created them with a superhuman fancy." 
 
viii.] RALLY IN THE SPRING. 193 
 
 The greatest pleasure be had experienced in life, Keats 
 said at another time, was in watching the growth of flow- 
 ers ; and in a discussion on the literary merits of the Bible 
 he once, says Hazlitt, found fault with the Hebrew poetry 
 for saying so little about them. What he wants to see 
 again, he writes now further from his sick-bed, are " the 
 simple flowers of our spring." And in the course of 
 April, after being nearly two months a prisoner, he began 
 gradually to pick up strength and get about. Even as 
 early as the 25th of March we hear of him going into 
 London, to the private view of Haydon's " Entry into 
 Jerusalem," where the painter tells how he found him and 
 Hazlitt in a corner, " really rejoicing." Keats's friends, in 
 whose minds his image had always been associated with 
 the ideas of intense vitality and of fame in store, could 
 not bring themselves to believe but that he would recover. 
 Brown had arranged to start early in May on a second 
 walking-tour in Scotland, and the doctor actually advised 
 Keats to go with him ; a folly on which he knew his own 
 state too well to venture. He went with Brown on the 
 smack as far as Gravesend, and then returned; not to 
 Hampstead, but to a lodging in Wesleyan Place, Kentish 
 Town. He had chosen this neighbourhood for the sake 
 of the companionship of Leigh Hunt, who was living in 
 Mortimer Street, close by. Keats remained at Wesleyan 
 Place for about seven weeks during May and June, living 
 an invalid life, and occasionally taking advantage of the 
 weather to go to an exhibition in London or for a drive 
 on Hampstead Heath. During the first weeks of his ill- 
 ness he had been strictly enjoined to avoid not only the 
 excitement of writing, but even that of reading, poetry. 
 About this time he speaks of intending to begin (meaning 
 begin again) soon on the Cap and Bells. But in fact the 
 
194 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 only work he really did was that of seeing through the 
 press, with some slight revision of the text, the new vol- 
 ume of poems which his friends had at last induced him 
 to put forward. This is the immortal volume containing 
 Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, and. the 
 Odes. Of the poems written during Keats's twenty 
 months of inspiration, from March, 1818, to October, 1819, 
 none of importance are omitted except The Eve of St. 
 Mark, the Ode on Indolence, and La Belle Dame sans 
 Merci. The first Keats no doubt thought too fragment- 
 ary, and the second too unequal; La Belle Dame sans 
 Merci he had let Hunt have for his periodical, the Indica- 
 tor, where it was printed (with alterations not for the bet- 
 ter) on May 20, 1820. Hyperion, as the publishers men- 
 tion in a note, was only at their special desire included in 
 the book ; it is given in its original shape, the poet's 
 friends, says Brown, having made him feel that they 
 thought the re-cast no improvement. The volume came 
 out in the first week of July. An admirably kind and 
 discreet review by Leigh Hunt appeared in the Indicator 
 at the beginning of August ; * and in the same month Jef- 
 frey, in the Edinburgh Review, for the first time broke si- 
 lence in Keats's favour. The impression made on the 
 more intelligent order of readers may be inferred from 
 the remarks of Crabbe Robinson in his Diaries for the 
 following December : 2 " My book has had good suc- 
 cess among the literary people," wrote Keats a few 
 
 1 A week or two later Leigh Hunt printed in the Indicator a few 
 stanzas from the Cap and Bells, and about the same time dedicated to 
 Keats his translation of Tasso's Amyntas, speaking of the original as 
 " an early work of a celebrated poet whose fate it was to be equally 
 pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical." 
 
 2 See Crabbe Robinson, Diaries, vol. ii., p. 197, sqq. 
 
Tin.] SUMMER IN KENTISH TOWN. 195 
 
 weeks after its appearance, "and I believe has a mod- 
 erate sale." 
 
 But bad the success been even far greater than it was, 
 Keats was in no heart and no health for it to cheer him. 
 Passion with lack of hope were working havoc in his 
 blood, and frustrating any efforts of nature towards recov- 
 ery. The^ relapse was not long delayed. Fresh haemor- 
 rhages occurring on the 22d and 23d of June, he moved 
 from his lodgings in Wesleyan Place to be nursed by the 
 Hunts at their house in Mortimer Street. Here every- 
 thing was done that kindness could suggest to keep him 
 amused and comforted, but all in vain ; he " would keep 
 his eyes fixed all day," as he afterwards avowed, on Hamp- 
 stead; and once when at Hunt's suggestion they took a 
 drive in that direction, and rested on a seat in Well Walk, 
 he burst into a flood of unwonted tears, and declared his 
 heart was breaking. In writing to Fanny Brawne he at 
 times cannot disguise nor control his misery, but breaks 
 into piteous outcries, the complaints of one who feels him- 
 self chained and desperate while mistress, and friends are 
 free, and whose heart is racked between desire and help- 
 lessness, and a thousand daily pangs of half-frantic jeal- 
 ousy and suspicion. "Hamlet's heart was full of such 
 misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, ' Go to a nun- 
 nery, go, go !' " Keats when he wrote thus was not him- 
 self, but only, in his own words, " a fever of himself ;" and 
 to seek cause for his complaints in anything but his own 
 distempered state would be unjust equally to his friends 
 and his betrothed. Wound as they might at the time, we 
 know from her own words that they left no impression of 
 unkindness on her memory. 1 
 
 1 See Appendix, p. 228. 
 
196 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Such, at this time, was Keats's condition that the slight- 
 est shock unmanned him, and he could not bear the en- 
 trance of an unexpected person or stranger. After he had 
 been some seven weeks with the Hunts, it happened on 
 the 12th of August, through the misconduct of a servant, 
 that a note from Fanny Brawne was delivered to him 
 opened and two days late. This circumstance, we are told, 
 so affected him that he could not endure to stay longer in 
 the house, but left it instantly, intending to go back to his 
 old lodgings in Well Walk. The Brawnes, however, 
 would not suffer this, but took him into their own home 
 and nursed him. Under the eye and tendance of his be- 
 trothed he found, during the next few weeks, some mitiga- 
 tion of his sufferings. Haydon came one day to sec him, 
 and has told with a painter's touch how he found him 
 "lying in a white bed, with white quilt and white sheets; 
 the only colour visible was the hectic flush of his cheeks. 
 He was deeply affected, and so was I." ' Ever since his 
 relapse at the end of June, Keats had been warned by the 
 doctors that a winter in England would be too much for 
 him, and had been trying to bring himself to face the 
 prospect of a journey to Italy. The Shelleys had heard 
 through the Gisbornes of Keats's relapse, and Shelley now 
 wrote in terras of the most delicate and sympathetic kind- 
 ness inviting him to come and take up his residence with 
 them at Pisa. This letter reached Keats immediately 
 after his return to Hampstead. He replied in an uncertain 
 tone, showing himself deeply touched by the Shelleys' 
 friendship; but as to the Cenci, which had just been sent 
 him, and generally as to Shelley's and his own work in 
 
 1 Houghton MSS. In both the Autobiography and the Corre- 
 spondence the passage is amplified with painful and probably not 
 trustworthy additions. 
 
Tin.] 
 
 ORDERED SOUTH. 197 
 
 poetry, finding nothing very cordial or much to the pur- 
 pose to say. 
 
 As to the plan of wintering in Italy, Keats had by this 
 time made up his mind to try it, " as a soldier marches up 
 to a battery." His hope was that Brown would accom- 
 pany him, but the letters he had written to that friend in 
 the Highlands were delayed in delivery, and the time for 
 Keats's°departure was fast approaching, while Brown still 
 remained in ignorance of his purpose. In the meantime 
 another companion offered himself in the person of Severn, 
 who having won, as we have seen, the gold medal of the 
 Royal Academy the year before, determined now to go 
 and work at Rome with a view to competing for the trav- 
 elling studentship. Keats and Severn accordingly took 
 passage for Naples on board the ship Maria Crowther 
 which sailed from London on Sept. 18th. 1 Several of the 
 friends who loved Keats best went on board with him as 
 far as Gravesend, and among them Mr. Taylor, who had 
 just helped him with money for his journey by the pur- 
 chase for £100 of the copyright of Endymion. As soon 
 as the ill news of his health reached Brown in Scotland, 
 he hastened to make the best of his way south, and for 
 that purpose caught a smack at Dundee, which arrived in 
 the Thames on the same evening as the Maria Crowther 
 sailed ; so that the two friends lay on that night within 
 hail of each other off Gravesend unawares. 
 
 The voyage at first seemed to do Keats good, and Severn 
 
 » I have the date of sailing from Lloyd's, through the kindness of 
 the secretary, Col. Hozier. For the particulars of the voyage and 
 the time following it, I have drawn in almost equal degrees from the 
 materials published by Lord Houghton, by Mr. Forman, by Severn 
 himself in Atlantic Monthly, vol. xi., p. 401, and from the unpublished 
 Houghton and Severn MSS. 
 
