As a draughtsman especially, Haydon's touch is surprisingly loose,

empty, and inexpressive. Even in drawing from the Elgin marbles, as he

did with passionate industry, covering reams, he fails almost wholly to

render the qualities which he so ardently perceived, and loses every

distinction and every subtlety of the original.[1] Infinitely better is

his account of them in words: for in truth Haydon's chief intellectual

power was as an observer, and his best instrument the pen. Readers of

his journals and correspondence know how vividly and tellingly he can

relate an experience or touch off a character. In this gift of striking

out a human portrait in words he stood second in his age, if second, to

Hazlitt alone, and in our later literature there has been no one to beat

him except Carlyle. But passion and pugnacity, vanity and the spirit of

self-exaltation, at the same time as they intensify vision, are bound to

discolour and distort it; and the reader must always bear in mind that

Haydon's pen portraits of his contemporaries are apt to be not less

untrustworthy than they are unforgettable. Moreover in this, the

literary, form of expression also, where he aims higher, leaving

description and trying to become imaginative and impressive, we find

only the same self-satisfied void turgidity, and proof of spiritual

hollowness disguised by temperamental fervour, as in his paintings.

But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those

he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his character, and not

his essential commonness of gift and faculty, that impressed his

associates as they impressed himself. Sturdy, loud-voiced, eloquent,

high of colour, with a bald perpendicular forehead surmounting a set of

squarely compressed, pugnacious features,--eyes, lips and jaw all

prominent and aggressive together,--he was a dominating, and yet a

welcome, presence in some of the choicest circles of his day. Wordsworth

and Wordsworth's firm ally, the painter-baronet Sir George Beaumont,

Hazlitt, Horace Smith, Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Walter Scott, Mary

Mitford, were among his friends. Some of them, like Wordsworth, held by

him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others

after a while. He was justly proud of his industry and strength of

purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit

of thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour

and protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for

deliverance from 'pecuniary emergencies,' and the like. 'I always rose

up from my knees,' he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, 'with a

refreshed fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling

that sent me streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of

life.' And he was prone to hold himself up as a model to his friends in

both particulars, lecturing them loftily on faith and conduct while

he was living without scruple on their bounty.

[Illustration: PL. III

BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY THOMSON AFTER HAYDON]

In October 1816, the first month of Keats's intimacy with Hunt, Haydon

also made a short stay at Hampstead. He and Hunt were already

acquainted, and Hunt had published in the _Examiner_ the very able,

cogent and pungent letter with which Haydon a few months before had

clenched the Elgin marble controversy and practically brought it to an

end. Hunt had congratulated Haydon in a sonnet on the occasion, closing

with a gentle hint that, fine as such a victory was, he was himself

devoted to a mission finer still, as

One of the spirits chosen by heaven to turn

The sunny side of things to human eyes.

Their intercourse was now warmly resumed, though never without latent

risk of antagonism and discord. The following letter of Haydon to

Wilkie, more just and temperate than usual, is good for filling in our

picture both of Hunt and of Haydon himself, as well as for adding

another to the number of bewildering contemporary estimates of _Rimini_.

27 October, 1816.

I have been at Hampstead this fortnight for my eyes, and shall return

with my body much stronger for application. The greater part of my

time has been spent in Leigh Hunt's society, who is certainly one of

the most delightful companions. Full of poetry and art, and amiable

humour, we argue always with full hearts on everything but religion

and Buonaparte, and we have resolved never to talk of these,

particularly as I have been recently examining Voltaire's opinions

concerning Christianity, and turmoiling my head to ascertain fully my

right to put him into my picture!

Though Leigh Hunt is not deep in knowledge, moral, metaphysical, or

classical, yet he is intense in feeling, and has an intellect for ever

on the alert. He is like one of those instruments on three legs,

which, throw it how you will, always pitches on two, and has a spike

sticking for ever up and ever ready for you. He 'sets' at a subject

with a scent like a pointer. He is a remarkable man, and created a

sensation by his independence, his courage, his disinterestedness in

public matters, and by the truth, acuteness, and taste of his dramatic

criticisms he raised the rank of newspapers, and gave by his example

a literary feeling to the weekly ones more especially.

As a poet, I think him full of the genuine feeling. His third canto in

_Rimini_ is equal to anything in any language of that sweet sort.

Perhaps in his wishing to avoid the monotony of the Pope school, he

may have shot into the other extreme, and his invention of obscure

words to express obscure feelings borders sometimes on affectation.

