CHAPTER XVII

EPILOGUE 513

APPENDIX 551

INDEX 559

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE PAGE

I. HEAD OF KEATS _Frontispiece_

From a posthumous oil painting by Joseph Severn in the

possession of the Marquis of Crewe, K.G.

II. PORTRAIT OF JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT 46

From an engraving by Mayer after a drawing by J. Hayter.

III. PORTRAIT OF BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON 62

From an engraving by Thomson after Haydon.

IV. LIFE-MASK OF KEATS 144

From an electrotype in the National Portrait Gallery.

V. 'ONWARD THE TIGER AND THE LEOPARD PANTS, WITH ASIAN

ELEPHANTS' 230

From an engraving after a sarcophagus relief at Woburn Abbey.

VI. A SACRIFICE TO APOLLO 264

From an engraving by Vivares and Woollett after Claude.

VII. THE ENCHANTED CASTLE 266

From an engraving by Vivares and Woollett after Claude.

VIII. 'AND THERE I'D SIT AND READ ALL DAY LIKE A PICTURE OF

SOMEBODY READING' 338

From an oil painting by Joseph Severn in the National

Portrait Gallery

IX. 'FIGURES ON A GREEK VASE--A MAN AND TWO WOMEN' 342

From an etching in Piranesi's _Vasi e Candelabri_.

X. PAGE FROM _ISABELLA; OR, THE POT OF BASIL_ 394

From an autograph by Keats in the British Museum.

XI. THE SOSIBIOS VASE: PROFILE AND FRIEZE 416

From an engraving in the _Musee Napoleon_.

XII. 'WHAT PIPES AND TIMBRELS? WHAT WILD ECSTASY?' 418

Bacchanalian friezes, (A) from the Townley Vase in the British

Museum, (B) from the Borghese Vase in the Louvre.

XIII. PAGE FROM A LETTER OF HAYDON TO ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1834 532

CHAPTER I

1795-1815: BIRTH AND PARENTAGE: SCHOOLDAYS AND APPRENTICESHIP

Obscure family history--The Finsbury livery stable--The surname

Keats--Origin probably Cornish--Character of parents--Traits of

childhood--The Enfield School--The Edmonton home--The Pymmes

Brook--Testimonies of schoolmates--Edward Holmes--Charles Cowden

Clarke--New passion for reading--Left an orphan--Apprenticed to a

surgeon--Relations with his master--Readings in the poets--The _Faerie

Queene_--The Spenser fever--Other poetic influences--Influences of

nature--Early attempts in verse--Early sympathizers--George Felton

Mathew--Move to London.

For all the study and research, that have lately been spent on the life

and work of Keats, there is one point as to which we remain as much in

the dark as ever, and that is his family history. He was born at an hour

when the gradually re-awakened genius of poetry in our race, I mean of

impassioned and imaginative poetry, was ready to offer new forms of

spiritual sustenance, and a range of emotions both widened and deepened,

to a generation as yet only half prepared to receive them. If we

consider the other chief poets who bore their part in that great

revival, we can commonly recognize either some strain of power in their

blood or some strong inspiring quality in the scenery and traditions of

their home, or both together. Granting that the scenic and legendary

romance of the Scottish border wilds were to be made live anew for the

delight of the latter-day world, we seem to see in Walter Scott a man

predestined for the task alike by origin, association, and opportunity.

Had the indwelling spirit of the Cumbrian lakes and mountains, and their

power upon the souls and lives of those living among them, to be newly

revealed and interpreted to the general mind of man, where should we

look for its spokesman but in one of Wordsworth's birth and training?

What, then, it may be asked, of Byron and Shelley, the two great

contrasted poets of revolution, or rather of revolt against the

counter-revolution, in the younger generation,--the one worldly,

mocking, half theatrically rebellious and Satanic, the other unworldly

even to unearthliness, a loving alien among men, more than half truly

angelic? These we are perhaps rightly used to count as offspring of

their age, with its forces and ferments, its violent actions and

reactions, rather than of their ancestry or upbringing. And yet, if we

will, we may fancy Byron inspired in literature by demons of the same

froward brood that had urged others of his lineage on lives of adventure

or of crime, and may conceive that Shelley drew some of his instincts

for headlong, peremptory self-guidance, though in directions most

opposite to the traditional, from the stubborn and wayward stock of

colonial and county aristocracy whence he sprang.

Keats, more purely and exclusively a poet than any of these, and

responding more intuitively than any to the spell alike of ancient

Greece, of mediaeval romance, and of the English woods and fields, was

born in a dull and middling walk of London city life, and 'if by

traduction came his mind',--to quote Dryden with a difference,--it was

through channels hidden from our search. From his case less even than

from Shakespeare's can we draw any argument as to the influence of

heredity or environment on the birth and growth of genius. His origin,

in spite of much diligent inquiry, has not been traced beyond one

generation on the father's side and two on the mother's. His father,

Thomas Keats, was a west-country lad who came young to London, and while

still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a livery-stable

kept by a Mr John Jennings in Finsbury. Seven or eight years later,

about the beginning of 1795, he married his employer's daughter, Frances

Jennings, then in her twentieth year. Mr Jennings, who had carried on a

large business in north-eastern London and the neighbouring suburbs, and

was a man of substance, retired about the same time to live in the

country, at Ponder's End near Edmonton, leaving the management of the

business in the hands of his son-in-law. At first 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 eldest child,

the poet JOHN KEATS, was born prematurely on either the 29th or 31st of

October, 1795. A second son, named George, followed on February 28,

1797; a third, Tom, on November 18, 1799; a fourth, Edward, who died in

infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the 3rd of June, 1803, a daughter,

Frances Mary. In the meantime the family had moved from the stable to a

house in Craven Street, City Road, half a mile farther north.

The Keats brothers as they grew up were remarked for their intense

fraternal feeling and strong vein of family pride. But it was a pride

that looked forward and not back: they were bent on raising the family

name and credit, but seem to have taken no interest at all in its

history, and have left no record or tradition concerning their forbears.

Some of their friends believed their father to have been a Devonshire

man: their sister, who long survived them, said she remembered hearing

as a child that he came from Cornwall, near the Land's End.

There is no positive evidence enabling us to decide the question. The

derivation of English surnames is apt to be complicated and obscure, and

'Keats' is no exception to the rule. It is a name widely distributed in

various counties of England, though not very frequent in any. It may in

some cases be a possessive form derived from the female Christian name

Kate, on the analogy of Jeans from Jane, or Maggs from Margaret: but the

source accepted as generally probable for it and its several variants is

the Middle-English adjective 'kete', a word of Scandinavian origin

meaning bold, gallant. In the form 'Keyte' the name prevails principally

in Warwickshire: in the variants Keat (or Keate) and Keats (or

Keates[1]) it occurs in many of the midland, home, and southern,

especially the south-western, counties.

Mr Thomas Hardy tells me of a Keats family sprung from a horsedealer of

Broadmayne, Dorsetshire, members of which lived within his own memory as

farmers and publicans in and near Dorchester, one or two of them

bearing, as he thought, a striking likeness to the portrait of the poet.

One Keats family of good standing was established by the mid-eighteenth

century in Devon, in the person of a well-known headmaster of Blundell's

school, Tiverton, afterwards rector of Bideford. His son was one of

Nelson's bravest and most famous captains, Sir Richard Godwin Keats of

the 'Superb', and from the same stock sprang in our own day the lady

whose tales of tragic and comic west-country life, published under the

pseudonym 'Zack', gave promise of a literary career which has been

unhappily cut short. But with this Bideford stock the Keats brothers can

have claimed no connexion, or as schoolboys they would assuredly have

made the prowess of their namesake of the 'Superb' their pride and

boast, whereas in fact their ideal naval hero was a much less famous

person, their mother's brother Midgley John Jennings, a tall lieutenant

of marines who served with some credit on Duncan's flagship at

Camperdown and by reason of his stature was said to have been a special

mark for the enemy's musketry. In the form Keat or Keate the name is

common enough both in Devon, particularly near Tiverton, and in

Cornwall, especially in the parishes of St Teath and Lanteglos,--that is

round about Camelford,--and also as far eastward as Callington and

westward as St Columb Major: the last named parish having been the seat

of a family of the name entitled to bear arms and said to have come

originally from Berkshire.

But neither the records of the Dorsetshire family, nor search in the

parish registers of Devon and Cornwall, have as yet yielded the name of

any Thomas Keat or Keats as born in 1768, the birth-year of our poet's

father according to our information. A 'Thomas Keast', however, is

registered as having been born in that year in the parish of St Agnes,

between New Quay and Redruth. Now Keast is a purely Cornish name,

limited to those parts, and it is quite possible that, borne by a

Cornishman coming to London, it would get changed into the far commoner

Keats (a somewhat similar phonetic change is that of Crisp into Cripps).

So the identification of this Thomas Keast of St Agnes as the father of

our Keats is not to be excluded. The Jennings connexion is of itself a

circumstance which may be held to add to the likelihood of a Cornish

origin for the poet, Jennings being a name frequent in the Falmouth

district and occurring as far westward as Lelant. Children are

registered as born in and after 1770 of the marriage of a John Jennings

to a Catherine Keate at Penryn; and it is a plausible conjecture (always

remembering it to be a conjecture and no more) that the prosperous

London stable-keeper Jonn Jennings was himself of Cornish origin, and

that between him and the lad Thomas Keats, whom he took so young first

as head stableman and then as son-in-law, there existed some previous

family connexion or acquaintance. These, however, are matters purely

conjectural, and all we really know about the poet's parents are the

dates above mentioned, and the fact that they were certainly people

somewhat out of the ordinary. Thomas Keats was noticed in his life-time

as a man of sense, spirit, and conduct: 'of so remarkably fine a

commonsense and native respectability,' writes Cowden Clarke, in whose

father's school the poet and his brother were brought up, 'that I

perfectly remember the warm terms in which his demeanour used to be

canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit his boys.' And

again:--'I have a clear recollection of his lively and energetic

countenance, particularly when seated on his gig and preparing to drive

his wife home after visiting his sons at school. In feature, stature,

and manner John resembled his father.' Of Frances Keats, the poet's

mother, we learn more vaguely that she was 'tall, of good figure, with

large oval face, and sensible deportment': and again that she was a

lively, clever, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and

supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some

imprudence. Her second son, George, wrote in after life of her and of

her family as follows:--'my grandfather Mr Jennings was very well off,

as his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible

would have been affluent. I have heard my grandmother speak with

enthusiasm of his excellencies, and Mr Abbey used to say that he never

saw a woman of the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my

mother.'

As to the grandmother and her estimable qualities all accounts are

agreed, but of the mother the witness quoted himself tells a very

different tale. This Mr Richard Abbey was a wholesale tea-dealer in

Saint Pancras Lane and a trusted friend of Mr and Mrs Jennings. In a

memorandum written long after their death he declares that both as girl

and woman their daughter, the poet's mother, was a person of unbridled

temperament, and that in her later years she fell into loose ways and

was no credit to her family.[2] Whatever truth there may be in these

charges, it is certain that she lived to the end under her mother's roof

and was in no way cut off from her children. The eldest boy John in

particular she is said to have held in passionate affection, by him

passionately returned. Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be

left quiet during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping

watch at her door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in.

Haydon, an artist who loved to lay his colours thick, gives this

anecdote of the sword a different turn:--'He was when an infant a most

violent and ungovernable child. At five years of age or thereabouts, he

once got hold of a naked sword and shutting the door swore nobody should

go out. His mother wanted to do so, but he threatened her so furiously

she began to cry, and was obliged to wait till somebody through the

window saw her position and came to the rescue.' Another trait of the

poet's childhood, mentioned also by Haydon, on the authority of a gammer

who had known him from his birth, is that when he was first learning to

speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had a trick of making a rime to

the last word people said and then laughing.

The parents were ambitious for their boys, and would have liked to send

them to Harrow, but thinking this beyond their means, chose the school

kept by a Mr John Clarke at Enfield. The brothers of Mrs Keats,

including the boys' admired uncle, the lieutenant of marines, had been

educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and of

exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. The school-house had

been originally built for a rich West India merchant, in the finest

style of early Georgian classic architecture, and stood in a spacious

garden at the lower end of the town. When years afterwards the site was

used for a railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to

stand: but later it was taken down, and the central part of the facade,

with its fine proportions and rich ornaments in moulded brick, was

transported to the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum,

and is still preserved there as a choice example of the style. It is

evident that Mr Clarke was a kind and excellent schoolmaster, much above

the standards of his time, and that lads with any bent for literature or

scholarship had their full chance under him. Still more was this the

case when his son Charles Cowden Clarke, a genial youth with an ardent

and trained love of books and music, grew old enough to help him as

usher in the school-work. The brothers John and George Keats were mere

children when they were put under Mr Clarke's care, John not much over

and George a good deal under eight years old, both still dressed, we are

told, in the childish frilled suits which give such a grace to groups of

young boys in the drawings of Stothard and his contemporaries.