198 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 was struck by Ins vigour of appetite and apparent cheer- 
 fulness. The fever of travel and change is apt to produce 
 this deceptive effect in a consumptive patient, and in 
 Keats's case, aided by his invincible spirit of pleasantness 
 to those about him, it was sufficient to disguise his suffer- 
 ings, and to raise the hopes of his companion throughout 
 the voyage and for some time afterwards. Contrary winds 
 held them beating about the Chanuel, and ten days after 
 starting they had got no farther than Portsmouth, where 
 Keats landed for a day, and paid a visit to his friends at 
 Bedhampton. On board ship in the Solent immediately 
 afterwards he wrote to Brown a letter confiding to him 
 the secret of his torments more fully than he had ever con- 
 fided it face to face. Even if his body would recover of 
 itself, his passion, he says, would prevent it : " The very 
 thino- which I want to live most for will be a creat occa- 
 sion of my death. I cannot help it. Who can help it? 
 Were I in health it would make me ill, and how can I 
 bear it in my state? I wish for death every day and night 
 to deliver me from these pains, and then T wish death 
 away, for death would destroy even these pains, which are 
 better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, 
 are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer for 
 ever." 
 
 On the night when Keats w T rote these words (Sept. 28th) 
 Brown was staying with the Dilkes at Chichester, so that 
 the two friends had thus narrowly missed seeing each other 
 once more. The ship putting to sea again, still with ad- 
 verse winds, there came next to Keats that day of mo- 
 mentary calm and lightening of the spirit of which Severn 
 has left us the record, and the poet himself a testimony in 
 the last, and one of the most beautiful, of his sonnets. 
 They landed on the Dorsetshire coast, apparently near 
 
viii.] VOYAGE TO ITALY. 199 
 
 Lulworth, and spent a day exploring its rocks and caves, 
 the beauties of which Keats showed and interpreted with 
 the delighted insight of one initiated from birth into the 
 secrets of nature. On board ship the same night he wrote 
 the sonnet which every reader of English knows so well, 
 placing it, by a pathetic choice or chance, opposite the 
 heading a Lover's Complaint, on a blank leaf of the folio 
 copy of Shakspeare's poems which had been given him 
 by Reynolds, and which in marks, notes, and under-scor- 
 ings bears so many other interesting traces of his thought 
 and feeling : 
 
 "Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art, 
 
 Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night 
 And watching, with eternal lids apart, 
 
 Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, 
 The moving waters at their priestlike task 
 
 Of cold ablution round earth's human shores, 
 Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask 
 
 Of snow upon the mountains and the moors — 
 No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, 
 
 Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, 
 To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, 
 
 Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, 
 Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, 
 And so live ever — or else swoon to death." 
 
 These were Keats's last verses. With the single exception 
 of the sonnet beginning " The day is gone, and all its 
 sweets are gone," composed probably immediately after 
 his return from Winchester, they are the only love-verses 
 in which his passion is attuned to tranquillity ; and surely 
 no death-song of lover or poet came ever in a strain of 
 more unfevered beauty and tenderness, or with images of 
 such a refreshing and solemn purity. 
 
200 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 Getting clear of the Channel at last, the vessel was caught 
 by a violent storm in the Bay of Biscay ; and Severn wak- 
 ing at night, and finding the water rushing through their 
 cabin, called out to Keats, " half fearing he might be dead," 
 and to his relief was answered cheerfully with the first line 
 of Arne's long-popular song from Artaxerxes — "Water 
 parted from the sea." As the storm abated Keats began 
 to read the shipwreck canto of Don Juan, but found its 
 reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and presently flung 
 the volume from him in disgust. A dead calm followed ; 
 after which the voyage proceeded without farther incident, 
 except the dropping of a shot across the ship's bow by a 
 Portuguese man-of-war, in order to bring her to and ask a 
 question about privateers. After a voyage of over four 
 weeks the Maria Crowther arrived in the Bay of Naples, 
 and w r as there subjected to ten days' quarantine, during 
 which, says Keats, he summoned up, " in a kind of desper- 
 ation," more puns than in the whole course of his life be- 
 fore. A Miss Cotterill, consumptive like himself, was 
 among his fellow -passengers, and to her Keats showed 
 himself full of cheerful kindness from first to last, the sight 
 of her sufferings inwardly preying all the while on his 
 nerves, and contributing to aggravate his own. He admits 
 as much in writing from Naples harbour to Mrs. Brawne ; 
 and in the same letter says, " what an account I could 
 give you of the Bay of Naples if I could once more feel 
 myself a Citizen of this world — I feel a spirit in my Brain 
 would lay it forth pleasantly." The effort he constantly 
 made to keep bright, and to show an interest in the new 
 world of colour and classic beauty about him, partly im- 
 posed on Severn ; but in a letter he wrote to Brown from 
 Naples on Nov. 1st, soon after their landing,, his secret 
 anguish of sense and spirit breaks out terribly : 
 
vin. ] NAPLES. 201 
 
 "I can bear to die — I cannot bear to leave her. . . . Oh God ! God ! 
 God! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes 
 through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling 
 cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her — I 
 see her — I hear her. . . . Oh, Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. 
 It surprises me that the human heart is capable of so much misery." 
 
 At Naples Keats and Severn staid at the Hotel d'An- 
 gleterre, and received much kindness and hospitality from 
 a brother of Miss Cotterill's who was there to meet her. 
 The political state and servile temper of the people — 
 though they were living just then under the constitutional 
 forms imposed on the Bourbon monarchy by the revolu- 
 tion of the previous summer — grated on Keats's liberal 
 instincts, and it was the sight in the theatre of sentries 
 actually posted on the stage during a performance that one 
 evening determined him suddenly to leave the place. He 
 had received there another letter from Shelley, who since 
 he last wrote had read the Lamia volume, and was full of 
 generous admiration for Hyperion. Shelley now warmly 
 renewed his invitation to Keats to come to Pisa. But his 
 and Severn's plans were fixed for Rome. On their drive 
 thither (apparently in the second week of November) Keats 
 suffered seriously from want of proper food ; but he was 
 able to take pleasure in the beauty of the land, and of the 
 autumn flowers which Severn gathered for him by the way. 
 Reaching Rome, they settled at once in lodgings which 
 Mr. (afterwards Sir James) Clark had taken for them in 
 the Piazza di Spagna, in the first house on the right going 
 up the steps to Sta. Trinita dei Monti. Here, according to 
 the manner of those days in Italy, they were left pretty 
 much to shift for themselves. Neither could speak Ital- 
 ian, and at first they were ill served by the trattoria from 
 which they got their meals, until Keats mended matters 
 
202 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 by one day coolly emptying all the dishes out of window, 
 and handing them back to the messenger — a hint, says 
 Severn, which was quickly taken. One of Severn's first 
 cares was to get a piano, since nothing soothed Keats's 
 pain so much as music. For a while the patient seemed 
 better. Dr. Clark wished him to avoid the excitement of 
 seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left Sev- 
 ern to visit these alone, and contented himself with quiet 
 strolls, chiefly on the Pincian close by. The season was 
 fine, and the freshness and brightness of the air, says Sev- 
 ern, invariably made him pleasant and witty. In Severn's 
 absence Keats had a companion he liked in an invalid, 
 Lieutenant Elton. In their walks on the Pincian these 
 two often met the famous beauty Pauline Bonaparte, Prin- 
 cess Borghese. Her charms were by this time failing — but 
 not for lack of exercise ; and her melting glances at his 
 companion, who was tall and handsome, presently affect- 
 ed Keats's nerves, and made them change the direction of 
 their walks. Sometimes, instead of walking, they would 
 ride a little way on horseback while Severn was working 
 among the ruins. 
 
 It is related by Severn that Keats in his first days at 
 Rome began reading a volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at 
 the words, too sadly applicable to himself, 
 
 " Misera me ! sollievo a me non resta 
 Altro che '1 piauto, ed il pianio e deliito." 
 
