_BY AN OLD SCHOOL-FELLOW._
In the village of Enfield, in Middlesex, ten miles on the north road
from London, was my father, John Clarke's school. The house had been
built by a West India merchant, in the latter end of the seventeenth or
beginning of the eighteenth century. It was of the better character of
the domestic architecture of that period,--the whole front being of the
purest red brick, wrought, by means of moulds, into rich designs of
flowers and pomegranates, with heads of cherubim over two niches in
the centre of the building. The elegance of the design and the perfect
finish of the structure were such as to secure its protection, when a
branch railway was brought from the Ware and Cambridge line to Enfield.
The old school-house was converted into the station-house, and the
railway company had the good taste to leave intact one of the few
remaining specimens of the graceful English domestic architecture of
long-gone days. Any of my readers who may happen to have a file of the
London "Illustrated News," may find in No. 360, March 3, 1849, a not
prodigiously enchanting wood-cut of the edifice.
Here it was that John Keats all but commenced and did complete his
school-education. He was born on the 29th of October, 1795; and I think
he was one of the little fellows who had not wholly emerged from the
child's costume upon being placed under my father's care. It will be
readily conceived difficult to recall from the "dark backward and
abysm" of nearly sixty years the general acts of perhaps the youngest
individual in a corporation of between seventy and eighty youngsters;
and very little more of Keats's child-life can I remember than that he
had a brisk, winning face, and was a favorite with all, particularly
with my mother.
His maternal grandfather, Jennings, was proprietor of a large
livery-stable, called "The Swan and Hoop," on the pavement in
Moorfields, opposite the entrance into Finsbury Circus. He had two sons
at my father's school. The elder was an officer in Duncan's ship in the
fight off Camperdown. After the battle, the Dutch Admiral, De Winter,
pointing to young Jennings, told Duncan that he had fired several
shots at that young man, and always missed his mark;--no credit to his
steadiness of aim; for Jennings, like his own admiral, was considerably
above the ordinary dimensions of stature.
Keats's father was the principal servant at the Swan and Hoop
Stables,--a man of so remarkably fine a common-sense and native
respectability, that I perfectly remember the warm terms in which his
demeanor used to be canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit
his boys. He was short of stature and well-knit in person, (John
resembling him both in make and feature,) with brown hair and dark hazel
eyes. He was killed by a fall from his horse, in returning from a visit
to the school. John's two brothers, George, older, and Thomas, younger
than himself, were like the mother,--who was tall, of good figure, with
large, oval face, sombre features, and grave in behavior. The last of
the family was a sister,--Fanny, I think, much younger than all,--of
whom I remember my mother once speaking with much fondness, for her
pretty, simple manners, while she was walking in the garden with her
brothers. She married Mr. Llanos, a Spanish refugee, the author of
"Don Estéban," and "Sandoval, the Free-Mason." He was a man of
liberal principles, attractive manners, and more than ordinary
accomplishments.--This is the amount of my knowledge and recollection of
the family.
In the early part of his school-life, John gave no extraordinary
indications of intellectual character; but it was remembered of him
afterwards, that there was ever present a determined and steady spirit
in all his undertakings; and, although of a strong and impulsive will,
I never knew it misdirected in his required pursuit of study. He was a
most orderly scholar. The future ramifications of that noble genius were
then closely shut in the seed, and greedily drinking in the moisture
which made it afterwards burst forth so kindly into luxuriance and
beauty.
My father was in the habit, at each half-year's vacation, of bestowing
prizes upon those pupils who had performed the greatest quantity of
voluntary extra work; and such was Keats's indefatigable energy for the
last two or three successive half-years of his remaining at school,
that, upon each occasion, he took the first prize by a considerable
distance. He was at work before the first school-hour began, and that
was at seven o'clock; almost all the intervening times of recreation
were so devoted; and during the afternoon-holidays, when all were at
play, I have seen him in the school,--almost the only one,--at his Latin
or French translation; and so unconscious and regardless was he of the
consequences of this close and persevering application, that he never
would have taken the necessary exercise, had he not been sometimes
driven out by one of us for the purpose.