Not long after Keats had been put to school he lost his father, whose

horse fell and threw him in the City Road as he rode home late one night

after dining at Southgate, perhaps on his way home from the Enfield

School. His skull was fractured: he was picked up unconscious about one

o'clock and died at eight in the morning. This was on the 16th of April,

1804. Within twelve months his widow had taken a second husband--one

William Rawlings, described as 'of Moorgate in the city of London,

stable-keeper,' presumably therefore the successor of her first husband

in the management of her father's business. (It may be noted

incidentally that Rawlings, like Jennings, is a name common in Cornwall,

especially in and about the parish of Madron). This marriage must have

turned out unhappily, for it was soon followed by a separation, under

what circumstances or through whose fault we are not told. In the

correspondence of the Keats brothers after they were grown up no mention

is ever made of their stepfather, of whom the family seem soon to have

lost all knowledge. Mrs Rawlings went with her children to live at

Edmonton, in the house of her mother, Mrs Jennings, who was just about

this time left a widow. The family was well enough provided for, Mr

Jennings (who died March 8, 1805) having left a fortune of over L13,000,

of which, in addition to other legacies, he bequeathed a capital

yielding L200 a year to his widow absolutely; one yielding L50 a year to

his daughter Frances Rawlings, with reversion to her Keats children

after her death; and L1000 to be separately held in trust for the said

children and divided among them on the coming of age of the youngest.

Between the home, then, in Church Street, Edmonton, and the neighbouring

Enfield school, where the two elder brothers were in due time joined by

the youngest, the next five years of Keats's boyhood (1806-1811) were

passed in sufficient comfort and pleasantness. He did not live to attain

the years, or the success, of men who write their reminiscences; and

almost the only recollections he has left of his own early days refer to

holiday times in his grandmother's house at Edmonton. They are conveyed

in some rimes which he wrote years afterwards by way of foolishness to

amuse his young sister, and testify to a partiality, common also to

little boys not of genius, for dabbling by the brookside and keeping

small fishes in tubs,--

There was a naughty boy Tittlebat

And a naughty boy was he Not over fat,

He kept little fishes Minnow small

In washing tubs three As the stal

In spite Of a glove

Of the might Not above

Of the Maid, The size

Nor afraid Of a nice

Of his Granny-good Little Baby's

He often would Little finger--

Hurly burly O he made

Get up early 'Twas his trade

And go Of Fish a pretty kettle

By hook or crook A kettle--

To the brook A kettle--

And bring home Of Fish a pretty kettle

Miller's thumb, A kettle!

In a later letter to his sister he makes much the same confession in a

different key, when he bids her ask him for any kind of present she

fancies, only not for live stock to be kept in captivity, 'though I will

not now be very severe on it, remembering how fond I used to be of

Goldfinches, Tomtits, Minnows, Mice, Ticklebacks, Dace, Cock salmons and

all the whole tribe of the Bushes and the Brooks.' Despite the changes

which have overbuilt and squalidly or sprucely suburbanized all those

parts of Middlesex, the Pymmes brook still holds its course across half

the county, is still bridged by the main street of Edmonton, and runs

countrywise, clear and open, for some distance along a side street on

its way to join the Lea. Other memories of it, and of his childish

playings and musings beside it, find expression in Keats's poetry where

he makes the shepherd-prince Endymion tell his sister Peona how one of

his love-sick vagaries has been to sit on a stone and bubble up the

water through a reed,--

So reaching back to boy-hood: make me ships

Of moulted feathers, touchwood, alder chips,

With leaves stuck in them; and the Neptune be

Of their petty ocean.

If we learn little of Keats's early days from his own lips, we have

sufficient testimony as to the impression which he made on his school

companions; which was that of a fiery, generous little fellow, handsome

and passionate, vehement both in tears and laughter, and as placable and

loveable as he was pugnacious. But beneath this 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, to whom he was attached by the

very closest of fraternal ties. George, the second brother, had all

John's spirit of manliness and honour, with a less impulsive disposition

and a cooler blood. From a boy he was the bigger and stronger of the

two: and at school found himself continually involved in fights for, and

not unfrequently with, his small, indomitably fiery senior. Tom, the

youngest, was always delicate, and an object of protecting care as well

as the warmest affection to the other two.

Here are some of George Keats's recollections, written after the death

of his elder brother, and referring partly to their school days and

partly to John's character after he was grown up:

I loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of

his heart and the nobleness of his spirit, before we left school we

quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and I can safely say and my

schoolfellows will bear witness that John's temper was the cause of

all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are.

From the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, and

fought alternately, until we separated in 1818, I in a great measure

relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible

spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. He

avoided teazing any one with his miseries but Tom and myself, and

often asked our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him

relief.

Let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly reminiscences to

their confirmation in the words of two of Keats's school friends; and

first in those of his junior Edward Holmes, afterwards a musical critic

of note and author of a well-known _Life of Mozart_:--

Keats was in childhood not attached to books. His _penchant_ was for

fighting. He would fight any one--morning, noon, and night, his

brother among the rest. It was meat and drink to him. Jennings their

sailor relation was always in the thoughts of the brothers, and they

determined to keep up the family reputation for courage; George in a

passive manner; John and Tom more fiercely. The favourites of John

were few; after they were known to fight readily he seemed to prefer

them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour. I recollect at this

moment his delight at the extraordinary gesticulations and pranks of a

boy named Wade who was celebrated for this.... He was a boy whom any

one from his extraordinary vivacity and personal beauty might easily

fancy would become great--but rather in some military capacity than in

literature. You will remark that this taste came out rather suddenly

and unexpectedly. Some books of his I remember reading were _Robinson

Crusoe_ and something about Montezuma and the Incas of Peru. He must

have read Shakespeare as he thought that 'no one would care to read

_Macbeth_ alone in a house at two o'clock in the morning.' This seems

to me a boyish trait of the poet. His sensibility was as remarkable as

his indifference to be thought well of by the master as a 'good boy'

and to his tasks in general.... He was in every way the creature of

passion.... The point to be chiefly insisted on is that he was _not

literary--his love of books and poetry manifested itself chiefly about

a year before he left school_. In all active exercises he excelled.

The generosity and daring of his character with the extreme beauty and

animation of his face made I remember an impression on me--and being

some years his junior I was obliged to woo his friendship--in which I

succeeded, but not till I had fought several battles. This violence

and vehemence--this pugnacity and generosity of disposition--in

passions of tears or outrageous fits of laughter--always in

extremes--will help to paint Keats in his boyhood. Associated as they

were with an extraordinary beauty of person and expression, these

qualities captivated the boys, and no one was more popular.[3]

Entirely to the same effect is the account of Keats given by a school

friend seven or eight years older than himself, to whose appreciation

and encouragement the world most likely owes it that he first became

aware of his own vocation for poetry. This was the aforementioned

Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the head master, who towards the close

of a long life, during which he had deserved well of literature and of

his generation in more ways than one, wrote retrospectively of Keats:--

He was a favourite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a

highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the most

picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--I ever saw. One of the

transports of that marvellous actor, Edmund Kean--whom, by the way, he

idolized--was its nearest resemblance; and the two were not very

dissimilar in face and figure. Upon one occasion when an usher, on

account of some impertinent behaviour, had boxed his brother Tom's

ears, John rushed up, put himself into the received posture of

offence, and, it was said, struck the usher--who could, so to say,

have put him in his pocket. His passion at times was almost

ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the taller

and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, laughing

when John was 'in one of his moods,' and was endeavouring to beat him.

It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he had an

intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon the

most trying occasions. He was not merely the favourite of all, like a

pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his highmindedness,

his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his

generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never

heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had

known him.[4]

The same excellent witness records in agreement with the last that in

his earlier school days Keats showed no particular signs of an

intellectual bent, though always orderly and methodical in what he did.

But during his last few terms, that is in his fifteenth and sixteenth

years, he suddenly became a passionate student and a very glutton of

books. Let us turn again to Cowden Clarke's words:--

My father was in the habit, at each half-year's vacation, of bestowing

prizes upon those pupils who had performed the greatest quantity of

voluntary work; and such was Keats's indefatigable energy for the last

two or three successive half-years of his remaining at school, that,

upon each occasion, he took the first prize by a considerable

distance. He was at work before the first school-hour began, and that

was at seven o'clock; almost all the intervening times of recreation

were so devoted; and during the afternoon holidays, when all were at

play, he would be in the school--almost the only one--at his Latin or

French translation; and so unconscious and regardless was he of the

consequences of so close and persevering an application, that he never

would have taken the necessary exercise had he not been sometimes

driven out for the purpose by one of the masters....

One of the silver medals awarded to Keats as a school prize in these

days exists in confirmation of this account and was lately in the

market. Cowden Clarke continues:--

In the latter part of the time--perhaps eighteen months--that he

remained at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading.

Thus, his _whole_ time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive

memory, and the quantity that he read was surprising. He must in those

last months have exhausted the school library, which consisted

principally of abridgements of all the voyages and travels of any

note; Mavor's collection, also his _Universal History_; Robertson's

histories of Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss

Edgeworth's productions, together with many other books equally well

calculated for youth. The books, however, that were his constantly

recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke's _Pantheon_, Lempriere's

_Classical Dictionary_, which he appeared to _learn_, and Spence's

_Polymetis_. This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with

the Greek mythology; here was he 'suckled in that creed outworn;' for

his amount of classical attainment extended no farther than the

_AEneid_, with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated that before

leaving school he had _voluntarily_ translated in writing a

considerable portion....

He must have gone through all the better publications in the school

library, for he asked me to lend him some of my own books; and, in my

'mind's eye,' I now see him at supper (we had our meals in the

schoolroom), sitting back on the form, from the table, holding the

folio volume of Burnet's _History of his Own Time_ between himself and

the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This work, and Leigh Hunt's

_Examiner_--which my father took in, and I used to lend to Keats--no

doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and religious liberty.

In the midst of these ardent studies of Keats's latter school days

befell the death of his mother, who had been for some time in failing

health. First she was disabled by chronic rheumatism, and at last fell

into a rapid consumption, which carried her off at the age of

thirty-five in February 1810. We are told with what devotion her eldest

boy attended her sick-bed,--'he 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.'

From her, no doubt, came that predisposition to consumption which showed

itself in her youngest son from adolescence and carried him off at

nineteen, and with the help of ill luck, over-exertion, and distress of

mind, wrecked also before twenty-five the robust-seeming frame and

constitution of her eldest, the poet. Were the accounts of her character

less ambiguous, or were the strands of human heredity less inveterately

entangled than they are, it would be tempting, when we consider the deep

duality of Keats's nature, the trenchant contrast between the two selves

that were in him, to trace to the mother the seeds of one of those

selves, the feverishly over-sensitive and morbidly passionate one, and

to his father the seeds of the other, the self that was all manly good

sense and good feeling and undisturbed clear vision and judgment. In the

sequel we shall see this fine virile self in Keats continually and

consciously battling against the other, trying to hold it down, and

succeeding almost always in keeping control over his ways and dealings

with his fellow-men, though not over the inward frettings of his spirit.

In the July following her daughter's death, Mrs Jennings, being desirous

to make the best provision she could for her orphan grand-children, '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.[5] The guardians were Mr Rowland

Sandell, merchant, who presently renounced the trust, and the aforesaid

Mr Richard Abbey, tea-dealer. Mrs Jennings survived the execution of

this deed more than four years,[6] but Mr Abbey seems at once to have

taken up all the responsibilities of the trust. Under his authority John

Keats was withdrawn from school at the end of the summer term, 1811,

when he was some months short of sixteen, and made to put on harness for

the practical work of life. With no opposition, so far as we learn, on

his own part, he was bound apprentice to a Mr Thomas Hammond, a surgeon

and apothecary of good repute at Edmonton, for the customary term of

five years.[7]

The years between the sixteenth and twentieth of his age are the most

critical of a young man's life, and in these years, during which our

other chief London-born poets, Spenser, Milton, Gray, were profiting by

the discipline of Cambridge and the Muses, Keats had no better or more

helpful regular training than that of an ordinary apprentice, apparently

one of several, in a suburban surgery. But he had the one advantage, to

him inestimable, of proximity to his old school, which meant free

access to the school library and continued encouragement and advice in

reading from his affectionate senior, the head master's son. The fact

that it was only two miles' walk from Edmonton to Enfield helped much,

says Cowden Clarke, to reconcile him to his new way of life, and his

duties at the surgery were not onerous. As laid down in the ordinary

indentures of apprenticeship in those times, they were indeed chiefly

negative, the apprentice binding himself 'not to haunt taverns or

playhouses, not to play at dice or cards, nor absent himself from his

said master's service day or night unlawfully, but in all things as a

faithful apprentice he shall behave himself towards the said master and

all his during the said term.'