 Notwithstanding signs like this, his mood w T as on the whole 
 more cheerful. His thoughts even turned again towards 
 verse, and he meditated a poem on the subject of Sabrina. 
 Severn began to believe he would get well, and wrote en- 
 couragingly to his friends in England; and on November 
 30th Keats himself wrote to Brown in a strain much less 
 
vin .] ROME. 203 
 
 despondent than before. But suddenly on these glimmer- 
 ings of hope followed despair. On December 10th came 
 a relapse which left no doubt of the issue. Haemorrhage 
 followed haemorrhage on successive days, and then came a 
 period of violent fever, with scenes the most piteous and 
 distressing. Keats at starting had confided to his friend 
 a bottle of laudanum, and now with agonies of entreaty 
 begged to have it, in order that he might put an end to 
 his misery ; and on Severn's refusal, " his tender appeal 
 turned to despair, with all the power of his ardent imagi- 
 nation and bursting heart." It was no unmanly fear of 
 pain in Keats, Severn again and again insists, that prompt- 
 ed this appeal, but above all his acute sympathetic sense 
 of the trials which the sequel would bring upon his friend. 
 " He explained to me the exact procedure of his gradual 
 dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and 
 dwelt upon the danger to my life, and certainly to my fort- 
 une, of my continued attendance on him." Severn gently 
 persisting in refusal, Keats for a while fiercely refused his 
 friend's ministrations, until presently the example of that 
 friend's patience and his own better mind made him 
 ashamed. In religion Keats had been neither a believer 
 nor a scoffer, respecting Christianity without calling him- 
 self a Christian, and by turns clinging to and drifting 
 from the doctrine of immortality. Contrasting now the 
 behaviour of the believer Severn with his own, he acknowl- 
 edged anew the power of the Christian teaching and ex- 
 ample, and bidding Severn read to him from Jeremy Tay- 
 lor's Holy Living and Dying, strove to pass the remainder 
 of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy. 
 
 By degrees the tumult of his soul abated. His suffer- 
 ings were very great, partly from the nature of the disease 
 itself, partly from the effect of the disastrous lowering and 
 
204 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 starving treatment at that day employed to combat it. 
 Shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions 
 then were in Italy, the friends had no succour except from 
 the assiduous kindness of Dr. and Mrs. Clark, with occa- 
 sional aid from a stranger, Mr. Ewing. At one moment, 
 their stock of money having run out, they were in danger 
 of actual destitution, till a remittance from Mr. Taylor 
 arrived just in time to save them. The devotion and re 
 source of Severn were infinite, and had their reward. Oc- 
 casionally there came times of delirium or half-delirium, 
 when the dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and 
 his ruined hopes, till his companion was almost exhausted 
 with "beating about in the tempest of his mind;" and 
 once and again some fresh remembrance of his love, or the 
 sight of her handwriting in a letter, would pierce him with 
 too intolerable a pang. But generally, after the first few 
 weeks, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cor- 
 nelian, one of the little tokens she had given him at start- 
 ing, while his companion soothed him with reading or 
 music. His favourite reading was still Jeremy Taylor, 
 and the sonatas of Haydn were the music he liked Severn 
 best to play to him. Of recovery he would not hear, but 
 longed for nothing except the peace of death, and had even 
 weaned, or all but weaned, himself from thoughts of fame. 
 "I feel," he said, "the flowers growing over me;" and it 
 seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he 
 gave the words for his epitaph : " Here lies one whose 
 name was writ in water." Ever since his first attack at 
 Wentworth Place he had been used to speak of himself as 
 living a posthumous life, and now his habitual question to 
 the doctor when he came in was, " Doctor, when will this 
 posthumous life of mine come to an end?" As he turned 
 to ask it neither physician nor friend could bear the pa- 
 
Yin.] LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 205 
 
 thetic expression of his eyes, at all times of extraordinary 
 power, and now burning with a sad and piercing unearthly 
 brightness in his wasted cheeks. Loveable and considerate 
 to the last, " his generous concern for me," says Severn, 
 "in my isolated position at Rome, was one of his greatest 
 cares." His response to kindness was irresistibly winning, 
 and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with him to 
 the end. Severn tells how in watching Keats he used 
 sometimes to fall asleep, and awakening, find they were in 
 the dark. " To remedy this, one night I tried the experi- 
 ment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a lighted can- 
 dle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might 
 be conducted, all which I did without telling Keats. When 
 he awoke and found the first candle nearly out, he was re- 
 luctant to wake me, ancf while doubting suddenly cried out, 
 " Severn, Severn, here's a little,, fairy lamplighter actually 
 lit up the other candle.' " And again, " Poor Keats has 
 me ever by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary 
 friend ; he opens his eyes in great doubt and horror, but 
 when they fall on me they close gently, open quietly and 
 close again, till he sinks to sleep." 
 
 Such tender and harrowing memories haunted all the 
 after life of the watcher, and in days long subsequent it 
 was one of his chief occupations to write them down. Life 
 held out for two months and a half after the relapse, but 
 from the first days of February the end was visibly draw- 
 ing near. It came peacefully at last. On the 23d of 
 that month, writes Severn, " about four, the approaches of 
 death came on. 'Severn — I — lift me up — I am dying — 
 I shall die easy ; don't be frightened — be firm, and thank 
 God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The 
 phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until 
 eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet that I 
 
206 KEATS. [chap. viii. 
 
 still thought he slept." Three days later his body was 
 carried, attended by several of the English in Rome who 
 had heard his story, to its grave in that retired and verdant 
 cemetery which for his sake and Shelley's has become a 
 place of pilgrimage to the English race for ever. It was 
 but the other day that the remains of Severn were laid in 
 their last resting-place beside his friend. 1 
 
 1 Severn, as most readers will remember, died at Rome in 1879, and 
 his remains were, in 1882, removed from their original burying-place 
 to a grave beside those of Keats in the Protestant cemetery near the 
 pyramid of Caius Sestius. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Character and Genius. 
 
 The touching circumstances of Keats's illness and death at 
 Rome aroused, naturally, as soon as they were known, the 
 sympathy of every generous mind. Foremost, as all the 
 world knows, in the expression of that sympathy was Shel- 
 ley. He had been misinformed as to the degree in which 
 the critics had contributed to Keats's sufferings, and be- 
 lieving that they had killed him, was full both of righteous 
 wrath against the offenders and of passionate regret for 
 what the world had lost. Under the stress of that double 
 inspiration Shelley wrote — 
 
 " And a whirlwind of music came sweet from the spheres." 
 
 As an utterance of abstract pity and indignation, Ado- 
 na'is is unsurpassed in literature; with its hurrying train 
 of beautiful spectral images, and the irresistible current 
 and thrilling modulation of its verse, it is perhaps the most 
 perfect and sympathetic effort of Shelley's art ; while its 
 strain of transcendental consolation t for mortal loss con- 
 tains the most lucid exposition of his philosophy. But of 
 Keats as he actually lived the elegy presents no' feature, 
 while the general impression it conveys of his character 
 and fate is erroneous. A similar false impression was at 
 the same time conveyed to a circle of readers incommeas- 
 nrably wider than that reached by Shelley in the well- 
 10 
 
208 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 known stanza of Don Juan. In regard to Keats, Byron 
 tried both to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare. 
 "When the Edinburgh praised him he was furious, and on 
 receipt of the Lamia volume wrote with vulgar savagery to 
 Murray : " No more Keats, I entreat — flay him alive ; if 
 some of you don't, I must skin him myself." Then after 
 his death, hearing that it had been caused by the critics, 
 he turns against the latter, and cries: "I would not be 
 the person who wrote that homicidal article for all the 
 honour and glory of the world." In the Don Juan pas- 
 sage he contrived to have his fling at the reviewers, and at 
 the weakness, as he imagined it, of their victim in the 
 same breath. 
 
 Taken together with the notion of "Johnny Keats " to 
 which Blackwood and the Quarterly had previously given 
 currency, the Adona'is and the Don Juan passage alike 
 tended to fix in the public mind an impression of Keats's 
 character as that of a weakling to whom the breath of de- 
 traction had been poison. It was long before his friends, 
 who knew that he was " as like Johnny Keats as the Holy 
 Ghost," did anything effectual to set his memory right. 
 Brown had been bent on doing so from the first, but in 
 the end wrote only the brief memoir, still in manuscript, 
 which has been quoted so often in the above pages. For 
 anything like a full biography, George Keats in America 
 could alone have supplied the information ; but against 
 him, since he had failed to send help to his poet-brother in 
 the hour of need (having been in truth simply unable to 
 do so), Brown had unluckily conceived so harsh a preju- 
 dice that friendly communication between them became 
 impossible. Neither was Dilke, who alone among Keats's 
 friends in England took George's part, disposed, under the 
 circumstances, to help Brown in his task. For a longtime 
 
IX .] CHARACTER AND GENIUS. 209 
 
 George himself hoped to superintend and supply materials 
 for aTlife of his brother, but partly his want of literary ex- 
 perience, and partly the difficulty of leaving his occupations 
 in the West, prevented him. Mr. Taylor, the publisher, 
 also at one time wished to be Keats's biographer, and with 
 the help of Woodhouse collected materials for the pur- 
 pose, but in the end failed to use them. The same wish 
 was entertained by John Hamilton Reynolds, whose litera- 
 ry skill and fine judgment and delicacy should have made 
 him, of all the poet's friends, the most competent for the 
 work. But of these many projects not one had been car- 
 vied out when, five-and-twenty years after Keats's death, a 
 younger man, who had never seen him, took up the task— 
 the Monckton Milnes of those days, the Lord Houghton 
 freshly remembered by us all— and with help from nearly 
 all Keats's surviving friends, and by the grace of his own 
 genial and sympathetic temper, set the memory of the poet 
 in its true light in the beautiful and moving book with 
 which every student is familiar. 
 