But these are trifles compared with the beauty of the poem, the

intense painting of the scenery, and the deep burning in of the

passion which trembles in every line. Thus far as a critic, an editor,

and a poet. As a man, I know none with such an affectionate heart, if

never opposed in his opinions. He has defects of course: one of his

great defects is getting inferior people about him to listen, too fond

of shining at any expense in society, and a love of approbation from

the darling sex bordering on weakness; though to women he is

delightfully pleasant, yet they seem more to dandle him as a delicate

plant. I don't know if they do not put a confidence in him which to me

would be mortifying.

He is a man of sensibility tinged with morbidity, and of such

sensitive organisation of body that the plant is not more alive to

touch than he. I remember once, walking in a field, we came to a muddy

place concealed by grass. The moment Hunt touched it, he shrank back,

saying, 'It's muddy!' as if he meaned that it was full of adders....

He is a composition, as we all are, of defects and delightful

qualities, indolently averse to worldly exertion, because it harasses

the musings of his fancy, existing only by the common duties of life,

yet ignorant of them, and often suffering from their neglect.

A few days later, on October 31, we find Keats writing to Cowden Clarke

of his pleasure at 'the thought of seeing so soon this glorious Haydon

and all his creations.' The introduction was arranged to take place at

Leigh Hunt's cottage, where they met for dinner. Haydon, the sublime

egoist, could be rapturously sympathetic and genuinely kind to those who

took him at his own valuation, and there was much to attract the spirits

of eager youth about him as a leader. Keats and he were mutually

delighted at first sight: each struck fire from the other, and they

quickly became close friends and comrades. After an evening of high talk

at the beginning of their acquaintance, on the 19th of November, 1816,

the young poet wrote to Haydon as follows, joining his name with those

of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt:--

Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the

following:--

Great spirits now on earth are sojourning:

He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake,

Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake,

Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing:

He of the rose, the violet, the spring,

The social smile, the chain for Freedom's sake,

And lo! whose steadfastness would never take

A meaner sound than Raphael's whispering.

And other spirits there are standing apart

Upon the forehead of the age to come;

These, these will give the world another heart,

And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum

Of mighty workings in some distant mart?

Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb.

Haydon was at no time of his life unused to compliments of this kind.

About the same time as Keats another young member of Hunt's circle, John

Hamilton Reynolds, also wrote him a sonnet of eager sympathy and

admiration; and the three addressed to him some years later by

Wordsworth are well known. In his reply to Keats he proposed to hand on

the above piece to Wordsworth--a proposal which 'puts me,' answers

Keats, 'out of breath--you know with what reverence I would send my

well-wishes to him.' Haydon suggested moreover the needless, and as it

seems to me regrettable, mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out the

words after 'workings' in the last line but one. The poet, however,

accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision.

Some time after the turn of the year we find Keats presented with a copy

of Goldsmith's _Greek History_ 'from his ardent friend, B. R. Haydon.'

All the winter and early spring the two met frequently, sometimes at

Haydon's studio in Great Marlborough Street, sometimes in the rooms of

the Keats brothers in the Poultry or in those of their common

acquaintance, and discussed with passionate eagerness most things in

heaven and earth, and especially poetry and painting. 'I have enjoyed

Shakespeare,' declares Haydon, 'with John Keats more than with any other

human being.' Both he and Keats's other painter friend, Joseph Severn,

have testified that Keats had a fine natural sense for the excellencies

of painting and sculpture. Both loved to take him to the British Museum

and expatiate to him on the glories of the antique; and it would seem

that through Haydon he must have had access also to the collection of

one at least of the great dilettanti noblemen of the day. After a first

visit to the newly acquired Parthenon marbles with Haydon at the

beginning of March 1817, Keats tried to embody his impressions in a

couple of sonnets, which Hunt promptly printed in the _Examiner_. It is

characteristic of his unfailing sincerity with his art and with himself

that he allows himself to break into no stock raptures, but strives

faithfully to get into words the confused sensations of spiritual

infirmity and awe that have overpowered him:--

My spirit is too weak--mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.

And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die

Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.

Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,

Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old Time--with a billowy main--

A sun--a shadow of a magnitude.

He sends this with a covering sonnet to Haydon asking pardon for its

immaturity and justly praising the part played by Haydon in forcing the

acceptance of the marbles upon the nation:--

Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak

Definitely on these mighty things;

Forgive me that I have not Eagle's wings--

That what I want I know not where to seek;

And think that I would not be over meek

In rolling out upfollow'd thunderings,

Even to the steep of Heliconian springs,

Were I of ample strength for such a freak--

Think too, that all those numbers should be thine;

Whose else? In this who touch thy vesture's hem?