Keats himself, it is recorded, did not love talking of his apprentice

days, and has left no single written reference to them except the

much-quoted phrase in a letter of 1819, in which, speaking of the

continual processes of change in the human tissues, he says, 'this is

not the same hand which seven years ago clenched itself at Hammond.' It

was natural that the same fiery temper which made him as a small boy

square up against an usher on behalf of his brother,--an offence which

the headmaster, according to his son Cowden Clarke, 'felt he could not

severely punish,'--it was natural that this same temper should on

occasion flame out against his employer the surgeon. If Keats's words

are to be taken literally, this happened in the second year of his

apprenticeship. Probably it was but the affair of a moment: there is no

evidence of any habitual disagreement or final breach between them, and

Keats was able to put in the necessary testimonial from Mr Hammond when

he presented himself in due course for examination before the Court of

Apothecaries. A fellow-apprentice in after years remembered him as 'an

idle loafing fellow, always writing poetry.' This, seeing that he did

not begin to write till he was near eighteen, must refer to the last two

years of his apprenticeship and probably represents an unlettered view

of his way of employing his leisure, rather (judging by his general

character) than any slackness in the performance of actual duty. One of

the very few glimpses we have of him from outside is from Robert Hengist

Horne ('Orion' Horne), another alumnus of the Enfield school who lived

to make his mark in literature. Horne remembered Mr Hammond driving on a

professional visit to the school one winter day and leaving Keats to

take care of the gig. While Keats sat in a brown study holding the

reins, young Horne, remembering his school reputation as a boxer, in

bravado threw a snowball at him and hit, but made off into safety before

Keats could get at him to inflict punishment. The story suggests a

picture to the eye but tells nothing to the mind.

Our only real witness for this time of Keats's life is Cowden Clarke. He

tells us how the lad's newly awakened passion for the pleasures of

literature and the imagination was not to be stifled, and how at

Edmonton he plunged back into his school occupations of reading and

translating whenever he could spare the time. He finished at this time

his prose version of the _Aeneid_, and on free afternoons and evenings,

five or six times a month or oftener, was in the habit of walking over

to Enfield,--by that field path where Lamb found the stiles so many and

so hard to tackle,--to see his friend Cowden Clarke and bring away or

return borrowed books. Young Clarke was an ardent liberal and disciple

of Leigh Hunt both in political opinions and literary taste. In summer

weather he and Keats would sit in a shady arbour in the old school

garden, the elder reading poetry to the younger, and enjoying his looks

and exclamations of delight. From the nature of Keats's imitative first

flights in verse, it is clear that though he hated the whole 'Augustan'

and post-Augustan tribe of social and moral essayists in verse, and

Pope, their illustrious master, most of all, yet his mind and ear had

become familiar, in the course of his school and after-school reading,

with Thomson, Collins, Gray, and all the more romantically minded poets

of the middle and later eighteenth century. But the essential service

Clarke did him was in pressing upon his attention the poetry of the

great Elizabethan and Jacobean age, from _The Shepheard's Calendar_ down

to _Comus_ and _Lycidas_,--'our older and nobler poetry,' as a few had

always held it to be even through the Age of Reason and the reign of

Pope and his followers, and as it was now loudly proclaimed to be by all

the innovating critics, with Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt among the foremost.

On a momentous day for Keats, Cowden Clarke introduced him for the first

time to Spenser, reading him the _Epithalamion_ in the afternoon and at

his own eager request lending him the _Faerie Queene_ to take away the

same evening. With Spenser's later imitators, playful or serious, as

Shenstone and Thomson, Beattie and the more recent Mrs Tighe, Keats, we

know, was already familiar; indeed he owned later to a passing phase of

boyish delight in Beattie's _Minstrel_ and Tighe's languorously romantic

_Psyche_. But now he found himself taken to the fountain head, and was

enraptured. It has been said, and truly, that no one who has not had the

good fortune to be attracted to the _Faerie Queene_ in boyhood can ever

quite wholeheartedly and to the full enjoy it. The maturer student,

appreciate as he may its innumerable beauties and noble ethical temper,

can hardly fail to be critically conscious also of its arbitrary forms

of rime and language, and sated by its melodious redundance: he will

perceive its faults now of scholastic pedantry and now of flagging

inspiration, the perplexity and discontinuousness of the allegory, and

the absence of real and breathing humanity amidst all that luxuriance of

symbolic and decorative invention, and prodigality of romantic incident

and detail. It is otherwise with the greedy and indiscriminate

imaginative appetite of boyhood. I speak as one of the fortunate who

know by experience that for a boy there is no poetical revelation like

the _Faerie Queene_, no pleasure equal to the pleasure of being rapt for

the first time along that ever-buoyant stream of verse, by those rivers

and forests of enchantment, glades and wildernesses alive with glancing

figures of knight and lady, oppressor and champion, mage and

Saracen,--with masque and combat, pursuit and rescue, the chivalrous

shapes and hazards of the woodland, and beauty triumphant or in

distress. Through the new world thus opened to him Keats went ranging

with delight: 'ramping' is Cowden Clarke's word: he showed moreover his

own instinct for the poetical art by fastening with critical enthusiasm

on epithets of special felicity or power. For instance, says his friend,

'he hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, "What

an image that is--_sea-shouldering whales_!"'

Spenser has been often 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, Keats's most

intimate companion during the two last years of his life, states

positively that it was to the inspiration of the _Faerie Queene_ that

his first notion of attempting to write was due. 'Though born to be a

poet, he was ignorant of his birthright until he had completed his

eighteenth year. It was the _Faerie Queene_ that awakened his genius. In

Spenser's fairy-land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and

became another being; till enamoured of the stanza, he attempted to

imitate it, and succeeded. This account of the sudden 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 peculiarly interesting to those

acquainted with his history.' Cowden Clarke places the attempt two years

earlier, but his memory for dates was, as he owns, the vaguest. We may

fairly take Brown to be on this point the better informed of the two,

and may assume that it was some time in the second year after he left

school that the Spenser fever took hold on Keats, and with it the

longing to be himself a poet. But it was not with Spenser alone, it was

with other allegoric and narrative poets as well, his followers or

contemporaries, that Keats was in these days gaining acquaintance. Not

quite in his earliest, but still in his very early, attempts, we find

clear traces of familiarity with the work both of William Browne of

Tavistock and of Michael Drayton, and we can conceive how in that

charming ingenuous retrospect of Drayton's on his boyish vocation to

poetry, addressed to his friend Henry Reynolds, Keats will have smiled

to find an utterance of the same passion that had just awakened in his

own not very much maturer self.

Let it be remembered moreover that the years of Keats's school days and

apprenticeship were also those of the richest and most stimulating

outburst of the new poetry in England. To name only their chief

products,--the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Coleridge and Wordsworth had come

while he was only a child: during his school days had appeared

Wordsworth's still richer and not less challenging volumes of 1807, and

the succession of Scott's romantic lays (but these last, in spite of

their enormous public success, it was in circles influenced by Leigh

Hunt not much the fashion to admire): during his apprentice years at

Edmonton, the two first cantos of Byron's _Childe Harold_ and the still

more overwhelmingly successful series of his Eastern tales: and finally

Wordsworth's _Excursion_, with which almost from the first Keats was

profoundly impressed. But it was not, of course, only by reading poetry

that he was learning to be a poet. Nature was quite as much his teacher

as books; and the nature within easy reach of him, tame indeed and

unimpressive in comparison with Wordsworth's lakes and mountains, had

quite enough of vital English beauty to afford fair seed-time to his

soul. Across the levels of the Lea valley, not then disfigured as they

are now by factories and reservoir works and the squalor of sprawling

suburbs, rose the softly shagged undulations of Epping forest, a region

which no amount of Cockney frequentation or prosaic vicinity can ever

quite strip of its primitive romance. Westward over Hornsey to the

Highgate and Hampstead heights, north-westward through Southgate towards

the Barnets, and thence in a sweep by the remains of Enfield Chase, was

a rich tract of typically English country, a country of winding

elm-shadowed lanes, of bosky hedge and thicket and undulating

pasture-land charmingly diversified with parks and pleasaunces. Nearly

such I can myself remember it some sixty years ago, and even now, off

the tram-frequented highways and between the devastating encroachments

of bricks and mortar, forlorn patches of its ancient pastoral self are

still to be found lurking.

It was in his rambles afield in these directions and in his habitual

afternoon and evening strolls to Enfield and back, that a delighted

sense of the myriad activities of nature's life in wood and field and

brook and croft and hedgerow began to possess Keats's mind, and to blend

with the beautiful images that already peopled it from his readings in

Greek mythology, and to be enhanced into a strange supernatural thrill

by the recurring magic of moonlight. It is only in adolescence that such

delights can be drunk in, not with conscious study and observation but

passively and half unaware through all the pores of being, and no youth

ever drank them in more deeply than Keats. Not till later came for him,

or comes for any man, the time when the images so absorbed, and the

emotions and sympathies so awakened, define and develop themselves in

consciousness and discover with effort and practice the secret of

rightly expressing themselves in words.

After Keats, under the stimulus of Spenser, had taken his first plunge

into verse, he went on writing occasional sonnets and other pieces:

secretly and shyly at first like all other young poets: at least it was

not until some two years later, in the spring of 1815, that he showed

anything that he had written to his friend and confidant Cowden Clarke.

This was a sonnet on the release of Leigh Hunt after serving a two

years' sentence of imprisonment for a political offence. Clarke relates

how he was walking in to London from Enfield to call on and congratulate

the ex-prisoner, whom he not only revered as a martyr in the cause of

liberty but knew and admired personally, when Keats met him and turned

back to accompany him part of the way. 'At the last field-gate, when

taking leave, he gave me the sonnet entitled _Written on the day that Mr

Leigh Hunt left prison_. This I feel to be the first proof I had

received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I

remember the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it!

There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with

life.' About a score of the pieces which Keats had written and kept

secret during the preceding two years are preserved, and like the work

of almost all beginners are quite imitative and conventional, failing to

express anything original or personal to himself. They include the

aforesaid Spenserian stanzas, which in fact echo the cadences of

Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_ much more than those of Spenser himself;

an ode to Hope, quite in the square-toed manner of eighteenth century

didactic verse, and another to Apollo, in which style and expression owe

everything to Gray; a set of octosyllabics recording, this time with

some touch of freshness, a momentary impression of a woman's beauty

received one night at Vauxhall, and so intense that it continued to

haunt his memory for years; two sets of verses addressed in a vein of

polite parlour compliment to lady friends at the seaside; and several

quite feeble sonnets in the Wordsworthian form, among them one on the

peace of Paris in 1814, one on Chatterton and one on Byron.

Of Keats's outward ways and doings during these days when he was growing

to manhood we know nothing directly except from Cowden Clarke, and can

only gather a little more by inference. It is clear that he enjoyed a

certain amount of liberty and holiday, more, perhaps, than would have

fallen to the lot of a more zealous apprentice, and that he spent part

of his free time in London in the society of his brother George, at this

time a clerk in Mr Abbey's counting-house, and of friends to whom George

made him known. Among these were the family of an officer of marines

named Wylie, to whose charming daughter, Georgiana, George Keats a

little later became engaged, and another family of prosperous

tradespeople named Mathew. Here too there were daughters, Caroline and

Ann, who made themselves pleasant to the Keats brothers, and to whom

were addressed the pair of complimentary jingles already mentioned. One

of the sisters, asked in later life for her recollections of the time,

replied in a weariful strain of evangelical penitence for the

frivolities of those days, and found nothing more to the purpose to say

of Keats than this:--'I cannot go further than say I always thought he

had a very beautiful countenance and was very warm and enthusiastic in

his character. He wrote a great deal of poetry at our house but I do not

recollect whether I ever had any of it, I certainly have none now; Ann

had many pieces of his.' A cousin of this family, one George Felton

Mathew, was a youth of sensibility and poetical leanings, and became for

a time an intimate friend of Keats, and next to his brothers and Cowden

Clarke the closest confidant of his studies and ambitions. Their

intimacy began in the Edmonton days and lasted through the earlier

months of his student life in London. Looking back upon their relations

after some thirty years, Mr Felton Mathew, then a supernumerary official

of the Poor Law Board, struggling meekly under the combined strain of a

precarious income, a family of twelve children, and a turn for the

interpretation of prophecy, wrote as follows:--

Keats and I though about the same age, and both inclined to

literature, were in many respects as different as two individuals

could be. He enjoyed 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. But I always delighted in

administering to the happiness of others: and being one of a large

family, it pleased me much to see him and his brother George enjoy

themselves so much at our little domestic concerts and dances.... He

was of the sceptical and republican school. An advocate for the

innovations which were making progress in his time. A faultfinder with

everything established. I, on the contrary, hated controversy and

dispute--dreaded discord and disorder--loved the institutions of my

country.... But I respected Keats' opinions, because they were

sincere--refrained from subjects on which we differed, and only asked

him to concede with me the imperfection of human knowledge, and the

fallibility of human judgment: while he, on his part, would often

express regret on finding that he had given pain or annoyance by

opposing with ridicule or asperity the opinions of others.