I have said that he was a favorite with all. Not the less beloved was he
for having a highly pugnacious spirit, which, when roused, was one of
the most picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--I ever saw. One of the
transports of that marvellous actor, Edmund Kean--whom, by the way,
he idolized--was its nearest resemblance; and the two were not very
dissimilar in face and figure. I remember, upon one occasion, when an
usher, on account of some impertinent behavior, had boxed his brother
Tom's ears, John rushed up, put himself in the received posture of
offence, and, I believe, struck the usher,--who could have put him into
his pocket. His passions at times were almost ungovernable; his brother
George, being considerably the taller and stronger, used frequently to
hold him down by main force, when he was in "one of his moods" and
was endeavoring to beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw
conflagration; for he had an intensely tender affection for his
brothers, and proved it upon the most trying occasions. He was not
merely the "favorite of all," like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier
courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean
motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in
his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one who
had known him, superior or equal.
The latter part of the time--perhaps eighteen months--that he remained
at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading. Thus his
_whole_ time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive memory, and the
quantity that he read was surprising. He must in those last months
have exhausted the school--library, which consisted principally of
abridgments of all the voyages and travels of any note; Mayor's
Collection; also his Universal History; Robertson's Histories of
Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss Edgeworth's
productions; together with many other works, equally well calculated for
youth, not necessary to be enumerated. The books, however, that were
his constantly recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke's "Pantheon,"
Lemprière's "Classical Dictionary," which he appeared to _learn_, and
Spence's "Polymetis." This was the store whence he acquired his perfect
intimacy with the Greek mythology; here was he "suckled In that creed
outworn"; for his amount of classical attainment extended no farther
than the "Aeneid"; with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated, that
before leaving school he had _voluntarily_ translated in writing a
considerable portion. And yet I remember that at that early age,--mayhap
under fourteen,--notwithstanding and through all its incidental
attractiveness, he hazarded the opinion to me that there was feebleness
in the structure of the work. He must have gone through all the better
publications in the school-library, for he asked me to lend him some of
my own books; and I think I now see him at supper, (we had all our meals
in the school-room,) sitting back on the form, and 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" newspaper,--which my father took in, and I used to lend to
Keats,--I make no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and
religious liberty. He once told me, smiling, that one of his guardians,
being informed what books I had lent him to read, declared, that, if he
had fifty children, he would not send one of them to my father's school.
When he left us,--I think at fourteen years of age,--he was apprenticed
to Mr. Thomas Hammond, a medical man, residing in Church Street,
Edmonton, and exactly two miles from Enfield. This arrangement appeared
to give him satisfaction; and I fear that it was the most placid period
of his painful life; for now, with the exception of the duty he had to
perform in the surgery, and which was by no means an onerous one, his
whole leisure hours were employed in indulging his passion for reading
and translating. It was during his apprenticeship that he finished the
latter portion of the "Aeneid."
The distance between our residences being so short, I encouraged his
inclination to come over, when he could be spared; and in consequence,
I saw him about five or six times a month, commonly on Wednesdays and
Saturdays, those afternoons being my own most leisure times. He rarely
came empty-handed; either he had a book to read, or brought one with him
to be exchanged. When the weather permitted, we always sat in an arbor
at the end of a spacious garden, and, in Boswellian phrase, "we had good
talk."
I cannot at this time remember what was the spark that fired the train
of his poetical tendencies,--I do not remember what was the first
signalized poetry he read; but he must have given me unmistakable tokens
of his bent of taste; otherwise, at that early stage of his career, I
never could have read to him the "Epithalamion" of Spenser; and this I
perfectly remember having done, and in that (to me) hallowed old arbor,
the scene of many bland and graceful associations,--all the substances
having passed away. He was at that time, I should suppose, fifteen or
sixteen years old; and at that period of life he certainly appreciated
the general beauty of the composition, and felt the more passionate
passages; for his features and exclamations were ecstatic. How often
have I in after-times heard him quote these lines:--
"Behold, whiles she before the altar stands,
Hearing the holy priest that to her speaks,
And blesses her with his two happy hands,
How the red roses flush up in her cheeks!