For when men star'd at what was most divine

With browless idiotism--o'erwise phlegm--

Thou hadst beheld the Hesperian shine

Of their star in the East, and gone to worship them.

Haydon's acknowledgment is of course enthusiastic, but betrays his

unfortunate gift for fustian in the following precious expansion of

Keats's image of the sick eagle:--

Many thanks, my dear fellow, for your two noble sonnets. I know not a

finer image than the comparison of a poet unable to express his high

feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he must have

remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling sunbeams,

in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing angels,

on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless

wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on

objects of their seeking....

In Haydon's journal about the same date there is an entry which reads

with ironical pathos in the light of after events:--'Keats is a man

after my own heart. He sympathises with me, and comprehends me. We saw

through each other, and I hope are friends for ever. I only know that,

if I sell my picture, Keats shall never want till another is done, that

he may have leisure for his effusions: in short he shall never want all

his life.' To Keats himself, more hyperbolically still, and in terms

still more suited to draw the pitying smile of the ironic gods, Haydon

writes a little later:--

Consider this letter a sacred secret.--Often have I sat by my fire

after a day's effort, as the dusk approached and a gauzy veil seemed

dimming all things--and mused on what I had done, and with a burning

glow on what I would do till filled with fury I have seen the faces of

the mighty dead crowd into my room, and I have sunk down and prayed

the great Spirit that I might be worthy to accompany these immortal

beings in their immortal glories, and then I have seen each smile as

it passes over me, and each shake his hand in awful encouragement. My

dear Keats, the Friends who surrounded me were sensible to what talent

I had,--but no one reflected my enthusiasm with that burning ripeness

of soul, my heart yearned for sympathy,--believe me from my soul, in

you I have found one,--you add fire, when I am exhausted, and excite

fury afresh--I offer my heart and intellect and experience--at first I

feared your ardor might lead you to disregard the accumulated wisdom

of ages in moral points--but the feelings put forth lately have

delighted my soul. God bless you! Let our hearts be buried on each

other.

Familiar visitors at this time of Haydon in the Marlborough Street

studio and of Hunt in the Hampstead cottage were two men of finer gift

than either, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. With both of these

seniors (Lamb was forty-one and Hazlitt thirty-eight) Keats now became

acquainted without becoming intimate. Unluckily neither of them has left

any but the slightest personal impression of the young poet, whose

modesty probably kept him somewhat in the background when they were by.

Haydon used to complain that it was only after Keats's death that he

could get Hazlitt to acknowledge his genius; but Lamb, as we shall see,

with his unerring critical touch, paid to Keats's best work while he was

still living a tribute as splendid as it was just. Keats on his part,

after the publication of Hazlitt's lectures on the characters of

Shakespeare in 1817, reckoned his 'depth of taste' one of the things

most to rejoice at in his age, and was a diligent attendant at his next

course on the English poets. But he never frequented, presumably for

lack of invitation, those Wednesday and Thursday evening parties at the

Lambs of which Talfourd and B. W. Procter have left us such vivid

pictures; and when he met some of the same company at the Novello's, the

friends of his friend Cowden Clarke, he enjoyed it, as will appear

later, less than one would have hoped. He has left no personal

impression of Hazlitt, and of Lamb only the slightest and most casual.

Fortunately we know them both so well from other sources that we can

almost see and hear them: Hazlitt with his unkempt black hair and

restless grey eyes, lean, slouching, splenetic, an Ishmaelite full of

mistrust and suspicion, his habitual action of the hand within the

waistcoat apt in his scowling moments to suggest a hidden dagger; but

capable withal, in company where he felt secure, of throwing into his

talk much the same fine mixture as distinguishes his writing of

impetuous fullness and variety with incisive point and critical

lucidity: Lamb noticeable in contrast by his neat, sombrely clad small

figure on its spindle legs and his handsome romantic head; by his

hurried, stammering utterance and too often, alas! his vinous flush and

step almost as titubant as his tongue; but most of all by that airy

genius of insight and caprice, of deep tenderness and freakish wisdom,

quick to break from him in sudden, illuminating phrases at any moment

and in any manner save the expected.