Of Keats's physical appearance and poetical preferences the same witness

writes further:--

A painter or a sculptor might have taken him for a study after the

Greek masters, and have given him 'a station like the herald Mercury,

new lighted on some heaven-kissing hill.' His eye admired more the

external decorations than felt the deep emotions of the Muse. He

delighted in leading you through the mazes of elaborate description,

but was less conscious of the sublime and the pathetic. He used to

spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never observed the tears

in his eyes nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme

sensibility. These indeed were not the parts of poetry which he took

pleasure in pointing out.

This last, it should be noted, seems in pretty direct contradiction with

one of Cowden Clarke's liveliest recollections as follows:--'It was a

treat to see as well as hear him read a pathetic passage. Once when

reading _Cymbeline_ aloud, I saw his eyes fill with tears, and his voice

faltered when he came to the departure of Posthumus, and Imogen saying

she would have watched him--

Till the diminution

Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;

Nay follow'd him till _he had melted from

The smallness of a gnat to air_; and then

Have turn'd mine eye and wept.'

Early in the autumn of 1815, a few weeks before his twentieth birthday,

Keats left the service of Mr Hammond, his indentures having apparently

been cancelled by consent, and went to live in London as a student at

the hospitals, then for teaching purposes united, of Guy's and St

Thomas's. What befell him during the eighteen months that followed, and

how his career as a student came to an end, will be told in the next two

chapters.[8]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Between the forms with and without the final 's' there is no hard

and fast line to be drawn, one getting changed into the other either

regularly, by the normal addition of the possessive or patronymic

suffix, or casually, through our mere English habit of phonetic

carelessness and slipshod pronunciation. I learn from a correspondent

belonging to the very numerous St Teath stock, and signing and known

only as Keat, that other members of his family call themselves Keats.

And my friend Mr F. B. Keate, working-man poet and politician of

Bristol, whose forbears came from Tiverton and earlier probably from

St Teath, assures me that he is addressed Keates in speech and

writing as often as not. There are several families in Bristol, most

of them coming from Wilts or (as the famous flogging headmaster of

Eton came) from Somerset, whose names are spelt and spoken Keat or

Keats and Keate or Keates indifferently.

[2] This document, a memorandum written for the information of

Keats's friend and publisher, John Taylor, was sold in London in

1907. I saw and took rough note of it before the sale, meaning to

follow it up afterwards: but circumstances kept me otherwise fully

occupied, and later I found that the buyer, a well known and friendly

bookseller, had unfortunately mislaid it: neither has he since been

able to recover it from among the chronic congestion of his shelves.

[3] Houghton MSS.

[4] Charles Cowden Clarke,_ Recollection of Writers_, 1878.

[5] _Rawlings v. Jennings._

[6] She was buried at St Stephen's, Colman Street, Decr. 19, 1814,

aged 78.

[7] Mistakes have crept into the received statements (my own

included) as to the dates when Keats's apprenticeship began and

ended. The witnesses on whom we have chiefly to depend wrote from

thirty to fifty years after the events they were trying to recall,

and some of them, Cowden Clarke especially, had avowedly no memory

for dates. The accepted date of Keats's leaving school and going as

apprentice to Mr Hammond at Edmonton has hitherto been the autumn of

1810, the end of his fifteenth year. It should have been the late

summer of 1811, well on in his sixteenth, as is proved by the

discovery of a copy of Bonnycastle's _Astronomy_ given him as a prize

at the end of the midsummer term that year (see _Bulletin of the

Keats-Shelley Memorial_, Rome, 1913, p. 23). On the other hand we

have material evidence of his having left by the following year, in

the shape of an Ovid presented to him from the school and inscribed

with a fine writing-master's flourish, 'JOHN KEATS, emer: 1812;'

_emer_, added in a fainter ink, is of course for _emeritus_, a boy

who has left school. This book is in the Dilke collection of Keats

relics at Hampstead, and the inscription has been supposed to be

Keats's own, which it manifestly is not. Another school-book of

Keats's, of five years' earlier date, has lately been presented to

the same collection: this is the French-English grammar of

Duverger,--inscribed in much the same calligraphy with his name and

the date 1807. He must have studied it to some purpose, if we may

judge by the good reading knowledge of French which he clearly

possessed when he was grown up.

[8] Surmise, partly founded on the vague recollections of former

fellow-students, has hitherto dated this step a year earlier, in the

autumn of 1814. But the publication of the documents relating to

Keats from the books of the hospital show that this is an error. He

was not entered as a student at Guy's till October 1, 1815. If he had

moved to London, as has been supposed, a year earlier, he would have

had nothing to do there, nor is it the least likely that his guardian

would have permitted such removal. That he came straight from Mr

Hammond's to Guy's, without any intermediate period of study

elsewhere, is certain both from a note to that effect against the

entry of his name in the hospital books, and from the explicit

statement of his fellow-student and sometime housemate, Mr Henry

Stephens. It results that the period of his life as hospital student

in a succession of London lodgings must be cut down from the supposed

two years and a half, October 1814-April 1817, to one year and a

half, Oct. 1815-April 1817. There is no difficulty about this, and I

think that both as to his leaving school and his going to London the

facts and dates set forth in the present chapter may be taken as well

established.

CHAPTER II

OCTOBER 1815-MARCH 1817: HOSPITAL STUDIES: POETICAL AMBITIONS: LEIGH

HUNT

Hospital days: summary--Aptitudes and ambitions--Teachers--Testimony

of Henry Stephens--Pride and other characteristics--Evidences of a

wandering mind--Services of Cowden Clarke--Introduction to Leigh

Hunt--Summer walks at Hampstead--Holiday epistles from Margate--Return

to London--First reading of Chapman's Homer--Date of the Chapman

sonnet--Intimacy with Leigh Hunt--The _Examiner_: Hunt's

imprisonment--His visitors in captivity--His occupations--_The Feast

of the poets_--Hunt's personality and charm--His ideas of poetical

reform--_The story of Rimini_--Its popularity--Dante and

namby-pamby--Hunt's life at Hampstead--Hunt and Keats compared--Keats

at Hunt's cottage--Prints in the library--The intercoronation

scene--Sonnets of Hunt to Keats--Sonnets of Keats to Hunt--Keats's

penitence.

The external and technical facts of Keats's life as a medical student

are these. His name, as we have said, was entered at Guy's as a six

months' student (surgeon's pupil) on October 1, 1815, a month before his

twentieth birthday. Four weeks later he was appointed dresser to one of

the hospital surgeons, Mr Lucas. At the close of his first six months'

term, March 3, 1816, he entered for a further term of twelve months. On

July 25, 1816, he presented himself for examination before the Court of

Apothecaries and obtained their licence to practise. He continued to

attend lectures and live the regular life of a student; but early in the

spring of 1817, being now of age and on the eve of publishing his first

volume of verse, he determined to abandon the pursuit of medicine for

that of poetry, declared his intention to his guardian, and ceased

attending the hospitals without seeking or receiving the usual

certificate of proficiency. For the first two or three months of this

period, from the beginning of October 1815 till about the new year of

1816, Keats lodged alone at 8 Dean Street, Borough, and then for half a

year or more with several other students over the shop of a tallow

chandler named Markham[1] in St Thomas's Street. Thence, in the summer

or early autumn of 1816, leaving the near neighbourhood of the

hospitals, he went to join his brothers in rooms in The Poultry, over a

passage leading to the Queen's Head Tavern. Finally, early in 1817, they

all three moved for a short time to 76 Cheapside. For filling up this

skeleton record, we have some traditions of the hospital concerning

Keats's teachers, some recollections of fellow students,--of one, Mr

Henry Stephens, in particular,--together with further reminiscences by

Cowden Clarke and impressions recorded in after years by one and another

of a circle of acquaintances which fast expanded. Moreover Keats begins

during this period to tell something of his own story, in the form of a

few poems of a personal tenor and a very few letters written to and

preserved by his friends.

As to his hospital work, it is clear that though his heart was not in it

and his thoughts were prone to wander, and though he held and declared

that poetry was the only thing worth living for, yet when he chose he

could bend his mind and will to the tasks before him. The operations

which as dresser he performed or assisted in are said to have proved him

no fumbler. When he went up for examination before the Court of

Apothecaries he passed with ease and credit, somewhat to the surprise of

his fellow students, who put his success down to his knowledge of Latin

rather than of medicine. Later, after he had abandoned the profession,

he was always ready to speak or act with a certain authority in cases of

illness or emergency, and though hating the notion of practice

evidently did not feel himself unqualified for it so far as knowledge

went. He could not find in the scientific part of the study a satisfying

occupation for his thoughts; and though a few years later, when he had

realized that there is no kind of knowledge but may help to nourish a

poet's mind, he felt unwilling to lose hold of what he had learned as

apprentice and student, he was never caught by that special passion of

philosophical curiosity which laid hold for a season on Coleridge and

Shelley successively, and drew them powerfully towards the study of the

mechanism and mysteries of the human frame. The practical

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.

Once when Cowden Clarke asked him about his prospects and feelings in

regard to his profession, he frankly declared his own sense of his

unfitness for it; with reasons such as this, that 'the other day, during

the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole

troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to

Oberon and fairy-land.' 'My last operation,' he once told another

friend, 'was the opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it with the

utmost nicety, but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the

time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the lancet

again.'

The surgeon to whom he was specially assigned as pupil, Mr Lucas, seems

to have had few qualifications as a teacher. We have the following

lively character of him from a man afterwards highly honoured in the

profession, John Flint South, who walked the hospitals at the same time

as Keats:--'A tall ungainly awkward man, with stooping shoulders and a

shuffling walk, as deaf as a post, not overburdened with brains, but

very good natured and easy, and liked by everyone. His surgical

acquirements were very small, his operations generally very badly

performed, and accompanied with much bungling, if not worse.' But the

teacher from whom Keats will really, as all witnesses agree, have

learnt the best of what he knew was the great dissector and anatomist,

Astley Cooper, then almost in the zenith of his power as a lecturer and

of his popular fame and practice. He is described as one of the

handsomest and most ingratiating of men, as well as one of the most

indefatigable and energetic, with an admirable gift of exposition made

racy by a strong East Anglian accent; and it is on record that he took

an interest in young Keats, and recommended him to the special care of

his own dresser and namesake, George Cooper. It was in consequence of

this recommendation that Keats left his solitary lodging in Dean Street

and went to live as housemate in St Thomas's Street with three other

students, the aforesaid George Cooper, one George Wilson Mackereth, and

Henry Stephens, the last-named afterwards a surgeon in good repute as

well as a dabbler in dramatic literature. It is from Stephens that we

get much the fullest picture of Keats in these student days. I give the

pith of his reminiscences, partly as quoted from his conversation by an

intimate friend in the same profession, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson,[2]

partly as written down by himself for Lord Houghton's information in

1847.[3]

Whether it was in the latter part of the year 1815 or the early part

of the year 1816 that my acquaintance with John Keats commenced I

cannot say. We were both students at the united hospitals of St

Thomas's and Guy's, and we had apartments in a house in St Thomas's

Street, kept by a decent respectable woman of the name of Mitchell I

think. [After naming his other fellow students, the witness goes

on]--John Keats being alone, and to avoid the expense of having a

sitting room to himself, asked to join us, which we readily acceded

to. We were therefore constant companions, and the following is what I

recollect of his previous history from conversation with him. Of his

parentage I know nothing, for upon that subject I never remember his

speaking, I think he was an orphan. He had been apprenticed to a Mr

Hammond surgeon of Southgate from whence he came on the completion of

his time to the hospitals. His passion, if I may so call it, for

poetry was soon manifested. He attended lectures and went through the

usual routine but he had no desire to excel in that pursuit.... He was

called by his fellow students 'little Keats,' being at his full growth

no more than five feet high.... In a room, he was always at the

window, peering into space, so that the window-seat was spoken of by

his comrades as Keats's place.... In the lecture room he seemed to sit

apart and to be absorbed in something else, as if the subject

suggested thoughts to him which were not practically connected with

it. He was often in the subject and out of it, in a dreamy way.