And the pure snow, with goodly vermil stain,
Like crimson dyed in grain,
That even the angels, which continually
About the sacred altar do remain,
Forget their service, and about her fly,
_Oft peeping in her face, that seems more fair,
The more they on it stare;_
But her sad eyes, still fastened on the ground,
Are governèd with goodly modesty,
That suffers not one look to glance awry,
Which may let in a little thought unsound."
That night he took away with him the first volume of the "Faery Queen,"
and went through it, as I told his biographer, Mr. Monckton Milnes, "as
a young horse would through a spring meadow,--ramping!" Like a true
poet, too,--a poet "born, not manufactured,"--a poet in grain,--he
especially singled out the epithets, for that felicity and power in
which Spenser is so eminent. He hoisted himself up, and looked burly
and dominant, as he said,--"What an image that is,--_'Sea-shouldering
whales'!_"
It was a treat to see as well as hear him read a pathetic passage. Once,
when reading the "Cymbeline" aloud', I saw his eyes fill with tears, and
for some moments he was unable to proceed, when he came to the departure
of Posthumus, and Imogen's saying she would have watched him
"till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;
Nay, followed him till he had _melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air_; and then
Have _turned mine eye and wept_."
I cannot quite reconcile the time of our separating at this stage of his
career,--which of us first went to London; but it was upon an occasion
when I was walking thither, and, I think, to see Leigh Hunt, who had
just fulfilled his penalty of confinement in Horsemonger-Lane Prison for
the trivial libel upon the Prince Regent, that Keats, who was coming
over to Enfield, met me, and, turning, accompanied me back part of the
way to Edmonton. At the last field-gate, when taking leave, he gave
me the sonnet entitled, "Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left
Prison." Unless I am utterly mistaken, this was the first proof I had
received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly can I
recall the conscious look with which he hesitatingly offered it! There
are some momentary glances of beloved friends that fade only with life.
I am not in a position to contradict the statement of his biographer,
that "the lines in imitation of Spenser,
"'Now Morning from her orient charger came,
And her first footsteps touched a verdant hill,' etc.,
"are the earliest known verses of his composition"; from the subject
being the inspiration of his first love--and such a love!--in poetry, it
is most probable; but certainly his first published poem was the sonnet
commencing,
'O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell';
and that will be found in the "Examiner," some time, as I conjecture,
in 1816,--for I have not the paper to refer to, and, indeed, at this
distance, both of time and removal from the means of verification, I
would not be dogmatical.
When we both had come to London,--he to enter as a student of St.
Thomas's Hospital,--he was not long in discovering that my abode was
with my brother-in-law, in Little Warner Street, Clerkenwell; and
just at that time I was installed housekeeper, and was solitary. He,
therefore, would come and revive his loved gossip, till, as the author
of the "Urn Burial" says, "we were acting our antipodes,--the huntsmen
were up in America, and they already were past their first sleep in
Persia." At this time he lived in his first lodging upon coming to
London, near to St. Thomas's Hospital. I find his address in a letter
which must have preceded my appointing him to come and lighten my
darkness in Clerkenwell. At the close of the letter, he says,--"Although
the Borough is a beastly place in dirt, turnings, and windings, yet
No. 8, Dean Street, is not difficult to find; and if you would run the
gauntlet over London Bridge, take the first turning to the left, and
then the first to the right, and, moreover, knock at my door, which is
nearly opposite a meeting, you would do me a charity, which, as St. Paul
saith, is the father of all the virtues. At all events, let me hear from
you soon: I say, at all events, not excepting the gout in your fingers."