Yet another acquaintance brought about by Hunt in these days was that

between Keats and Shelley, who was Keats's senior by only three years

and with whom Hunt himself was now first becoming intimate. When Hunt

was sentenced for sedition four years earlier, Shelley, then barely

twenty, had been eager to befriend him and had sent him an offer of

money help; which for once, not being then in immediate need, Hunt had

honourably declined. Since then they had held only slight communication;

but when Hunt included Shelley on the strength of his poem _Alastor_,

among the young poets praised in his _Examiner_ essay (December 1,

1816), a glowing correspondence immediately followed, and a few days

later Shelley came up from Bath to stay at the Hampstead cottage. The

result of a week's visit was an immediate intimacy and enthusiastic

mutual regard, with a prompt determination on Shelley's part to rescue

Hunt from the slough of debt (something like L1400) into which during

and since his imprisonment he had cheerfully muddled himself.

It was the eve of the most harrowing crisis in Shelley's life, when his

principle of love a law to itself entailed in action so dire a

consequence, and his obedience to his own morality brought him into such

harsh collision with the world's. First came the news of the suicide of

his deserted wife Harriet (December 14) and three months later the

sentence of Lord Eldon which deprived him of the custody of his and

Harriet's children. On the day of the first tragic news he writes to

Mary Godwin, whom he had left at Bath, 'Leigh Hunt has been with me all

day, and his delicate and tender attentions to me, his kind speeches of

you, have sustained me against the weight of horror of this event.' In

the interval between the shock of Harriet's death and that of the

judgment sequestering his children Shelley was a frequent guest in the

Vale of Health, sometimes alone and sometimes with Mary, now legally his

wife. Neither in these first days nor later could Hunt persuade his old

intimates Hazlitt and Lamb to take kindly to his new friend Shelley

either as man or poet. Lamb, who seems only to have seen him once, said

after his death, 'his voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was

tormented with'; of his poetry, that it was 'thin sown with profit or

delight'; and of his 'theories and nostrums,' that 'they are oracular

enough, but I either comprehend 'em not, or there is miching malice and

mischief in 'em.' Hazlitt, opening the most studied of his several

attacks on Shelley's poetry and doctrine, gives one of his vivid

portraits, saying 'he has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a

maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech.... He is

sanguine-complexioned, and shrill-voiced.... His bending, flexible form

appears to take no strong hold of things, does not grapple with the

world about him, but flows from it like a river.' Still less was a good

understanding possible between Shelley and Haydon, who met him more than

once in these early days at the Vale of Health. He tells how, on the

evening of their first meeting, Shelley, looking hectically frail and

girlish, opened the conversation at dinner with the words, 'as to that

detestable religion, the Christian,'--and how he, Haydon, a man at all

times stoutly and vociferously orthodox, waited till the meal was over

and then, 'like a stag at bay and resolved to gore without mercy,'

struck his hardest on behalf of the established faith, while Hunt in his

airily complacent way kept skirmishing in on Shelley's side, until the

contention grew hot and stormy. The heat and noise, Haydon owns, were

chiefly on his side, and we might guess as much without his admission,

for we have abundant evidence of the unfailing courtesy and sweetness of

manner with which Shelley would in that high-pitched feminine voice of

his advance the most staggering propositions and patiently encounter the

arguments of his adversaries.

Such contentions, victorious as he always held himself to be in them,

annoyed Haydon. The queer blend, in the atmosphere of the Hampstead

cottage, of eager kindness and hospitality and a graceful, voluble

enthusiasm for the 'luxuries' of poetry, art, and nature with slatternly

housekeeping and a spirit of fervent or flippant anti-Christianity,

became distasteful to him, and he afterwards dated from these days his

gradual estrangement from Hunt and his circle. At the same time he began

to try and draw away Keats from Hunt's influence.

Keats, we are told, though much inclining in these days towards the

Voltairian views of his host, would take little part in such debates as

that above narrated, and once even supported another young member of the

circle, Joseph Severn, in a defence of Christianity against Hunt and

Shelley. To Shelley himself, his senior by three years, his relation was

from the first and remained to the end one of friendly civility and

little more. He did not take to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him,

says Hunt, and adds the comment: 'Keats, being a little too sensitive on

the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a

sort of natural enemy.' 'He was haughty, and had a fierce hatred of

rank,' says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his pride had not been

aroused by anticipation, Keats, as we have seen, was eagerly

open-hearted to new friendships, and it may well be that the reserve he

maintained towards Shelley was assumed at first by way of defence

against the possibility of social patronage on the other's part. But he

must soon have perceived that from Shelley, a gentleman of gentlemen,

such an attitude was the last thing to be apprehended, and the cause of

his standing off was much more likely his knowledge that nearly all

Shelley's literary friends were his pensioners,--from Godwin, the

greediest, to Leigh Hunt, the lightest-hearted,--and a fear that he too

might be supposed to expect a similar bounty. It would seem that in his

spirit of independence he gave Shelley the impression of being much

better off than he was,--or possibly instances of his only too ready

generosity in lending from his modest means to his intimates when they

were hard pressed may have come to Shelley's knowledge: at all events a

few months later we find Shelley casting about for persons able to help

him in helping Hunt, and writing under a false impression, 'Keats

certainly can.'