He never attached much consequence to his own studies in medicine, and

indeed looked upon the medical career as the career by which to live

in a workaday world, without being certain that he could keep up the

strain of it. He nevertheless had a consciousness of his own powers,

and even of his own greatness, though it might never be recognised....

Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his aspirations: the only

thing worthy the attention of superior minds: so he thought: all other

pursuits were mean and tame. He had no idea of fame or greatness but

as it was connected with the pursuits of poetry, or the attainment of

poetical excellence. The greatest men in the world were the poets and

to rank among them was the chief object of his ambition. It may

readily be imagined that this feeling was accompanied with a good deal

of pride and conceit, and that amongst mere medical students he would

walk and talk as one of the Gods might be supposed to do when mingling

with mortals. This pride exposed him, as may be readily imagined, to

occasional ridicule, and some mortification.

Having a taste and liking for poetry myself, though at that time but

little cultivated, he regarded me as something a little superior to

the rest, and would gratify himself frequently by showing me some

lines of his writing, or some new idea which he had struck out. We had

frequent conversation on the merits of particular poets, but our

tastes did not agree. He was a great admirer of Spenser, his _Faerie

Queene_ was a great favourite with him. Byron was also in favour, Pope

he maintained was no poet, only a versifier. He was fond of imagery,

the most trifling similes appeared to please him. Sometimes I ventured

to show him some lines which I had written, but I always had the

mortification of hearing them condemned, indeed he seemed to think it

presumption in me to attempt to tread along the same pathway as

himself at however humble a distance.

He had two brothers, who visited him frequently, and they worshipped

him. They seemed to think their brother John was to be exalted, and

to exalt the family name. I remember a student from St Bartholomew's

Hospital who came often to see him, as they had formerly been

intimate, but though old friends they did not cordially agree.

Newmarsh or Newmarch (I forget which was his name) was a classical

scholar, as was Keats, and therefore they scanned freely the

respective merits of the Poets of Greece and Rome. Whenever Keats

showed Newmarch any of his poetry it was sure to be ridiculed and

severely handled.

Newmarch was a light-hearted and merry fellow, but I thought he was

rather too fond of mortifying Keats, but more particularly his

brothers, as their praise of their brother John amounted almost to

idolatry, and Newmarch and they frequently quarrelled. Whilst

attending lectures he would sit and instead of copying out the

lecture, would often scribble some doggrel rhymes among the notes of

Lecture, particularly if he got hold of another student's syllabus. In

my syllabus of chemical lectures he scribbled many lines on the paper

cover. This cover has been long torn off, except one small piece on

which is the following fragment of doggrel rhyme:--

Give me women, wine and snuff

Until I cry out, 'hold! enough'

You may do so, sans objection

Until the day of resurrection.

This is all that remains, and is the only piece of his writing which

is now in my possession. He was gentlemanly in his manners and when he

condescended to talk upon other subjects he was agreeable and

intelligent. He was quick and apt at learning, when he chose to give

his attention to any subject. He was a steady quiet and well behaved

person, never inclined to pursuits of a low or vicious character.

The last words need to be read in the light of the convivial snatch of

verse quoted just above. Keats in these days was no rake, indeed, but

neither was he a puritan: his passions were strong in proportion to the

general intensity of his being: and his ardent absorption in poetry and

study did not save him from the risks and slips incident to appetite and

hot blood.

Another fellow student relates:--'even in the lecture room of St

Thomas's I have seen Keats in a deep poetic dream; his mind was on

Parnassus with the Muses. And here is a quaint fragment which he one

evening scribbled in our presence, while the precepts of Sir Astley

Cooper fell unheeded on his ear.' The fragment tells how Alexander the

Great saw and loved a lady of surpassing beauty on his march through

India, and reads like the beginning of an attempt to tell the story of

the old French _Lai d'Aristote_ in the style and spelling of an

early-printed English prose romance,--possibly the _Morte d'Arthure_.

Into his would-be archaic prose, luxuriantly describing the lady's

beauty, Keats works in tags taken direct from Spenser and Shakespeare

and Milton, all three. He no doubt knew this favourite mediaeval

tale--that of the Indian damsel whose charms enslaved first Alexander in

the midst of his conquests and then his tutor Aristotle--either in the

eighteenth-century prose version of Le Grand or the recent English verse

translation by G. L. Way, who turns the tale in couplets of this

style:--

At the first glance all dreams of conquest fade

And his first thought is of his Indian maid.

I cannot but think the Indian maiden of this story must have been still

lingering in Keats's imagination when he devised the episode of that

other Indian maiden in the fourth book of _Endymion_.[4]

Besides these records, we have an actual tangible relic to show how

Keats's attention in the lecture room was now fixed and now wandered, in

the shape of a notebook in which some other student has begun to put

down anatomy notes and Keats has followed. Beginning from both ends, he

has made notes of an anatomical and also of a surgical course, which are

not those of a lax or inaccurate student, but full and close as far as

they go; only squeezed into the margins of one or two pages there are

signs of flagging attention in the shape of sketches, rather prettily

touched, of a pansy and other flowers.[5]

After the first weeks of autumn gloom spent in solitary lodgings in the

dingiest part of London, Keats expresses, in a rimed epistle to Felton

Mathew, the fear lest his present studies and surroundings should stifle

the poetic faculty in him altogether. About the same time he takes pains

to get into touch again with Cowden Clarke, who had by this time left

Enfield and was living with a brother-in-law in Clerkenwell. In a letter

unluckily not dated, but certainly belonging to these first autumn weeks

in London, Keats writes to Clarke:--'Although the Borough is a beastly

place in dirt, turnings, and 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 right, and, moreover, knock at my door,

which is nearly opposite a meeting, you would do me a charity, which, as

St Paul saith, is the father of all the virtues. At all events, let me

hear from you soon: I say, at all events, not excepting the gout in your

fingers.' Clarke seems to have complied promptly with this petition, and

before many months their renewed intercourse had momentous consequences.

Keats's fear that the springs of poetry would dry up in him was not

fulfilled, and he kept trying his prentice hand in various modes of

verse. Some of the sonnets recorded to have belonged to the year 1815,

as _Woman, when I behold thee, Happy is England_, may have been written

in London at the close of that year: a number of others, showing a

gradually strengthening touch, belong, we know, to the spring and early

summer of the next. For his brother George to send to his _fiancee_,

Miss Georgiana Wylie, on Valentine's day, Feb. 14, 1816, he wrote the

pleasant set of heptasyllabics beginning 'Hadst thou lived in days of

old.' In the same month was published Leigh Hunt's poem _The Story of

Rimini_, and by this, working together with his rooted enthusiasm for

Spenser, Keats was immediately inspired to begin an attempt at a

chivalrous romance of his own, _Calidore_; which went no farther than an

Induction and some hundred and fifty opening lines.

Cowden Clarke had kept up his acquaintance with Leigh Hunt, and was in

the habit of going up to visit him at the cottage where he was now

living at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health. Some time in the late spring

of 1816 Clarke made known to Hunt first some of Keats's efforts in

poetry and then Keats himself. Both Clarke and Hunt have told the story,

both writing at a considerable, and Clarke at a very long, interval

after the event. In their main substance the two accounts agree, but

both are in some points confused, telescoping together, as memory is apt

to do, circumstances really separated by an interval of months. One firm

fact we have to start with,--that Hunt printed in his paper, the

_Examiner_, for May 5th, 1816, Keats's sonnet, _O Solitude, if I with

thee must dwell_. This was Keats's first appearance in print, and a

decisive circumstance in his life. Clarke, it appears, had taken up the

'Solitude' sonnet and a few other manuscript verses of Keats to submit

to Leigh Hunt for his opinion,[6] and had every reason to be gratified

at the result. Here is his story of what happened.

I took with me two or three of the poems I had received from Keats. I

could not but anticipate that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and

indeed approvingly, of the compositions--written, too, by a youth

under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating

and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty

lines of the first poem. Horace Smith happened to be there on the

occasion, and he was not less demonstrative in his appreciation of

their merits.... After making numerous and eager inquiries about him

personally, and with reference to any peculiarities of mind and

manner, the visit ended in my being requested to bring him over to the

Vale of Health.

That was a 'red-letter day' in the young poet's life, and one which

will never fade with me while memory lasts. The character and

expression of Keats's features would arrest even the casual passenger

in the street; and now they were wrought to a tone of animation that I

could not but watch with interest, knowing what was in store for him

from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention,

with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to encounter

and receive. As we approached the Heath, there was the rising and

accelerated step, with the gradual subsidence of all talk. The

interview, which stretched into three 'morning calls,' was the prelude

to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its

neighbourhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the

household, and was always welcomed.

In connexion with this, take Hunt's own account of the matter, as given

about ten years after the event in his volume, _Lord Byron and his

Contemporaries_:

To Mr Clarke I was indebted for my acquaintance with him. I shall

never forget the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of

genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise

of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We

became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet's heart as

warm as his imagination. We read and walked together, and used to

write verses of an evening on a given subject. No imaginative pleasure

was left unnoticed by us, or unenjoyed, from the recollections of the

bards and patriots of old to the luxury of a summer's rain at our

window or the clicking of the coal in winter-time.

Some inquirers, in interpreting these accounts, have judged that the

personal introduction did not take place in the spring or early summer

at all, but only after Keats's return from his holiday at the end of

September. I think it is quite clear, on the contrary, that Clarke had

taken Keats up to Hampstead by the end of May or some time in June.

Unmistakeable impressions of summer strolls there occur in his poetry of

the next few months. The 'happy fields' where he had been rambling when

he wrote the sonnet to Charles Wells on June the 29th were almost

certainly the fields of Hampstead, and there is no reason to doubt

Hunt's statement that the 'little hill' from which Keats drank the

summer view and air, as told at the opening of his poem _I stood

tiptoe_, was one of the swells of ground towards the Caen wood side of

the Heath. At the same time it would seem that their intercourse in

these first weeks did not extend beyond a few walks and talks, and that

it was not until after Keats's return from his summer holiday that the

acquaintance ripened into the close and delighted intimacy which we find

subsisting by the autumn.

For part of August and September he had been away at Margate, apparently

alone. A couple of rimed epistles addressed during this holiday to his

brother George and to Cowden Clarke breathe just such a heightened joy

of life and happiness of anticipation as would be natural in one who had

lately felt the first glow of new and inspiriting personal sympathies.

To George, besides the epistle, he addressed a pleasant sonnet on the

wonders he has seen, the sea, the sunsets, and the world of poetic

glories and mysteries vaguely evoked by them in his mind. The epistle to

George is dated August: that to Cowden Clarke followed in September. In

it he explains, in a well-conditioned and affectionate spirit of

youthful modesty, why he has hitherto been shy of addressing any of his

own attempts in verse to a friend so familiar with the work of the

masters; and takes occasion, in a heartfelt passage of autobiography, to

declare all he has owed to that friend's guidance and encouragement.

Thus have I thought; and days on days have flown

Slowly, or rapidly--unwilling still

For you to try my dull, unlearned quill.

Nor should I now, but that I've known you long;

That you first taught me all the sweets of song:

The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine;

What swell'd with pathos, and what right divine:

Spenserian vowels that elope with ease,

And float along like birds o'er summer seas;

Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness,

Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve's fair slenderness.

Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly

Up to its climax and then dying proudly?

Who found for me the grandeur of the ode,

Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load?

Who let me taste that more than cordial dram,

The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram?

Show'd me that epic was of all the king,

Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn's ring?

You too upheld the veil from Clio's beauty,

And pointed out the patriot's stern duty;

The might of Alfred, and the shaft of Tell;

The hand of Brutus, that so grandly fell

Upon a tyrant's head. Ah! had I never seen,

Or known your kindness, what might I have been?

What my enjoyments in my youthful years,

Bereft of all that now my life endears?

And can I e'er these benefits forget?

And can I e'er repay the friendly debt?

No doubly no;--yet should these rhymings please,

I shall roll on the grass with two-fold ease:

For I have long time been my fancy feeding

With hopes that you would one day think the reading

Of my rough verses not an hour misspent;

Should it e'er be so, what a rich content!