I have little doubt that this letter (which has no other date than the
day of the week, and no post-mark) preceded our first symposium; and a
memorable night it was in my life's career.
A copy, and a beautiful one, of the folio edition of Chapman's Homer had
been lent me. It was the property of Mr. Alsager, the gentleman who
for years had contributed no small share of celebrity to the great
reputation of the "Times" newspaper, by the masterly manner in which he
conducted the money-market department of that journal. At the time
when I was first introduced to Mr. Alsager, he was living opposite
Horsemonger-Lane Prison; and upon Mr. Leigh Hunt's being sentenced for
the libel, his first day's dinner was sent over by Mr. Alsager. He was
a man of the most studiously correct demeanor, with a highly cultivated
taste and judgment in the fine arts and music. He succeeded Hazlitt,
(which was no insignificant honor,) and for some time contributed the
critiques upon the theatres, but ended by being the reporter of the
state of the money-market. He had long been accustomed to have the first
trial at his own house of the best-reputed new foreign instrumental
music, which he used to import from Germany.
Well, then, we were put in possession of the Homer of Chapman, and to
work we went, turning to some of the "famousest" passages, as we had
scrappily known them in Pope's version. There was, for instance, that
perfect scene of the conversation on Troy wall of the old Senators with
Helen, who is pointing out to them the several Greek captains, with that
wonderfully vivid portrait of an orator, in Ulysses, in the Third Book,
beginning at the 237th line,--
"But when the prudent Ithacus did to his counsels rise";
the helmet and shield of Diomed, in the opening of the Fifth Book; the
prodigious description of Neptune's passage in his chariot to the Achive
ships, in the opening of the Thirteenth Book,--
"The woods, and all the great hills near,
trembled beneath the weight
Of his immortal moving feet."
The last was the whole of the shipwreck of Ulysses in the Fifth Book of
the "Odyssey." I think his expression of delight, during the reading of
those dozen lines, was never surpassed:--
"Then forth he came, his both knees faltering, both
His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth
His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath
Spent to all use, and down he sunk to death.
_The sea had soaked his heart through_; all his veins
His toils had racked t' a laboring woman's pains.
Dead weary was he."
On an after-occasion I showed him the couplet of Pope's upon the same
passage:--
"From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran,
_And lost in lassitude, lay all the man._"
Chapman supplied us with many an after-feast; but it was in the teeming
wonderment of this, his first introduction, that, when I came down to
breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter with no other
inclosure than his famous sonnet, "On first looking into Chapman's
Homer." We had parted, as I have already said, at day-spring; yet he
contrived that I should receive the poem, from a distance of nearly two
miles, before 10, A.M. In the published copy of this sonnet he made an
alteration in the seventh line:--
"Yet did I never breathe its pure serene."
The original, which he sent me, had the phrase,
"Yet could I never tell what men could mean";
which he said was bald, and too simply wondering. No one could more
earnestly chastise his thoughts than Keats. His favorite among Chapman's
Hymns of Homer was the one to Pan, and which he himself rivalled in the
"Endymion."
In one of our conversations about this period, I alluded to his position
at St. Thomas's Hospital,--coasting and reconnoitring, as it were, that
I might discover how he got on, and, with the total absorption that
had evidently taken place of every other mood of his mind than that of
imaginative composition, what was his bias for the future, and what his
feeling with regard to the profession that had been _chosen for him_,--a
circumstance I did not know at that time. He made no secret, however,
that he could not sympathize with the science of anatomy, as a main
pursuit in life; for one of the expressions that he used, in describing
his unfitness for its mastery, was perfectly characteristic. He said, in
illustration of his argument,--"The other day, for instance, during the
lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop
of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon
and Fairy-land." And yet, with all this self-styled unfitness for the
pursuit, I was afterwards informed, that at his subsequent
examination he displayed an amount of acquirement which surprised his
fellow-students, who had scarcely any other association with him than
that of a cheerful, crochety rhymester.