 Keats had, indeed, enemies within his house, apart (if the 
 separation can with truth be made) from the secret pres- 
 ence of that worst enemy of all, inherited disease, which 
 killed him. He had a nature all tingling with pride and 
 sensitiveness; he had the perilous capacity and appetite 
 for pleasure to which he owns when he speaks of his own 
 " exquisite sense of the luxurious ;" and with it the be- 
 setting tendency to self- torment which he describes as 
 his " horrid morbidity of temperament." The greater his 
 credit that on the one hand he gave way so little to self- 
 indulgence, and that, on the other, he battled so bravely 
 with the spirits that plagued him. To the bridle thus put 
 on himself he alludes in his unaffected way when he speaks 
 of the " violence of his temperament, continually smoth- 
 
210 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 ered up." Left fatherless at eight, motherless at fifteen, 
 and subject, during the forming years of his life which 
 followed, to no other discipline but that of apprenticeship 
 in a suburban surgery, he showed in his life such generos- 
 ity, modesty, humour, and self-knowledge, such a spirit of 
 conduct and degree of self-control, as would have done 
 honour to one infinitely better trained and less hardly 
 tried. His hold over himself gave way, indeed, under tho 
 stress of passion, and as a lover he betrays all the weak 
 places of his nature. But we must remember his state of 
 health when the passion seized, and the worse state into 
 which it quickly threw, him, as well as the lack there was 
 in her who caused it — not, indeed, so far as we can judge, 
 of kindness and loyalty, but certainly, it would seem, of 
 the woman's finer genius of tact and tenderness. Under 
 another kind of trial, when the work he offered to the 
 world, in all soberness of self-judgment and of hope, was 
 thrust back upon him with gibes and insult, he bore him- 
 self with true dignity ; and if the practical consequences 
 preyed upon his mind, it was not more than reason and 
 the state of his fortunes justified. 
 
 In all ordinary relations of life his character was con- 
 spicuous alike for manly spirit and sweetness. No man 
 who ever lived has inspired in his friends a deeper or 
 more devoted affection. One, of whose name we have 
 heard little in this history, 1 wrote while the poet lay dy- 
 ing : " Keats must get himself again, Severn, if but for 
 me — I cannot afford to lose him ; if I know what it is to 
 love, I truly love John Keats." The following is from a 
 letter of Brown, written also during his illness>- "He is 
 present to me everywhere and at all times — he now seems 
 sitting here at my side, and looking hard into my face. . ■> * 
 1 Haslam, in Severn MSS. 
 
ix.] CHARACTER AND GENIUS. 211 
 
 So much as I have loved him, I never knew how closely 
 he was wound about my heart." * Elsewhere, speaking of 
 the time of his first attack, Brown says : " While I waited 
 on him, his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my of- 
 fices, by a glance of his eye or motion of his hand, made 
 me regard my mechanical duty as absolutely nothing com- 
 pared to his silent acknowledgment. Something like this 
 Severn, his last nurse, observed to me ;" 2 and we know in 
 fact how the whole life of Severn, prolonged nearly sixty 
 years after his friend's death, was coloured by the light re- 
 flected from his memory. When Lord Houghton's book 
 came out, in 1848, Archdeacon Bailey wrote from Ceylon 
 to thank the writer for doing merited honour to one 
 " whose genius I did not, and do not, more fully admire 
 than I entirely loved the Man." 3 The points on which 
 all who knew him especially dwell are two : First, his high 
 good sense and spirit of honour ; as to which let one wit- 
 ness stand for many. "He had a soul of noble integrity," 
 says Bailey, " and his common sense was a conspicuous 
 part of his character. Indeed his character was, in the 
 best sense, manly." Next, his beautiful unselfishness and 
 warmth of sympathy. This is the rarest quality of gen- 
 ius, which from the very intensity of its own life and oc- 
 cupations is apt to be self-absorbed, requiting the devotion 
 it receives with charm, which costs it nothing — but with 
 charm only — and when the trial comes, refusing to friend- 
 ship any real sacrifice of its own objects or inclinations. 
 But when genius to charm adds true unselfishness, and is 
 ready to throw all the ardour of its own life into the cares 
 and interests of those about it, then we have what in hu- 
 man nature is most worthy of love. And this is what his 
 
 1 Severn MSS. 2 Hou-hton MSS. 3 Ibid. 
 
212 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 companions found in Keats. "He was the sincerest 
 friend," cries Reynolds, " the most lovable associate— the 
 deepest listener to the griefs and distresses of all around 
 him— 'that ever lived in this tide of times." 1 To the 
 same effect Haydon : " He was the most unselfish of hu- 
 man creatures ; unadapted to this world, he cared not for 
 himself, and put himself to any inconvenience for the sake 
 of his friends. ... He had a kind, gentle heart, and would 
 have shared his fortune with any one who wanted it." 
 And again Bailey : 
 
 " With his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew than was 
 John Keats. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without 
 one particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit. ... In his 
 letters he talks of suspecting everybody. It appeared not in his con- 
 versation. On the contrary, he was uniformly the apologist for poor 
 frail human nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any 
 man I ever knew, and especially for the faults of his friends. But 
 if any act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the top- 
 ic, he rose into sudden and animated indignation." 2 
 
 Lastly, "He had no fears of self," says George Keats; 
 " through interference in the quarrels of others, he would 
 at all hazards, and without calculating his powers to de- 
 fend, or his reward for the deed, defend the oppressed and 
 distressed with heart and soul, with hand and purse." 
 
 In this chorus of admiring affection Haydon alone must 
 assert his own superiority by mixing depreciation with 
 praise. When he laments over Keats's dissipations he ex- 
 aggerates, there is evidence enough to show, idly and ca- 
 lumniously. When, on the other hand, he speaks of the 
 poet's " want of decision of character and power of will," 
 and says that "never for two days did he know his own 
 
 1 Houghton MSS. 2 fifa 
 
ix.] CHARACTER AND GEXIUS. 213 
 
 intentions," his criticism is deserving of more attention. 
 This is only Haydon's way of describing a fact in Keats's 
 nature of which no one was better aware than himself. 
 He acknowledges his own " unsteady and vagarish dispo- 
 sition." What he means is no weakness of instinct or 
 principle affecting the springs of conduct in regard to oth- 
 ers, but a liability to veerings of opinion and purpose in 
 regard to himself. " The Celtic instability " a reader may 
 perhaps surmise who adopts that hypothesis as to the 
 poet's descent. Whether the quality was one of race or 
 not, it was probably inseparable from the peculiar com- 
 plexion of Keats's genius. Or rather it was an expression 
 in character of that which was the very essence of that 
 genius, the predominance, namely, of the sympathetic im- 
 agination over every other faculty. Acute as was his own 
 emotional life, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the 
 order of poets whose work is inspired, not mainly by their 
 own personality, but by the world of things and men out- 
 side them. He realised clearly the nature of his own gift, 
 and the degree to which susceptibility to external impres- 
 sions was apt to overpower in him — not practical consist- 
 ency only, but even the sense of a personal identity. 
 
 "As to the poetic character itself," he writes, "(I mean that sort 
 of which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished 
 from the AVordsworthian, or egotistical sublime; which is athing/w 
 se, and stands alone), it is not itself — it has no self — it is everything 
 and nothing — it has no character — it enjoys light and shade — it lives 
 in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated 
 — it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. 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. . . . 
 If, then, he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that 
 I should say I woTtld write no more ? Might I not at that very in- 
 stant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops ? It 
 
214 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 is a wretched thing to 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." 
 
 " Even now," he says, on another occasion, " I am per- 
 haps not speaking from myself, but from some character 
 in whose soul I now live." Keats was often impatient of 
 this Protean quality of his own mind. "I would call the 
 head and top of those who have a proper self," he says, 
 "men of power;" and it is the men of power, the men of 
 trenchant individuality and settled aims, that in the sphere 
 of practical life he most admires. But in the sphere of 
 thought and imagination his preference is dictated by the 
 instinctive bent of his own genius. In that sphere he is 
 impatient, in turn, of all intellectual narrowness, and will 
 not allow that poetry should make itself the exponent of 
 any single creed or given philosophy. Thus, in speaking 
 of what he thinks too doctrinal and pedagogic in the work 
 of Wordsworth — 
 
 "For the sake," he asks, "of a few fine imaginative or domestic 
 passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered 
 in the whims of an egotist ? Every man has his speculations, but 
 every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a 
 false coinage and deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the 
 very bourne of Heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his half- 
 seeing. ... We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, 
 if Ave do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. 
 Poetry should be great and unobtrusive — a thing which enters into 
 one's soul." 
 