Some of these lines are merely feeble and boyish, but some show a fast

ripening, nay an almost fully ripened, critical feeling for the poetry

of the past. The couplet about Spenser's vowels could scarcely be

happier, and the next on Milton anticipates, though without at all

approaching in craftsmanship, the 'Me rather all that bowery loneliness'

of Tennyson's famous alcaic stanzas to the same effect.

Coming back from the seaside about the end of September to take up his

quarters with his brothers in their lodging in the Poultry, Keats was

soon to be indebted to Clarke for another and invaluable literary

stimulus: I mean his first knowledge of Chapman's translation of Homer.

This experience, as every reader knows, was instantly celebrated by him

in a sonnet, classical now almost to triteness, which is his first high

achievement, and one of the masterpieces of our language in this form.

The question of its exact date has been much discussed: needlessly,

seeing that Keats himself signed and dated it in full, when it was

printed in the _Examiner_ for the first of December following, 'Oct^r

1816, JOHN KEATS.' The doubts expressed have been due partly to the

overlooking of this fact and partly to a mistake in Cowden Clarke's

account of the matter written many years later. After quoting Keats's

invitation of October 1815 to come and find him at his lodging in the

Borough, Clarke goes on:--

This letter having no date but the week's day, and no postmark,

preceded our first symposium; and a memorable night it was in my

life's career. A beautiful copy of the folio edition of Chapman's

translation of _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....

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 the Senator Antenor's vivid portrait of an orator in Ulysses,

beginning at the 237th line of the third book:--

But when the prudent Ithacus did to his counsels rise,

He stood a little still, and fix'd upon the earth his eyes,

His sceptre moving neither way, but held it formally,

Like one that vainly doth affect. Of wrathful quality,

And frantic (rashly judging), you would have said he was;

But when out of his ample breast he gave his great voice pass,

And words that flew about our ears like drifts of winter's snow,

None thenceforth might contend with him, though naught admired for

show.

The shield and helmet of Diomed, with the accompanying simile, in the

opening of the third book; and the prodigious description of Neptune's

passage to the Achive ships, in the thirteenth book:--

The woods and all the great hills near trembled beneath the weight

Of his immortal-moving feet. Three steps he only took,

Before he far-off AEgas reach'd, but with the fourth, it shook

With his dread entry.

One scene I could not fail to introduce to him--the shipwreck of

Ulysses, in the fifth book of the _Odysseis_, and I had the reward of

one of his delighted stares, upon reading the following lines:--

Then forth he came, his both knees falt'ring, both

His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth

His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath

Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.

_The sea had soak'd his heart through_; all his veins

His toils had rack'd t'a labouring woman's pains.

Dead-weary was he.

On an after-occasion I showed him the couplet, in Pope's translation,

upon the same passage:--

From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran,

And _lost in lassitude lay all the man_. (!!!)

Chapman supplied us with many an after-treat; but it was in the

teeming wonderment of this his first introduction, that, when I came

down to breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter

with no other enclosure than his famous sonnet, _On First Looking into

Chapman's Homer_. We had parted, as I have already said, at

day-spring, yet he contrived that I should receive the poem from a

distance of, may be, two miles by ten o'clock.

The whole of the above is a typical case of what I have called the

telescoping action of memory. Recollections not of one, but of many,

Homer readings are here compressed into a couple of paragraphs. They

will have been readings carried on at intervals through the autumn and

winter of 1816-17: an inspiring addition to the other intellectual gains

and pleasures which fell to Keats's lot during those months. There is no

reason to doubt the exactness of Clarke's account of the first night the

friends spent together over Chapman and its result in the shape of the

sonnet which lay on his table the next morning. His error is in

remembering these circumstances as having happened when he and Keats

first foregathered in London in the autumn of 1815, whereas Keats's

positive evidence above quoted shows that they did not really happen

until a year later, after his return from his summer holiday in 1816.[7]

Before printing the Chapman sonnet, Leigh Hunt had the satisfaction of

hearing his own opinion of it and of some other manuscript poems of

Keats confirmed by good judges. I quote his words for the sake of the

excellent concluding phrase. 'Not long afterwards, having the pleasure

of entertaining at dinner Mr Godwin, Mr Hazlitt, and Mr Basil Montague,

I showed them the verses of my young friend, and they were pronounced to

be as extraordinary as I thought them. One of them was that noble sonnet

on first reading Chapman's _Homer_, which terminates with so energetic a

calmness, and which completely announced the new poet taking

possession.' But by this time Keats had become an established intimate

in the Leigh Hunt household, and was constantly backwards and forwards

between London and the Hampstead cottage.

This intimacy was really the opening of a new chapter both in his

intellectual and social life. At first it was a source of unmixed

encouragement and pleasure, but seeing that it carried with it in the

sequel disadvantages and penalties which gravely affected Keats's

career, it is necessary that we should fix clearly in our mind Hunt's

previous history and the place held by him in the literary and political

life of the time. He was Keats's senior by eleven years: the son of an

eloquent and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable

preacher, sprung from a family long settled in Barbadoes, who having

married a lady from Philadelphia had migrated to England and exercised

his vocation in the northern suburbs of London. Brought up at Christ's

Hospital about a dozen years later than Lamb and Coleridge, Leigh Hunt

gained at sixteen a measure of precocious literary reputation with a

volume of juvenile poems which gave evidence of great fluency and, for a

boy, of wide and eager reading. A few years later he came into notice as

a theatrical critic, being then a clerk in the War Office: an occupation

which he abandoned at twenty-four (in 1808) in order to take part in the

conduct of the _Examiner_ newspaper, then just founded by his brother

John Hunt. For nearly five years the brothers Hunt, as manager and

editor of that journal, helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism,

in those days of tense grapple with the Corsican ogre abroad and stiff

re-action and repression at home, with a dexterous brisk audacity and an

unflinching sincerity of conviction. So far they had escaped the usual

penalty of such courage. Several prosecutions directed against them

failed, but at last, late in 1812, they were caught tripping. To go as

far as was safely possible in satire of the follies and vices of the

Prince Regent was a tempting exercise to the reforming spirits of the

time. Provoked by the grovelling excesses of some of the Prince's

flatterers, the _Examiner_ at last broke bounds and denounced him as 'a

violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a

despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man

who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the

gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.' This attack

followed within a few weeks of another almost as stinging contributed

anonymously by Charles Lamb. Under the circumstances the result of a

prosecution could not be doubtful: and the two Hunts were condemned to a

fine of L500 each and two years imprisonment in separate jails. Leigh

Hunt bore himself in his captivity with cheerful fortitude, suffering

severely in health but flagging little in spirits or industry. He

decorated his apartment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol with a rose-trellis

paper and a ceiling to imitate a summer sky, so that it looked, said

Charles Lamb, like a room in a fairy tale, and spent money which he had

not got in converting its backyard into a garden of shrubs and flowers.

Very early in life Hunt had been received into a family called Kent at

the instance of an elder daughter who greatly admired him. Not long

afterwards he engaged himself to her younger sister, then almost a

child, and married her soon after the _Examiner_ was started. She proved

a prolific, thriftless woman and ill housekeeper, but through all the

rubs and pinches of his after years he was ever an affectionate husband

and father. His wife was allowed to be with him in prison, and there

they received the visits of many friends old and new. Liberal statesmen,

philosophers, and writers, including characters so divers as Bentham and

Byron, Brougham and Hazlitt, James Mill and Miss Edgeworth, Tom Moore

and Wilkie the painter, pressed to offer this victim of political

persecution their sympathy and society. Charles Lamb and his sister were

the most constant of all his visitors. Tom Moore, who both before and

after the sentence on the brothers Hunt managed in his series of verse

skits, _The Twopenny Post Bag_, to go on playing with impunity the game

of Prince-Regent-baiting,--the light-hearted Tom Moore joined in deepest

earnest the chorus of sympathy with the prisoners:--

Yet go--for thoughts as blessed as the air

Of Spring or Summer flowers await you there:

Thoughts such as He, who feasts his courtly crew

In rich conservatories, _never_ knew;

Pure self-esteem--the smiles that light within--

The Zeal, whose circling charities begin

With the few lov'd ones Heaven has plac'd it near,

And spread, till all Mankind are in its sphere;

The Pride, that suffers without vaunt or plea,

And the fresh Spirit, that can warble free,

Through prison-bars, its hymn to Liberty!

Among ardent young men who brought their tributes was Cowden Clarke with

a basket of fruit and flowers from his father's garden; and this was

followed up by a weekly offering in the same kind. 'Libertas, the loved

Libertas,' was the name found for Hunt by such fond young spirits and

adopted by Keats.

During his captivity Hunt was allowed the full use of his library, and

his chief reading was in the fifty volumes of the _Parnaso Italiano_. As

a result he acquired and retained for life a really wide and familiar

knowledge of Italian poetry. He continued to edit the _Examiner_ from

prison and occupied himself moreover with three small volumes in verse.

One of these was _The Descent of Liberty, A Mask_, celebrating the

downfall of Napoleon in 1814, and embodying gracefully enough the

Liberal's hope against hope that with that catastrophe there might

return to Europe not only peace but freedom. (We have told already how

Keats at Edmonton tried his boyish hand at a sonnet on the same occasion

and to the same purpose.) Another of his prison tasks was the writing of

his poem, _The Story of Rimini_; a third, the recasting and annotating

of his _Feast of the Poets_, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse

first printed two years before and modelled on the precedent of several

rimed skits of the Caroline age such as Suckling's _Session of the

Poets_ and the Duke of Buckinghamshire's _Election of a Poet Laureate_.

It represented Apollo as convoking the contemporary British poets, or

pretenders to the poetical title, to a session, or rather to a supper.

Some of those who present themselves the god rejects with scorn, others

he cordially welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. In

revising this skit while he was in prison, Hunt modified some of his

earlier verdicts, but in the main he let them stand. Moore and Campbell

fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof;

Coleridge and Wordsworth admonished (but Wordsworth in much more lenient

terms than in the first edition) and dismissed. Hunt's notes are of

still living interest as setting forth, at that pregnant moment of our

literary history, the considered judgments of a kindly and accomplished

critic on his contemporaries. Seen at a distance of a hundred years

they look short-sighted enough, as almost all contemporary judgments

must, and are coloured as a matter of course with party feeling, though

not so grossly as was the habit of the hour. Since Coleridge, Southey

and Wordsworth had been transformed, first by the Terror and then by the

aggressions of Bonaparte, from ardent revolutionary idealists into

vehement partisans of reaction both at home and abroad, the bitterness

of the 'Lost Leader' feeling, common to all liberals, accounts for much

of Hunt's disparagement of them; while besides sharing the prejudice of

his party in general against Scott as a known high Tory and friend to

kings, he had ignorantly and peevishly conceived a special grudge

against that great generous and chivalrous spirit on account of his

lenient handling of Charles II in his _Life of Dryden_. Hunt in his new

notes fully acknowledged the genius, while he condemned the defection

and also what he thought the poetical perversities, of Wordsworth; but

his treatment of Scott, as little more than a mere money-making

manufacturer of pinchbeck northern lays in a sham antique ballad

dialect, is idly flippant and patronizing. The point is of importance in

Keats's history, for hence, as we shall see in the sequel, came probably

a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem paradoxical rancour

with which the genial Hunt, and Keats as his friend and supposed

follower, were by-and-by to be persecuted in Blackwood.

When Hunt's ordeal was over in the first days of February 1815, he

issued from it a butt for savage and vindictive obloquy to the

reactionary half of the lettered world, but little less than a hero and

martyr to the reforming half. He retained the private friendship of many

of those who had sought him out from public sympathy. Tall, straight,

slender, charmingly courteous and vivacious, with glossy black hair,

bright jet-black eyes, full, relishing nether lip, and 'nose of taste,'

Leigh Hunt was one of the most winning of companions, full of kindly

smiles and jests, of reading, gaiety, and ideas, with an infinity of

pleasant things to say of his own and a beautiful caressing voice to say

them in, yet the most sympathetic and deferential of listeners. To the

misfortune of himself and his friends, he had no notion of even

attempting to balance income and expenditure, and was perfectly

light-hearted in the matter of money obligations, which he shrank

neither from receiving nor conferring,--only circumstances made him

almost invariably a receiver. But men of sterner fibre and better able

to order their affairs have often been much more ready than he was to

sacrifice conviction to advantage, and his friends found more to admire

in his smiling steadfastness under obloquy and persecution than to blame

in his chronic incapacity to pay his way. Hardly anyone had warmer

well-wishers or requited them, so far as the depth of his nature went,

with truer loyalty and kindness. His industry as a writer was incessant,

hardly less than that of Southey himself. The titles he gave to the

several journals he conducted, _The Examiner_, _The Reflector_, _The

Indicator_, define accurately enough his true vocation as a guide to the

pleasures of literature. His manner in criticism has at its best an easy

penetration, and flowing unobtrusive felicity, most remote from those

faults to which De Quincey and even the illustrious Coleridge, with

their more philosophic powers and method, were subject, the faults of

roundaboutness and over-laboured profundity.