It was about this period, that, going to call upon Mr. Leigh Hunt,
who then occupied a pretty little cottage in the "Vale of Health," on
Hampstead Heath, I took with me two or three of the poems I had received
from Keats. I did expect that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and indeed
approvingly, of the compositions,--written, too, by a youth under age;
but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating and prompt
admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty lines of the
first poem. Mr. Horace Smith happened to be there, on the occasion, and
was not less demonstrative in his praise of their merits. The piece
which he read out, I remember, was the sonnet,--
"How many bards gild the lapses of time!"
marking with particular emphasis and approbation the last six lines:--
"So the unnumbered sounds that evening store,--
The songs of birds, the whispering of the leaves,
The voice of waters, the great bell that heaves
With solemn sound, and thousand others more,
_That distance of recognizance bereaves_,--
Make pleasing music, and not wild uproar."
Smith repeated, with applause, the line in Italics, saying, "What a
well-condensed expression!" After making numerous and eager inquiries
about him, personally, and with reference to any peculiarities of mind
and manner, the visit ended in my being requested to bring him over
to the Vale of Health. That was a red-letter day in the young poet's
life,--and one which will never fade with me, as long as memory lasts.
The character and expression of Keats's features would unfailingly
arrest even the casual passenger in the street; and now they were
wrought to a tone of animation that I could not but watch with
intense interest, knowing what was in store for him from the bland
encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention, with fascinating
conversational eloquence, that he was to receive and encounter. When we
reached the Heath, I have present the rising and accelerated step, with
the gradual subsidence of all talk, as we drew towards the cottage. The
interview, which stretched into three "morning calls," was the
prelude to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its
neighborhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household,
and was always welcomed.
It was in the library at Hunt's cottage, where an extemporary bed had
been made up for him on the sofa, that he composed the framework and
many lines of the poem on "Sleep and Poetry,"--the last sixty or seventy
being an inventory of the art-garniture of the room. The sonnet,
"Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there,"
he gave me the day after one of our visits, and very shortly after his
installation at the cottage.
"Give me a golden pen, and let me lean,"
was another, upon being compelled to leave "at an early hour." But the
occasion that recurs to me with the liveliest interest was the evening
when, some observations having been made upon the character, habits,
and pleasant associations of that reverenced denizen of the hearth,
the cheerful little fireside grasshopper, Hunt proposed to Keats the
challenge of writing, then, there, and to time, a sonnet "On the
Grasshopper and the Cricket." No one was present but myself, and they
accordingly set to. I, absent with a book at the end of the sofa, could
not avoid furtive glances, every now and then, at the emulants. I cannot
say how long the trial lasted; I was not proposed umpire, and had no
stop-watch for the occasion: the time, however, was short, for such
a performance; and Keats won, as to time. But the event of the
after-scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the
memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration, for
unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement: his
sincere look of pleasure at the first line,--
"The poetry of earth is never dead";
"Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth and
eleventh lines,--
"On a lone winter evening, _when the frost
Has wrought a silence_";
"Ah! that's perfect! bravo, Keats!"--and then he went on in a dilation
upon, the dumbness of all Nature during the season's suspension and
torpidity. With all the kind and gratifying things that were said to
him, Keats protested to me, as we were afterwards walking home, that he
preferred Hunt's treatment of the subject to his own.
He had left the neighborhood of the Borough, and was now living with his
brothers in apartments on the second floor of a house in the Poultry,
over the passage leading to the Queen's Head Tavern, and opposite one of
the City Companies' Halls,--the Ironmongers', if I mistake not. I have
the associating reminiscence of many happy hours spent in this lodging.
Here was determined upon, in great part written, and sent forth to the
world, the first little, but vigorous, offspring of his brain:--
POEMS
BY
JOHN KEATS.
"What more felicity can fell to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?"