 This is but one of many passages in which Keats pro- 
 claims the necessity, for a poet, of an all-embracing recep- 
 tivity and openness of mind. His critics sometimes speak 
 as if his aim had been merely to create a paradise of art 
 and beauty remote from the cares and interests of the 
 
ix.] CHARACTER AND GENIUS. 215 
 
 world. If the foregoing pages have been written to any 
 purpose, the reader will be aware that no criticism can be 
 more mistaken. At the creation, the revelation, of beauty 
 Keats aimed indeed invariably, but of beauty, wherever its 
 elements existed — " I have loved," as he says, " the prin- 
 ciple of beauty in all things." His conception of the 
 kingdom of poetry was Shakspearean, including the whole 
 range of life and imagination, every affection of the soul 
 and every speculation of the mind. Of that kingdom he 
 lived long enough to enter on and possess certain provinces 
 only — those that, by their manifest and prevailing charm, 
 first and most naturally allure the spirit of youth. Would 
 he have been able to make the rest also his own ? Would 
 the faculties that were so swift to reveal the hidden de- 
 lights of nature, to divine the true spirit of antiquity, to 
 conjure with the spell of the Middle Age — would they 
 with time have gained equal power to unlock the myste- 
 ries of the heart, and still, in obedience to the law of beau- 
 ty, to illuminate and harmonise the great struggles and 
 problems of human life? 
 
 My belief is that such power they would not have failed 
 to gain. From the height to which the genius of Keats 
 arose during the brief period between its first effervescence 
 and its exhaustion — from the glowing humanity of his own 
 nature, and the completeness with which, by the testimony 
 alike of his own consciousness and his friends' experience, 
 he was accustomed to live in the lives of others — from the 
 gleams of true greatness of mind which shine not only in 
 his poetry, but equally amid the gossip and pleasantry of 
 his familiar letters — from all our evidences, in a word, as 
 to what he was as well as from what he did — I think it 
 probable that by power, as well as by temperament and 
 aim, he was the most Shakspearean spirit that has lived 
 10* v 
 
216 KEATS. [chap. 
 
 since Shakspeare ; the true Marcellus, as his first biographer 
 has called him, of the realm of English song ; and that in 
 his premature death our literature has sustained its great- 
 est loss. Something like this, it would seem, is also the 
 opinion of his foremost now living successors — as Lord 
 Tennyson, Mr. Browning, Mr. Matthew Arnold. Others 
 have formed a different judgment, but among those unfort- 
 unate guests at the banquet of life — the poets called away 
 before their time — who can really adjudge the honours 
 that would have been due had they remained ? In a final 
 estimate of any writer's work we must take into account 
 not what he might have done, but only what he did. And 
 in the work actually left by Keats, the master-chord of 
 humanity, we shall admit, had not yet been struck with 
 fulness. When we sum up in our minds the total effect 
 of his poetry we can think, indeed, of the pathos of Isabel- 
 la, but of that alone, as equally powerful in its kind with 
 the nature-magic of the Hymn to Pan and the Ode to a 
 Nightingale, with the glow of romance colour in St. Ag- 
 nes' s Eve, the weirdness of romance sentiment in La Belle 
 Dame sans Merci, the conflict of elemental force with fate 
 in Hyperion, the revelations of the soul of ancient life and 
 art in the Ode on a Grecian Urn, and the fragment of an 
 Ode to Mala. 
 
 It remains to glance at the influence exercised by Keats 
 on the poets who have come after him. In two ways, 
 chiefly, I should say, has that influence been operative. 
 First, on the subject-matter of poetry: in kindling and 
 informing in other souls the poetic love of nature for her 
 own sake, and also, in equal degrees, the love both of 
 classic fable and of romance. And secondly, on its form : 
 in setting before poets a certain standard of execution — a 
 standard not of technical correctness, for which Keats nev- 
 
IX .] CHARACTER AND GENIUS. 217 
 
 er cared sufficiently, but of that quality to which he him- 
 self refers when he speaks of " loading every rift of a sub- 
 ject with ore." We may define it as the endeavour after 
 a continual positive poetic richness and felicity of phrase. 
 A typical instance is to be found in the lines already quoted 
 that tell us of the trembling hopes of Madeline— 
 
 " But to her heart her heart was voluble, 
 Paining with eloquence her balmy side." 
 
 The beauty of such a phrase is no mere beauty of fancy 
 or of sound ; it is the beauty which resides in truth only, 
 every word being chosen and every touch laid by a vital 
 exercise of the imagination. The first line describes in 
 perfection the duality of consciousness in such a moment 
 of suspense, the second makes us realise at once the phys- 
 ical effect of the emotion on the heroine, and the spell of 
 her imagined presence on ourselves. In so far as Keats 
 has taught other poets really to write like this, his influ- 
 ence has been wholly to their advantage— but not so when 
 for this quality they give us only its simulacrum, in the 
 shape of brilliancies merely verbal and a glitter not of gold. 
 The first considerable writer among Keats's successors on 
 whom his example took effect was Hood, in the fairy and 
 romance poems of his earlier time. The dominant poet of 
 the Victorian age, Tennyson, has been profoundly influ- 
 enced by it both in the form and the matter of his art, 
 and is indeed the heir of Keats and of Wordsworth in 
 almost equal degrees. After or together with Coleridge, 
 Keats has also contributed most, among English writers, 
 to the poetic method and ideals of Rossetti and his group. 
 Himself, as we have seen, alike by gifts and training a 
 true child of the Elizabethans, he thus stands in the most 
 direct line of descent between the great poets of that age 
 
218 KEATS. [chap. ix. 
 
 and those, whom posterity has yet to estimate, of our own 
 day. 
 
 Such, I think, is Keats's historic place in English litera- 
 ture. What his place was in the hearts of those who best 
 knew him, we have just learned from their own lips. The 
 days of the years of his life were few and evil, but above 
 his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship shines 
 immortally. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 Pa^e 2 note 1.— As to the exact date of Keats's birth the evidence 
 is conflicting He was christened at St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate, Dec. 
 18 1795, and on the margin of the entry in the baptismal register 
 (which I am informed is in the handwriting of the rector, Dr. Cony- 
 beare) is a note stating that he was born Oct. 31st. The date is given 
 accordingly without question by Mr. Buxton Forman ( Works, vol. i., 
 n xlviii) But it seems certain that Keats himself and his family 
 believed his birthday to have been Oct. 29th. Writing on that day in 
 1818 Keats says, " this is my birthday." Brown (in Houghton MSS.) 
 gives the same day, but only as on hearsay from a lady to whom 
 Keats had mentioned it, and with a mistake as to the year. Lastly, 
 in the proceedings in Rawlmgs v. Jennings, Oct 29th is again given as 
 his birthday, in the affidavit of one Anne Birch, who swears that she 
 knew his father and mother intimately. The entry in the St. Bo- 
 tolph's register is probably the authority to be preferred.— Lower 
 Moorfields was the space now occupied by Finsbury Circus and the 
 London Institution, together with the east side of Finsbury Fave- 
 ment —The births of the younger brothers are in my text given 
 ricrhtly for the first time, from the parish registers of St. Leonard s, 
 Shoreditch, where they were all three christened in a batch on Sept. 
 24 1801 The family were at that date living m Craven Street 
 
 P 2 note 2 —Brown (Houghton MSS.) says simply that Thomas 
 Keats 'was a "native of Devon." His daughter, Mrs Llanos, tells me 
 she remembers hearing as a child that he came from the Lands 
 End Persons of the name are still living m Plymouth. 
 
 P 5 note 2 —The total amount of the funds paid into Court by 
 the 'executors under Mr. Jennings's will (see Preface, p. til) was 
 -PI ^ 1 fiO 19s hd 
 
 P 10 note Land p. 70, note 1.— Of the total last mentioned, there 
 came to the widow first and last (partly by reversion from other leg- 
 atees who predeceased her) sums amounting to £9343 2s In the 
 Chancery proceedings the precise terms of the deed executed by Mrs 
 Jennings for the benefit of her grandchildren are not quoted, but 
 only its° general purport; whence it appears that the sum she made 
 over to Messrs. Sandell and Abbey in trust for them amounted ap- 
 proximately to £8000, and included all the reversions fallen or still 
 to fall in as above mentioned. The balance, it is to be presumed, she 
 retained for her own support (she being then seventy-four). 
 
220 - KEATS. 
 
 P. 16, note 1. — The following letter written by Mr. Abbey to Mr. 
 Taylor the publisher, under date April 18, 1821, soon after the news 
 of Keats's death reached England, speaks for itself. The letter is 
 from Woodhouse MSS. B. 
 
 "Sir, 
 
 I beg pardon for not replying to your favor of the 30th ult. re- 
 specting the late Mr. Juo. Keats. 
 
 "I am obliged by your note, but he having withdrawn himself from my 
 controul, and acted contrary to my advice, I cannot interfere with his affairs. 
 
 "I am, Sir, 
 
 "Yr. mo. Hble St., 
 
 "KlOUD. AlJBKY." 
 