[Illustration: PL. II

JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY MAYER AFTER J. HAYTER]

The weakness of Leigh Hunt's style is of an opposite kind. 'Matchless,'

according to Lamb's well-known phrase, 'as a fire-side companion,' it

was his misfortune to carry too much of a fire-side or parlour tone, and

sometimes, it must be owned, a very second-rate parlour tone, into

literature. He could not walk by the advice of Polonius, and in aiming

at the familiar was apt, rarely in prose but sadly often in verse, to

slip into an underbred strain of airy and genteel vulgarity, hard to

reconcile with what we are told of his acceptable social qualities in

real life.[8] He was as enthusiastic a student of our sixteenth and

seventeenth century literature as Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had

more appreciation than they of the characteristic excellencies of what

he always persists in calling the 'French school,' the school of

polished artifice and convention which came in after Dryden and swore by

the precepts of Boileau, he was not less bent on seeing it overthrown.

In English poetry his predilection was for the older writers from

Chaucer to Dryden, and above all others for Spenser: in Italian for

Boiardo, Ariosto, Pulci and the later writers of the chivalrous-fanciful

epic style. He insisted that such writers were much better models for

English poets to follow than the French, and fought as hard as anyone

for the return of English poetry from the urbane conventions of the

eighteenth century to the paths of nature and of freedom. But he had his

own conception of the manner in which this return should be effected. He

did not admit that Wordsworth with his rustic simplicities and his

recluse philosophy had solved the problem. 'It was his intention,' he

wrote in prison, 'by the beginning of next year to bring out a piece of

some length ... in which he would attempt to reduce to practice his own

ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various and legitimate

harmony of the English heroic.' The result of this intention was the

_Story of Rimini_, begun before his prosecution and 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

having a free and idiomatic cast of language.'

We shall have to consider Hunt's effort to revive the old freedom of the

English heroic metre when we come to the study of Keats's first volume,

written much under Hunt's influence. As to his success with his 'ideas

of what is natural in style,' and his free and idiomatic--or as he

elsewhere says 'unaffected, contemporaneous'--cast of language to

supersede the styles alike of Pope and Wordsworth, let us take a sample

of _Rimini_ at its best and worst. Relating the gradual obsession of

Paolo's thoughts by the charm of his sister-in-law,--

And she became companion of his thought;

Silence her gentleness before him brought,

Society her sense, reading her books,

Music her voice, every sweet thing her looks,

Which sometimes seemed, when he sat fixed awhile,

To steal beneath his eyes with upward smile;

And did he stroll into some lonely place,

Under the trees, upon the thick soft grass,

How charming, would he think, to see her here!

How heightened then, and perfect would appear

The two divinest things this world has got,

A lovely woman in a rural spot!

The first few lines are skilfully modulated, and in an ordinary domestic

theme might be palatable enough; but what a couplet, good heavens! for

the last. At the climax, Hunt's version of Dante is an example of

milk-and-water in conditions where milk-and-water is sheer poison:--

As thus they sat, and felt with leaps of heart

Their colour change, they came upon the part

Where fond Genevra, with her flame long nurst,

Smiled upon Launcelot when he kissed her first:--

That touch, at last, through every fibre slid;

And Paulo turned, scarce knowing what he did,

Only he felt he could no more dissemble,

And kissed her, mouth to mouth, all in a tremble.

The taste, we see, which guided Hunt so well in appreciating the work of

others could betray him terribly in original composition. The passages

of light narrative in _Rimini_ are often vivacious and pleasant enough,

those of nature description genuinely if not profoundly felt, and

written with an eye on the object: but they are the only tolerable

things in the poem. Hunt's idea of a true poetical style was to avoid

everything strained, stilted, and conventional, and to lighten the

stress of his theme with familiar graces and pleasantries in the manner

of his beloved Ariosto. But he did not realize that while any style,

from that of the _Book of Job_ to that of Wordsworth's _Idiot Boy_, may

become poetical if only there is strength and intensity of feeling

behind it, nothing but the finest social instinct and tradition can

impart the tact for such light conversational graces as he attempted,

and that to treat a theme of high tragic passion in the tone and

vocabulary of a suburban tea-party is intolerable. Contemporaries,

welcoming as a relief any change from the stale conventions and

tarnished glitter of eighteenth century poetic rhythm and diction, and

perhaps sated for the moment with the rush and thrill of new romantic

and exotic sensation they had owed in recent years, first to Scott's

metrical tales of the Border and the Highlands, then to Byron's of

Greece and the Levant,--contemporaries found something fresh and

homefelt in Leigh Hunt's _Rimini_, and sentimental ladies and gentlemen

wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine as though they had been

their own. No less a person than Byron, to whom the poem was dedicated,

writes to Moore:--'Leigh Hunt's poem is a devilish good one--quaint here

and there, but with the substratum of originality, and with poetry about

it that will stand the test. I do not say this because he has inscribed

it to me.' And to Leigh Hunt himself Byron reports praise of the poem

from Sir Henry Englefield the dilettante, 'a mighty man in the blue

circles, and a very clever man anywhere,' from Hookham Frere 'and all

the arch _literati_,' and says how he had left his own sister and cousin

'in fixed and delighted perusal of it.' Byron's admiration cooled

greatly in the sequel, with or even before the cooling of his regard

for the author. But it is an instructive comment on standards of taste

and their instability that cultivated readers should at any time have

endured to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca--Dante's Paolo and

Francesca--diluted through four cantos in a style like that of the above

quotations. When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer

poetical gifts and instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the

attempt to add a familiar ease of manner to variety of movement in this

metre, Shelley, it need not be said, was in no danger of falling into

Hunt's faults of triviality and under-breeding: but Keats was only too

apt to be betrayed into them.

Hunt had spent the first months after his release in London, but by the

end of 1815, some time before the publication of _Rimini_, had settled

at Hampstead, where he soon made himself a sort of self-crowned laureate

of the beauties of the place, and continued to vary his critical and

political labours with gossiping complimentary verses to his friends in

the form both of sonnet and epistle. The gravest of the epistles is one

addressed in a spirit of good-hearted loyalty to Byron in that

disastrous April when, after four years spent in the full blaze of

popularity and fashion, he was leaving England under the storm of

obloquy aroused by the scandals attending his separation from his wife.

This is in Hunt's reformed heroic couplet: the rest are in a chirruping

and gossiping anapaestic sing-song which is perhaps the writer's most

congenial vein. Here is a summer picture of Hampstead from a letter to

Tom Moore:--

And yet how can I touch, and not linger a while,

On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile?

On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades,

Dark pines, and white houses, and long-allied shades,

With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees

The hills up above him with roofs in the trees?

Now too, while the season,--half summer, half spring,--

Brown elms and green oaks--makes one loiter and sing;

And the bee's weighty murmur comes by us at noon,

And the cuckoo repeats his short indolent tune,

And little white clouds lie about in the sun,

And the wind's in the west, and hay-making begun?--

and here an autumn night-sketch, from a letter expressing surprise that

the wet weather has not brought a visit from Charles Lamb, that

inveterate lover of walking in the rain:--

We hadn't much thunder and lightning, I own;

But the rains might have led you to walk out of town;

And what made us think your desertion still stranger,

The roads were so bad, there was really no danger;

At least where I live; for the nights were so groping,

The rains made such wet, and the paths are so sloping,

That few, unemboldened by youth or by drinking,

Came down without lanthorns,--nor then without shrinking.

And really, to see the bright spots come and go,

As the path rose or fell, was a fanciful shew.

Like fairies they seemed, pitching up from their nooks,

And twinkling upon us their bright little looks.

Such were Leigh Hunt's antecedents, and such his literary performances

and reputation, when Keats at the age of twenty-one became his intimate.

So far as opinions and public sympathies were concerned, those of Keats

had already, as we have seen, been largely formed in boyhood by

familiarity, under the lead of Cowden Clarke, with Leigh Hunt's writings

in the _Examiner_. Hunt was a confirmed Voltairian and sceptic as to

revealed religion, and supplied its place with a private gospel of

cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his

own invincibly sunny temperament and partly by the hopeful doctrines of

eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural

sympathy of generous youth for Hunt's liberal and kind-hearted view of

things, and he had a mind naturally unapt for dogma: ready to entertain

and appreciate any set of ideas according as his imagination recognized

their beauty or power, he could never wed himself to any as representing

ultimate truth. In matters of poetic feeling and fancy the two men had

up to a certain point not a little in common. Like Hunt, Keats at this

time was given to 'luxuriating' too effusively and fondly over the

'deliciousness' of whatever he liked in art, books, or nature. To the

every-day pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt brought in a

lower degree the same alertness of perception and acuteness of enjoyment

which in Keats were intense beyond parallel. In his lighter and

shallower way Hunt also truly felt with Keats the perennial charm and

vitality of classic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about this

time some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and some,

less adequate, of Homer. But behind such pleasant faculties in Hunt

nothing deeper or more potent lay hidden. Whereas with Keats, as time

went on, delighted sensation became more and more surely and

instantaneously transmuted and spiritualized into imaginative emotion;

his words and cadences came every day from deeper sources within him and

more fully charged with the power of far-reaching and symbolic

suggestion. Hence, as this profound and passionate young genius grew, he

could not but be aware of what was shallow in the talent of his senior

and cloying and distasteful in his ever-voluble geniality. But for many

months the harmony of their relations was complete.

The 'little cottage' in the Vale of Health must have been fairly

overcrowded, one would suppose, with Hunt's fast-growing family of young

children, but a bed was made up for Keats on a sofa, 'in a parlour no

bigger than an old mansion's closet,' says Hunt, which nevertheless

served him for a library and had prints after Stothard hung on the walls

and casts of the heads of poets and heroes crowning the bookshelves.

Here the young poet was made always welcome. The sonnet beginning 'Keen,

fitful gusts are whispering here and there' records a night of October

or November 1816, when, instead of staying to sleep, he preferred to

walk home under the stars, his head full of talk about Petrarch and the

youth of Milton, to the city lodgings where he lived with his brothers

the life affectionately described in that other pleasant sonnet written

on Tom's birthday, November 18, beginning 'Small, busy flames play

through the fresh-laid coals.' The well-known fifty lines at the end of

_Sleep and Poetry_, a poem on which Keats put forth the best of his

half-fledged strength this winter, give the fullest and most engaging

account of the pleasure and inspiration he drew from Hunt's

hospitality:--

The chimes

Of friendly voices had just given place

To as sweet a silence, when I 'gan retrace

The pleasant day, upon a couch at ease.

It was a poet's house who keeps the keys

Of pleasure's temple. Round about were hung

The glorious features of the bards who sung

In other ages--cold and sacred busts

Smiled at each other. Happy he who trusts

To clear Futurity his darling fame!

Then there were fauns and satyrs taking aim

At swelling apples with a frisky leap

And reaching fingers, 'mid a luscious heap

Of vine-leaves. Then there rose to view a fane

Of liny marble, and thereto a train

Of nymphs approaching fairly o'er the sward:

One, loveliest, holding her white hand toward

The dazzling sun-rise: two sisters sweet

Bending their graceful figures till they meet

Over the trippings of a little child:

And some are hearing, eagerly, the wild

Thrilling liquidity of dewy piping.

See, in another picture, nymphs are wiping

Cherishingly Diana's timorous limbs;--

A fold of lawny mantle dabbling swims

At the bath's edge, and keeps a gentle motion

With the subsiding crystal: as when ocean

Heaves calmly its broad swelling smoothness o'er

Its rocky marge, and balances once more

The patient weeds; that now unshent by foam

Feel all about their undulating home...

Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green,

Starts at the sight of Laura; nor can wean

His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they!

For over them was seen a free display

Of out-spread wings, and from between them shone

The face of Poesy: from off her throne

She overlook'd things that I scarce could tell.