 P. 33, note 1. — The difficulty of determining the exact date and 
 place of Keats's first introduction to Hunt arises as follows : Cow- 
 den Clarke states plainly and circumstantially that it took place in 
 Leigh Hunt's cottage at Hampstead. Hunt in his Autobiography 
 says it was "in the spring of the year 1S16" that he went to live 
 at Hampstead in the cottage in question. Putting these two state- 
 ments together, we get the result stated as probable in the text. But 
 on the other hand there is the strongly Huntian character of Keats's 
 Epistle to G. F. Mathew, dated November, 1815, which would seem to 
 indicate an earlier acquaintance (see p. 30). Unluckily Leigh Hunt 
 himself has darkened counsel on the point by a paragraph inserted 
 in the last edition of his Autobiography, as follows (Pref. no. 7, p. 
 257) : " It was not at Hampstead that I first saw Keats. It was at 
 York Buildings, in the New Road (No. 8), where I wrote part of the 
 Indicator, and he resided with me while in Mortimer Street, Kentish 
 Town (No. 13), where I concluded it. I mention this for the curious 
 in such things, among whom I am one." The student must not be 
 misled by this remark of Hunt's, which is evidently only due to a 
 slip of memory. It is quite true that Keats lived with Hunt in 
 Mortimer Street, Kentish Town, during part of July and August, 
 1820 (see page 195), and that before moving to that address Hunt 
 had lived for more than a year (from the autumn of 1818 to the 
 spring of 1820) at 8 New Road. But that Keats was intimate with 
 him two years and a half earlier, when he was in fact living not in 
 London at all but at the Yale of Health, is abundantly certain. 
 
 P. 37, note 1. — Cowden Clarke tells how Keats, once calling and 
 finding him fallen asleep over Chaucer, wrote on the blank space 
 at the end of the Floure and the Leafe the sonnet beginning " This 
 pleasant tale is like a little copse." Reynolds on reading it ad- 
 dressed to Keats the following sonnet of his own, which is unpub- 
 lished (Houghton MSS.), and has a certain biographical interest. It 
 is dated Feb. 27, 1817: 
 
 "Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves, 
 Or white flowers pluck'd from some sweet lily bed ; 
 They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed 
 
 The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eves 
 
 O'er the excited soul.— Thy genius weaves 
 
APPENDIX. 221 
 
 Songs that shall make the age he nature-led, 
 
 And win that coronal for thy young head 
 Which time's strange [qy. strong?] hand of freshness ne'er bereaves. 
 Go on ! and keep thee to thine own green way, 
 
 Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung ; 
 Be thou companion of the summer day, 
 
 Roaming the fields and older woods among: 
 So shall thy muse be ever in her Ma)', 
 
 And thy luxuriant spirit ever young." 
 
 P. 44, note 1. — Woodhouse MSS. A contains the text of the first 
 draft in question, with some preliminary words of Woodhouse as 
 follows : 
 
 "The lines at p. 36 of Keats's printed poems are altered from a 
 copy of verses written by K. at the request of his brother George, 
 and by the latter sent as a valentine to the lady. The following is a 
 copy of the lines as originally written : 
 
 " ' Hadst thou lived in days of old, 
 Oh what wonders had been told 
 Of thy lively dimpled face, 
 And thy footsteps full of grace : 
 Of thy hair's luxurious darkling, 
 Of thine eyes' expressive sparkling, 
 And thy voice's swelling rapture, 
 Taking hearts a ready capture. 
 Oh ! if thou hadst breathed then, 
 Thon hadst made the Muses ten. 
 Could'st thou wish for lineage higher 
 Than twin sister of Thalia? 
 At least for ever, ever more 
 Will I call the Graces four.' " 
 
 Here follow lines 41-68 of the poem as afterwards published; 
 and in conclusion — 
 
 "Ah me ! whither shall I flee? 
 Thou hast metamorphosed me. 
 Do not let me sigh and pine, 
 Prythee be my valentine. 
 
 " 14 Feby., 1816." 
 
 P. 47, note 1. — Mrs. Procter's memory, however, betrayed her when 
 she informed Lord Houghton that the colour of Keats's eyes was 
 blue. That they were pure hazel-brown is certain, from the evidence 
 alike of C. C. Clarke, of George Keats and his wife (as transmitted 
 by their daughter Mrs. Speed to her son), and from the various por^ 
 traits painted from life and posthumously by Severn and Hilton. 
 Mrs. Procter calls his hair auburn ; Mrs. Speed had heard from hex- 
 father and mother that it was " golden red," which may mean nearly 
 the same thing ; I have seen a lock in the possession of Sir Charles 
 Dilke, and should rather call it a warm brown, likely to have looked 
 gold in the lights. Bailey in Houghton MSS. speaks of it as extraor- 
 dinarily thick and curly, and says that to lay your hand on his head 
 was like laying it " on the rich plumage of a bird." An evidently 
 misleading description of Keats's general aspect is that of Coleridge, 
 when he describes him as a " loose, slack, not well-dressed youth." 
 
222 KEATS. 
 
 The sage must have been drawing from his inward eye, those inti- 
 mate with Keats being of one accord as to his appearance of trim 
 strength and "fine compactness of person." Coleridge's further 
 mention of his hand as shrunken and old-looking seems exact. 
 
 P. 78, note 1. — The isolated expressions of Keats on this subject, 
 which alone have been hitherto published, have exposed him some- 
 what unjustly to the charge of petulance and morbid suspicion. 
 Fairness seems to require that the whole passage in which he deals 
 with it should be given. The passage occurs in a letter to Bailey 
 written from Hampstead and dated Oct. 8, 1817, of which only a 
 fragment was printed by Lord Houghton, and after him by Mr. Bux- 
 ton Forman (Works, vol. iii., p. 82, no. xvi.): 
 
 "I went to Hunt's and Haydon's, who live now neighbours. — 
 Shelley was there — I know nothing about anything in this part of 
 the world— every Body seems at Loggerheads. There's Hunt infat- 
 uated — there's Haydon's picture in statu quo — There's Hunt walks 
 up and down his painting-room criticising every head most unmerci- 
 fully — There's Horace Smith tired of Hunt — ' The Web of our life 
 is of mingled yarn.' ... I am quite disgusted with literary men, and 
 will never know another except Wordsworth — no not even Byron. 
 Here is an instance of the friendship of such. Haydoh and Hunt 
 have known each other many years — now they live, pour ainsi dire, 
 jealous neighbours. Haydon says to me, Keats, don't show your 
 lines to Hunt on any account, or he will have done half for you — so 
 it appears Hunt wishes it to be thought. When he met Reynolds in 
 the Theatre, John told him I was getting on to the completion of 
 4000 lines — Ah ! says Hunt, had it not been for me they would have 
 been 7000 ! If he will say this to Reynolds, what would he to other 
 people ? Haydon received a Letter a little while back on the subject 
 from some Lady, which contains a caution to me, thro' him, on this 
 subject. Now is not all this a most paultry thing to think about?" 
 
 P. 82, note 1. — See Haydon, Autobiography, vol. i., pp. 38-4-5. The 
 letter containing Keats's account of the same entertainment was 
 printed for the first time by Speed, Works, vol. i., p. i., no. 1, where it 
 is dated merely " Featherstone Buildings, Monday." (At Feather- 
 stone Buildings lived the family of Charles Wells.) In Houghton 
 MSS. I find a transcript of the same letter in the hand of Mr. Coven- 
 try Patmore, with a note in Lord Houghton's hand : " These letters 
 I did not print. R. M. M." In the transcript is added in a paren- 
 thesis after the weekday the date 5 April, 1818: but this is a mis- 
 take ; the 5th of April in that year Avas not a Monday ; and the 
 contents of Keats's letter itself, as well as a comparison with Hay- 
 don's words in his Autobiography, prove beyond question that it was 
 written on Monday, the 5th of January. 
 
 P. 87, note 1. — Similar expressions about the Devonshire weather 
 occur in nearly all Keats's letters written thence in the course of 
 March and April. The letter to Bailey containing the sentences 
 quoted in my text is wrongly printed both by Lord Houghton and 
 
APPENDIX. 223 
 
 Mr. Forman under date Sept., 1818. I find the same date given 
 between brackets at the head of the same letter as transcribed in 
 Woodhouse MSS. B, proving that an error was early made either in 
 docketing or copying it. The contents of the letter leave no doubt 
 as to its real date. The sentences quoted prove it to have been 
 written not in autumn but in spring. It contains Kcats's reasons 
 both for going down to join his brother Tom at Teignmouth and for 
 failing to visit Bailey at Oxford on the way. Now in September 
 Keats was not at Teignmouth at all, and Bailey had left Oxford for 
 good, and was living at his curacy in Cumberland (see p. 121). More- 
 over, there is an allusion by Keats himself to this letter in another 
 which he wrote the next day to Reynolds, whereby its true date can 
 be fixed with precision as Friday, March 13th. 
 