It is easy from the above and from some of Keats's later work to guess

at most of the prints which had caught his attention on Hunt's walls and

in his portfolios and worked on his imagination afterwards:--Poussin's

'Empire of Flora' for certain: several, probably, of his various

'Bacchanals,' with the god and his leopard-drawn car, and groups of

nymphs dancing with fauns or strewn upon the foreground to right or

left: the same artist's 'Venus and Adonis': Stothard's 'Bathers' and

'Vintage,' his small print of Petrarch as a youth first meeting Laura

and her friend; Raphael's 'Poetry' from the Vatican; and so forth. These

things are not without importance in the study of Keats, for he was

quicker and more apt than any of our other poets to draw inspiration

from works of art,--prints, pictures, or marbles,--that came under his

notice, and it is not for nothing that he alludes in this same poem to

--the pleasant flow

Of words on opening a portfolio.

A whole treatise might be written on matters which I shall have to

mention briefly or not at all,--how such and such a descriptive phrase

in Keats has been suggested by this or that figure in a picture; how

pictures by or prints after old masters have been partly responsible for

his vision alike of the Indian maiden and the blind Orion; what various

originals, paintings or antiques or both, we can recognize as blending

themselves into his evocation of the triumph of Bacchus or his creation

of the Grecian Urn.

On December the 1st, 1816, Hunt, as has been said, did Keats the new

service of printing the Chapman sonnet as a specimen of his work in an

essay in the _Examiner_ on 'Young Poets,' in which the names of Shelley

and Reynolds were bracketed with his as poetical beginners of high

promise. With reference to the custom mentioned by Hunt of Keats and

himself sitting down of an evening to write verses on a given subject,

Cowden Clarke pleasantly describes one such occasion on December 30 of

the same year, when the chosen theme was _The Grasshopper and the

Cricket_:--'The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such

occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my

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 morning, when the frost

Hath wrought a silence--

"Ah that's perfect! Bravo Keats!" And then he went on in a dilatation on

the dumbness of Nature during the season's suspension and torpidity.'

The affectionate enthusiasm of the younger and the older man (himself,

be it remembered, little over thirty) for one another's company and

verses sometimes took forms which to the mind of the younger and wiser

of the two soon came to seem ridiculous. One day in early spring (1817)

the whim seized them over their wine to crown themselves 'after the

manner of the elder bards.' Keats crowned Hunt with a wreath of ivy,

Hunt crowned Keats with a wreath of laurel, and each while sitting so

adorned wrote a pair of sonnets expressive of his feelings. While they

were in the act of composition, it seems, three lady callers came

in--conceivably the three Misses Reynolds, of whom we shall hear more

anon, Jane, afterwards Mrs Thomas Hood, Marianne, and their young sister

Charlotte. When visitors were announced Hunt took off his wreath and

suggested that Keats should do the same: he, however, 'in his

enthusiastic way, declared he would not take off his crown for any human

being,' and accordingly wore it as long as the visit lasted.[9] Here

are Hunt's pair of sonnets, which are about as good as any he ever

wrote, and which he not long afterwards printed:--

A crown of ivy! I submit my head

To the young hand that gives it,--young, 'tis true,

But with a right, for 'tis a poet's too.

How pleasant the leaves feel! and how they spread

With their broad angles, like a nodding shed

Over both eyes! and how complete and new,

As on my hand I lean, to feel them strew

My sense with freshness,--Fancy's rustling bed!

Tress-tossing girls, with smell of flowers and grapes

Come dancing by, and downward piping cheeks,

And up-thrown cymbals, and Silenus old

Lumpishly borne, and many trampling shapes,--

And lastly, with his bright eyes on her bent,

Bacchus,--whose bride has of his hand fast hold.

It is a lofty feeling, yet a kind,

Thus to be topped with leaves;--to have a sense

Of honour-shaded thought,--an influence

As from great Nature's fingers, and be twined

With her old, sacred, verdurous ivy-bind,

As though she hallowed with that sylvan fence

A head that bows to her benevolence,

Midst pomp of fancied trumpets in the wind.

'Tis what's within us crowned. And kind and great

Are all the conquering wishes it inspires,--

Love of things lasting, love of the tall woods,

Love of love's self, and ardour for a state

Of natural good befitting such desires,

Towns without gain, and haunted solitudes.

Keats had the good sense not to print his efforts of the day; they are

of slight account poetically, but have a real biographical interest:--

ON RECEIVING A LAUREL CROWN FROM LEIGH HUNT

Minutes are flying swiftly, and as yet

Nothing unearthly has enticed my brain

Into a delphic labyrinth--I would fain

Catch an immortal thought to pay the debt

I owe to the kind poet who has set

Upon my ambitious head a glorious gain.

Two bending laurel sprigs--'tis nearly pain

To be conscious of such a coronet.

Still time is fleeting, and no dream arises

Gorgeous as I would have it--only I see

A trampling down of what the world most prizes,

Turbans and crowns and blank regality;

And then I run into most wild surmises

Of all the many glories that may be.

TO THE LADIES WHO SAW ME CROWNED

What is there in the universal earth

More lovely than a wreath from the bay tree?

Haply a halo round the moon--a glee

Circling from three sweet pair of lips in mirth;

And haply you will say the dewy birth

Of morning roses--ripplings tenderly

Spread by the halcyon's breast upon the sea--

But these comparisons are nothing worth.

Then there is nothing in the world so fair?

The silvery tears of April? Youth of May?

Or June that breathes out life for butterflies?

No, none of these can from my favourite bear

Away the palm--yet shall it ever pay

Due reverence to your most sovereign eyes.

Here we have expressed in the first sonnet the same mood as in some of

the holiday rimes of the previous summer, the mood of ardent expectancy

for an inspiration that declines (and no wonder considering the

circumstances) to come. It was natural that the call for an impromptu

should bring up phrases already lying formed or half formed in Keats's

mind, and the sestet of this sonnet is interesting as containing in its

first four lines the germs of the well-known passage at the beginning of

the third book of _Endymion_,--

There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men

With most prevailing tinsel--

and in its fifth a repetition of the 'wild surmise' phrase of the

Chapman sonnet. The second sonnet has a happy line or two in its list of

delights, and its opening is noticeable as repeating the interrogative

formula of the opening lines of _Sleep and Poetry_, Keats's chief

venture in verse this winter.

Very soon after the date of this scene of intercoronation (the word is

Hunt's, used on a different occasion) Keats became heartily ashamed of

it, and expressed his penitence in a strain of ranting verse (his own

name for compositions in this vein) under the form of a hymn or palinode

to Apollo:--

God of the golden bow,

And of the golden lyre,

And of the golden hair,

And of the golden fire,

Charioteer

Of the patient year,

Where--where slept thine ire,

When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath,

Thy laurel, thy glory,

The light of thy story,

Or was I a worm--too low crawling, for death?

O Delphic Apollo!

And so forth: the same half-amused spirit of penitence is expressed in a

letter of a few weeks later to his brother George: and later still he

came to look back, with a smile of manly self-derision, on those days as

a time when he had been content to play the part of 'A pet-lamb in a

sentimental farce.'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Another account says Mitchell.

[2] In _The Asclepiad_, April 1884.

[3] Houghton MSS.

[4] Le Grand: _Fabliaux ou Contes, 1781_. G. L. Way: _Fabliaux or

Tales_, London, 1800; 2nd ed. 1815. See Appendix I.

[5] This note-book is in the collection bequeathed by the late Sir

Charles Dilke to the public library at Hampstead.

[6] In a review of Keats's first book written the next year

(_Examiner_, July 9, 1817) Hunt says that when he printed the

'Solitude' sonnet he knew no more of Keats than of any other

anonymous correspondent: but this probably only means that he had not

yet met Keats personally.

[7] Putting day-break in early October at a little before six, there

would have been fully time enough for Keats to walk to the Poultry,

composing as he went, and to commit his draft to paper and send it to

Clerkenwell by ten o'clock. The longer walk to and from the Borough,

had the date been a year earlier, would have made the feat more

difficult. Moreover the feat itself becomes less of a miracle when we

recognize it as performed not at the end of the poet's twentieth year

but at the end of his twenty first. But in view of Keats's own

explicit dating of the piece, the point seems to need no labouring:

or else it might be pointed out that if Clarke had really introduced

him to Chapman in October 1815 Chapman would assuredly not have been

left out of the list of masters whom he quotes as having known

through Clarke in his epistle of the following August quoted above

(pp. 37, 38).

[8] Both Byron and Barry Cornwall have expressed their sense of

contrast between certain vulgarities of Hunt's diction and his

personal good breeding. Byron before their quarrel declared

emphatically that he was 'not a vulgar man'; and Barry Cornwall,

admitting that he 'indulged himself occasionally in pet words, some

of which struck me as almost approaching to the vulgar,' goes on to

say that 'he was essentially a gentleman in conduct, in demeanour, in

manner, in his consideration for others,' and to praise him for his

'great fund of positive active kindness,' his freedom from all

irritable vanity, his pleasure and liberality in praising (Bryan

Walter Procter, _An Autobiographical Fragment_, 1877, pp. 197-200).

[9] This reconstruction of the scene is founded on a comparison of

the sonnets themselves with Woodhouse's note on Keats's subsequent

palinode, _A Hymn to Apollo_. Woodhouse says the friends were both

crowned with laurel, but it seems more likely that he should have

made this mistake than that a similar performance should have been

twice repeated (Houghton MSS.).

CHAPTER III

WINTER 1816-1817: HAYDON: OTHER NEW FRIENDSHIPS: THE DIE CAST FOR POETRY

Haydon and the Elgin marbles--Haydon as painter and writer--Vanity,

pugnacity, and piety--Haydon on Leigh Hunt--Keats and Haydon meet--An

enthusiastic friendship--Keats and the Elgin marbles--Sonnets and

protestations--Hazlitt and Lamb--Friendship of Hunt and Shelley--Lamb

and Hazlitt on Shelley--Haydon and Shelley: a battle royal--Keats and

Shelley--A cool relation--John Hamilton Reynolds--His devotion to

Keats--The Reynolds sisters--James Rice--Charles Wells--William

Haslam--Joseph Severn--Keats judged by his circle--Described by

Severn--His range of sympathies--His poetic ambition--The die is

cast--First volume goes to press.

So much for the relations of Keats with Hunt himself in these first six

months of their intimacy. Next of the other intimacies which he formed

with friends to whom Hunt introduced him. One of the first of these, and

for a while the most stimulating and engrossing, was with the painter

Haydon. This remarkable man, now just thirty, had lately been victorious

in one of the two great objects of his ambition, and had achieved a

temporary semblance of victory in the other. For the last eight years he

had fought and laboured to win national recognition for the deserts of

Lord Elgin in his great work of salvage--for such under the conditions

of the time it was--in bringing away the remains of the Parthenon

sculptures from Athens. By dint of sheer justice of conviction and power

of fight, and then only when he had been reinforced in the campaign by

foreigners of indisputable authority like the archaeologist Visconti and

the sculptor Canova, he had succeeded in getting the pre-eminence of

these marbles among all works of the sculptor's art acknowledged, and

their acquisition for the nation secured, in the teeth of powerful and

bitterly hostile cliques. His opponents included both the

sentimentalists who took their cue from Byron's _Curse of Minerva_ in

shrieking at Elgin as a vandal, and the dilettanti who, blinded to the

true Greek touch by familiarity with smoothed and pumiced Roman copies,

had declared the Parthenon sculptures to be works of the age of Hadrian.

Haydon's victory over these antagonists is his chief title, and a title

both sound and strong, to the regard of posterity. His other and

life-long, half insane 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 high-flaming

energy and industry, his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the

clamour of his indomitable self-assertion and of his ceaseless conflict

with the academic powers, even his unabashed claims for pecuniary

support on friends, patrons, and society at large, had won for him much

convinced or half convinced attention and encouragement, both in the

world of art and letters and in that of dilettantism and fashion. His

first and second great pictures, 'Dentatus' and 'Macbeth,' had been

dubiously received; his third, the 'Judgment of Solomon,' with

acclamation. This had been finished after his victory in the matter of

the Elgin marbles. He was now busy on one larger and more ambitious than

all, 'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,' in which it was his purpose to

include among the crowd of lookers-on portraits of many famous men both

historical and contemporary. While as usual sunk deep in debt, he was

perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence--for he was in truth a man

whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of the gifts

of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he possessed

completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely exalted pitch

of 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 armpits, and ether in his

soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of

energy followed and impressed me.... They came over me, and shot across

me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God.' But for

all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of genius,

the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties which it

is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to Haydon. Its

vision and originality, its gift of 'heavenly alchemy' for transmuting

and new-creating the materials offered it by experience, its sovereign

inability to see with any eyes or create to any pattern but its own,

were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an occasional

bold conception, a trick of colour or craftsmanship not too obviously

caught from greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid

siege to immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the

kingdom not of true great art but of imitative pictorial posturing and

empty pictorial bombast.