 P. Ill, note 1. The following unpublished letter of Keats to Mr. 
 Taylor (from Woodhouse MSS. B) has a certain interest, both in it. 
 self and as fixing the date of his departure for the North : 
 
 " Sunday evening. 
 "My dear Taylor, 
 
 I am sorry I have not had time to call and wish you health til) 
 my return. Really I have been hard run these last three days. However, 
 au revoir, God keep us all well ! I start tomorrow Morning. My brother 
 Tom will I am afraid be lonely. I can scarcely ask the loan of books for 
 him, since I still keep those yon lent me a year ago. If I am overweening, 
 you will I know be indulgent. Therefore when you shall write, do send 
 him some you think will be most amusing— he will be careful in returning 
 them. Let him have one of my books bound. I am ashamed to catalogue 
 these messages. There is but one more, which ought to go for nothing 
 as there is a lady concerned. I promised Mrs. Reynolds one of my books 
 bound. As I cannot write in it let the opposite" [a leaf with the name 
 and " from the author," notes Woodhouse] " be pasted in 'prythee. Remem- 
 ber me to Percy St.— Tell Hilton that one gratification on my return will 
 be to find him engaged on a history piece to his own content. And tell 
 Dewint I shall become a disputant on the landscape. Bow for me very 
 genteely to Mrs. D. or she will not admit your diploma. Remember me to 
 llessey, saying I hope he'll Carey his point. I would not forget Woodhouse. 
 Adieu! Your sincere friend, 
 
 "John o'Gbots. 
 
 "June 22, 1S18. Hampstead." [The date and place are added by Wood- 
 house in red ink, presumably from the post-mark.] 
 
 P. 118, note 1. — In the concluding lines quoted in my text Mr. 
 Buxton Forman has noticed the failure of rhyme between "All the 
 magic of the place" and the next line, "So saying, with a spirit's 
 glance," and has proposed, by way of improvement, to read " with a 
 spirit's grace." I find the true explanation in Woodhouse MSS. A, 
 where the poem is continued thus in pencil after the word " place :" 
 
 " Tis now free to stupid face, 
 To cutters, and to fashion boats, 
 To cravats and to petticoats — 
 The great sea shall war it down, 
 For its fame shall not be blown 
 At each farthing Quadrille dance. 
 So saying with a spirit's glance 
 He dived." 
 
224 KEATS. 
 
 Evidently Keats was dissatisfied with the first six of these lines (as 
 he well might be), and suppressed them in copying the piece both 
 for his correspondents and for the press, forgetting at the same 
 time to give any indication of the hiatus so caused. 
 
 P. 126, note i.— Lord Houghton says, " On returning to the south, 
 Keats found his brother alarmingly ill, and immediately joined him 
 at Teignmouth." It is certain that no such second visit to Teign- 
 mouth was made by either brother. The error is doubtless due to 
 the misdating of Keats's April letter to Bailey : see last note but 
 one, p. 222. 
 
 P. 136, note 1. — Keats in this letter proves how imperfect was his 
 knowledge of his own affairs, and how much those affairs had been 
 mismanaged. At the time when he thus found himself near the end 
 of the capital on which he had hitherto subsisted, there was another 
 resource at his disposal of which it is evident he knew nothing. 
 Quite apart from the provision made by Mrs. Jennings for her grand- 
 children after her husband's death, and administered by Mr. Abbey, 
 there were the legacies Mr. Jennings himself had left them by will: 
 one of £1000 direct; the other, of a capital to yield £50 a year, in 
 reversion after their mother's death (see p. 5). The former sum 
 was invested by order of the Court in Consols, and brought £1550 
 Is. lOd. worth of that security at the price at which it then stood. 
 £1666 13s. Ad. worth of the same stock was farther purchased from 
 the funds of the estate in order to yield the income of £50 a year. 
 The interest on both these investments was duly paid to Frances 
 Rawlings during her life, but after her death in 1810 both invest- 
 ments lay untouched and accumulating interest until 1823, when 
 George Keats, to whose knowledge their existence must then have 
 become known for the first time, received on application to the Court 
 a fourth share of each, with its accumulations. Two years after- 
 wards Fanny Keats received in like manner on application the re- 
 maining three shares (those of her brothers John and Tom as well as 
 her own), the total amount paid to her being £3375 5.9. Id., and to 
 George £1147 5s. Id. It was a part of the ill luck which attended 
 the poet always that the very existence of these_ funds must have 
 been ignored or forgotten by his guardian and solicitors at the time 
 when he most needed them. 
 
 P. 146, note 1. — Landor's letter to Lord Houghton on receipt of a 
 presentation copy of the Life and Letters, in 1848, begins character- 
 istically as follows : 
 
 " Bath, Aug. 29th. 
 
 Dear Milnes, . , 
 
 On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks absence, I Unci 
 your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an edi- 
 tor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets, excepting Shaks- 
 peare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of the poetical char- 
 acter—fire, fancv, and diversity. lie has not indeed overcome so great a 
 difficulty as Shelley in his Genet, nor united so many powers of the mind as 
 Southey in Kehama— but there is an effluence of power and light pervad- 
 ing all his works, and a freshness such as wo feel in the glorious dawn ul 
 Chaucer." 
 
APPENDIX. 225- 
 
 P. 150, note 1. — I think there is no doubt that Hyperion was begun 
 by Keats beside his brother's sick-bed in September or October, 1818, 
 and that it is to it he alludes when he speaks in those days of 
 "plunging into abstract images," and finding a "feverous relief" in 
 the " abstractions " of poetry. Certainly these phrases could hardly 
 apply to so slight a task as the translation of Ronsard's sonnet, Nat- 
 we ornant Cassandre, which is the only specific piece of work he 
 about the same time mentions. Brown says distinctly, of the weeks 
 when Keats was first living with him after Tom's death in Decem- 
 ber— "It was then he wrote Hyperion;" but these words rather 
 favour than exclude the supposition that it had been already begun. 
 In his December-January letter to America Keats himself alludes to 
 the poem by name, and says he has been "going on a little" with it; 
 and on the 14th of February, 1819, says, "I have not gone on with 
 Hyperion." During the next three months he was chiefly occupied 
 on the Odes, and whether he at the same time wrote any more of 
 Hyperion we cannot tell. It was certainly finished, all but the re- 
 vision, by some time in April, as in that month Woodhouse had the 
 MS. to read, and notes (see Buxton Forman, Works, vol. ii., p. 143) 
 that " it contains two books and $ (about 900 lines in all) :" the 
 actual length of the piece as published being 883 lines and a word, 
 and that of the draft copied by Woodhouse before revision 891 and 
 a word (see note to p. 162). When Keats, after nearly a year's 
 interruption of his correspondence with Bailev, tells him 'in a "letter 
 from Winchester in August or September, " I have also been writ- 
 ing parts of my Hyperion," this must not be taken as meaning that 
 he has been writing them lately, but only that he has been writing 
 them— like Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes, which he mentions at 
 the same time— since the date of his last letter. 
 
 P. 162, note 1. — The version of The Em of St. Agnes given in 
 Woodhouse MSS. A is copied almost without change from the cor- 
 rected state of the original MS. in the possession of Mr. F. Locker- 
 Lampson, which is in all probability that actually written by Keats 
 at Chichester (see p. 131). The readings of the MS. in question are 
 given with great care by Mr. Buxton Forman ( Works, vol. ii., p. 71 
 folk), but the first seven stanzas of the poem as printed are wanting 
 in it. Students may therefore be glad to have from Woodhouse's 
 transcript the following table of the changes in those stanzas made 
 by the poet in the course of composition: 
 
 Stanza i. : line 1, for " chill " stood " cold ;" line 4, for " was " stood 
 "were;" line 7, for "from" stood " in ;" line 9 (and Stanza n., line 
 1), for "prayer" stood "prayers." Stanza in. : line V, for "went" 
 stood "turn'd ;" line 8, for " Rough " stood " Black." After stanza 
 in. stood the following stanza, suppressed in the poem as printed : 
 
 4. 
 
 "But (here are ears may hear sweet melodies, 
 And ihere are eye? to brighten festivals, 
 And there are feet for nimble minstrelsies, 
 
226 KEATS. 
 
 And many a lip that for the red wine calls- 
 Follow, then follow to the illumined halls, 
 Follow me youth— and leave the eremite- 
 Give him a tear— then trophied bannerals 
 And many a brilliant tasseling of light 
 Shall droop from arched ways this high baronial night." 
 
 Stanza v. : line 1, for " revelry" stood " revellers ;" lines 3-5, for 
 
 "Numerous as shadows haunting fairily 
 The brain new-stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay 
 Of old romance. These let us wish away," 
 
 stood the following : 
 
 "Ah what are they? the idle pulse scarce stirs, 
 The muse should never make the spirit gay; 
 Away, bright dulness, laughing fools away." 
 
 P. 164, note 1. — At what precise date La Belle Dame sans Merci 
 was written is uncertain. As of the Ode to Melancholy, Keats makes 
 no mention of this poem in his correspondence. In Woodhouse 
 MSS. A it is dated 1819. That Woodhouse made his transcripts 
 before or while Keats was on his Shanklin-Winchester expedition in 
 that year is, I think, certain both from the readings of the transcripts 
 themselves, and from the absence among them of Lamia and the 
 Ode to Autumn. Hence it is to the first half of 1819 that La Belle 
 Dame sans Merci must belong, like so much of the poet's best work 
 besides. The line quoted in my text shows that the theme was al- 
 ready in his mind when he composed The Eve of St. Agnes in Janu- 
 ary. Mr. Buxton Forman is certainly mistaken in supposing it to 
 have been written a year later, after his critical attack of illness 
 (Works, vol. ii., p. 357, note). 
 
 P. 183, note 1. — The relation of Hyperion, A Vision, to the origi- 
 nal Hyperion is a vital point in the history of Keats's mind and art, 
 and one that has been generally misunderstood. The growth of the 
 error is somewhat interesting to trace. The first mention of the 
 Vision is in Lord Houghton's Life and Letters, ed. 184*7, vol. i., p. 244. 
 Having then doubtless freshly in his mind the passage of Brown's 
 MS. memoir quoted in the text, Lord Houghton stated the matter 
 rightly in the words following his account of Hyperion: "He after- 
 wards published it as a fragment, and still later re-cast it into the 
 shape of a Vision, which remains equally unfinished." When, eight 
 years later, the same editor printed the piece for the first time (in 
 Miscellanies of the PhUobiblon Society, vol. iii., 1856-7) from the MS. 
 given him by Brown, he must have forgotten Brown's account of its 
 origin, and writes doubtfully : " Is it the original sketch out of which 
 the earlier part of the poem was composed, or is it the commence- 
 ment of a reconstruction of the whole ? I have no external evidence 
 to decide this question;" and further: "The problem of the priority 
 of the two poems — both fragments, and both so beautiful — may af- 
 ford a wide field for ingenious and critical conjecture." Ten years 
 later again, wheu he brought out the second edition of the Life and 
 
APPENDIX. 227 
 
 Letters, Lord Houghton had drifted definitely into a wrong conclu- 
 sion on the point, and printing the piece in his Appendix as "An- 
 other Version," says in his text (p. 206), " On reconsideration, I have 
 no doubt that it was the first draft." Accordingly it is given as " an 
 earlier version " in Mr. W. M. Rossetti's edition of 1872, as " the first 
 version" in Lord Houghton's own edition of 1876; and so on, posi- 
 tively but quite wrongly, in the several editions by Messrs. Buxton 
 Forman, Speed, and W. T. Arnold. The obvious superiority of Hy- 
 perion to the Vision no doubt at first sight suggested the conclusion 
 to which these editors, following Lord Houghton, had come. In the 
 meantime at least two good critics, Mr. W. B. Scott and Mr. R. Gar- 
 nett, had always held on internal evidence that the Vision was not a 
 first draft, but a recast attempted by the poet in the decline of his 
 powers : an opinion in which Mr. Garnett was confirmed by his rec- 
 ollection of a statement to that effect in the lost MS. of Woodhouse 
 (see above, Preface, p. v., and W. T. Arnold, Works, etc., p. xlix., note). 
 Brown's words, quoted in my text, leave no doubt whatever that 
 these gentlemen were right. They are confirmed from another side 
 by Woodhouse MSS. A, which contains the copy of a real early draft 
 of Hyperion. In this copy the omissions and alterations made in 
 revising the piece are all marked in pencil, and are as follows (taking 
 the number of lines in the several books of the poem as printed); 
 Book I. After line 21 stood the cancelled lines, 
 
 "Thus the old Eagle, drowsy with great grief, 
 Sat moulting his weak plumage, never 'more 
 To be restored or soar against the sun ; 
 While his three sons upon Olympus stood." 
 
 In line 30, for " stay'd Ixion's wheel " stood " eased Ixion's toil." In 
 line 48, for "tone" stood "tune." In line 76, for "gradual" stood 
 " sudden." In line 102, after the word " Saturn," stood the cancelled 
 words, 
 
 "What dost think? 
 Am I that same ? O Chaos !" 
 
 In line 156, for "yielded like the mist" stood "gave to them like 
 mist." In line 189, for "Savour of poisonous brass" stood "A poi- 
 son-feel of brass." In line 200, for " When earthquakes jar their 
 battlements and towers " stood " When an earthquake hath shook 
 their city towers." After line 205 stood the cancelled line " Most like 
 a rose-bud to a fairy's lute." In line 209, for " And like a rose " stood 
 " Yes, like a rose." In line 268, for " Suddenly " stood " And, sudden." 
 
 Book II. In line 128, for "vibrating" stood "vibrated." In line 
 134, for " starry Uranus " stood " starr'd Uranus " (some friend doubt- 
 less called Keats's attention to the false quantity). 
 
 Book III. After line 125 stood the cancelled lines, 
 
 "Into a hue more roseate than sweet pain 
 Gives to a ravish'd nymph, when her warm tears 
 Gush luscious with no sob ; or more severe." 
 
 In line 126, for " most like " stood " more like." 
 
228 KEATS. 
 
 In these omissions and corrections two things will be apparent to 
 the student : first, that they are all greatly for the better, and sec- 
 ond, that where a corrected passage occurs again in the Vision, it in 
 every case corresponds to the printed Hyperion, and not to the draft 
 of the poem preserved by Woodhouse. This of itself would make it 
 certain that the Vision was not a first version of Hyperion, but a re- 
 cast of the poem as revised (in all probability at Winchester) after 
 its first composition. Taken together with the statement of Brown, 
 which is perfectly explicit, as to time, place, and circumstances, and 
 the corresponding statement of Woodhouse as recollected by Mr. 
 Garnett, the proof is from all sides absolute ; and the " first version " 
 theory must disappear henceforward from editions of and commen- 
 taries on our poet. 
 
 I\ 191, note 1. — A more explicit refutation of Haydon's account 
 was given, some years after its appearance, by Cowden Clarke (see 
 Preface, no. 10) ; not, indeed, from personal observation at the time in 
 question, but from general knowledge of the poet's character : 
 
 "I can scarcely conceive of anything more unjust than the ac- 
 count which that ill-ordered being, Ilaydon, the artist, left behind 
 him in his 'Diary' respecting the idolised object of his former in- 
 timacy, John Keats. . . . Haydon's detraction was the more odious 
 because its object could not contradict the charge, and because it 
 supplied his old critical antagonists (if any remained) with an au- 
 thority for their charge against him of Cockney ostentation and dis- 
 play. The most mean-spirited and trumpery twaddle in the para- 
 graph was, that Keats was so far gone in sensual excitement as to 
 put cayenne pepper on his tongue when taking his claret. In the 
 first place, if the stupid trick were ever played, I have not the slight- 
 est belief in its serious sincerity. During my knowledge of him 
 Keats never purchased a bottle of claret; and from such observa- 
 tion as could not escape me, I am bound to say that his domestic 
 expenses never would have occasioned him a regret or a self-reproof ; 
 and, lastly, I never perceived in him even a tendency to imprudent 
 indulgence." 
 
 P. 195, note 1.— In Medwin's Life of Shelley (1847), pp. 89-92, are 
 some notices of Keats communicated to the writer by Fanny Brawne 
 (then Mrs. Lindon), to whom Medwin alludes as his " kind corre- 
 spondent." Medwin's carelessness of statement and workmanship 
 is well known : he is perfectly casual in the use of quotation marks 
 and the like ; but I think an attentive reading of the paragraph 
 beginning on p. 90, which discusses Mr. Finch's account of Keats's 
 death, leaves no doubt that it continues in substance the quotation 
 previously begun from Mrs. Lindon. " That his sensibility," so runs 
 the text, " was most acute, is true, and his passions were very strong, 
 but not violent; if by that term, violence of temper is implied. His 
 was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn on 
 himself than others, and in moments of greatest irritation it was 
 only by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and 
 
APPENDIX. 229 
 
 wounded his friends. Violence such as the letter " [of Mr. Finch] 
 "describes was quite foreign to his nature. For more than a twelve- 
 month before quitting England I saw him everyday" [this would 
 be true of Fanny Brawne from Oct., 1819, to Sept.", 1820, if we except 
 the Kentish Town period in the summer, and is certainly more near- 
 ly true of her than of anyone else], "I often witnessed his suffer- 
 ings, both mental and bodily, and I do not hesitate to say that he 
 never could have addressed an unkind expression, much less a vio- 
 lent one, to any human being." The above passage has been over- 
 looked by critics of Keats, and I am glad to bring it forward, as 
 serving to show a truer and kinder appreciation of the poet by the 
 woman he loved than might be gathered from her phrase in the 
 letter to Dilke so often quoted. 
 
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