These two young poets, equally and conjointly beloved by posterity, were

in truth at many points the most opposite-natured of men. Pride and

sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not

easy between them. Keats, with the rich elements of earthly clay in his

composition, his lively vein of every-day common-sense and humour, his

keen, tolerant delight and interest in the aspects and activities of

nature and human nature as he found them, may well have been as much

repelled as attracted by Shelley, Shelley the 'Elfin knight,' the spirit

all air and fire, with his passionate repudiation of the world's ways

and the world's law, his passionate absorption in his vision of a

happier scheme of things, a vision engendered in humanitarian dreams

from his readings of Rousseau and Godwin and Plato,--or was it rather

one brought with him from some ante-natal sojourn among the radiances

and serenities of the sunset clouds? Leigh Hunt's way of putting it is

this:--'Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with ordinary

flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of

_Hyperion_, was so far inferior in universality to his great

acquaintance, that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with

nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own

hands.' Of the incidents and results of their intercourse at Hampstead

we know little more than that Shelley, wisely enough in the light of his

own headlong early experiments, tried to dissuade Keats from premature

publication; and that Keats on his part declined, 'in order that he

might have his own unfettered scope,' a cordial invitation from Shelley

to come and stay with him at Great Marlow. Keats, though he must have

known that he could learn much from Shelley's trained scholarship and

fine literary sense, was doubtless right in feeling that whatever power

of poetry might be in him must work its own way to maturity in freedom

and not in leading-strings. To these scanty facts Shelley's cousin

Medwin adds the statement that the two agreed to write in friendly

rivalry the long poems each was severally meditating for his summer's

work, Shelley _Laon and Cythna_, afterwards called _The Revolt of

Islam_, and Keats _Endymion_. This may very well have been the case, but

Medwin was a man so lax of memory, tongue, and pen that his evidence,

unconfirmed, counts for little. Of the influence possibly exercised on

Keats by Shelley's first important poem, _Alastor_, or by his _Hymn to

Intellectual Beauty_ printed in the _Examiner_ during the January of

their intercourse at Hunt's, it will be time to speak later on.

A much closer intimacy sprang up between Keats and the other young

poetic aspirant whom Hunt in his December essay in the _Examiner_ had

bracketed with him and Shelley. This was John Hamilton Reynolds, of

whom we have as yet heard only the name. He was a handsome, witty,

enthusiastic youth a year younger than Keats, having been born at

Shrewsbury in September 1796. Part of his boyhood was spent in

Devonshire near Sidmouth, a countryside to which he remained always

deeply attached; but he was still quite young when his father came and

settled in London as mathematical master and head writing master at

Christ's Hospital. The elder Reynolds and his wife were people of

literary leanings and literary acquaintance, and seem to have been

characters in their way: both Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were

frequenters of their house in Little Britain, and Mrs Reynolds is

reported as holding her own well among the talkers at Lamb's evenings.

Their son John was educated at St Paul's school and showed talent and

inclinations which drew him precociously into the literary movement of

the time. At eighteen he wrote an Eastern tale in verse in the Byronic

manner, _Safie_, of which Byron acknowledged the presentation copy in a

kind and careful letter several pages long. Two years later, just about

the time of his first introduction to Keats at Leigh Hunt's, the

youngster had the honour of receiving a similar attention from

Wordsworth in reply to a presentation of another poem, _The Naiad_

(November 1816). Neither of these two youthful volumes, nor yet a third,

_The Eden of Imagination_, showed much more than a quick susceptibility

to nature and romance, and a gift of falling in readily and gracefully

now with one and now with another of the poetic fashions of the hour.

Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt were alternately his models.

The same gift of adaptiveness which Reynolds showed in serious work made

him when he chose a deft, sometimes even a masterly, parodist in the

humourous vein, and his work done in this vein a few years later in

collaboration with Thomas Hood holds its own well beside that of his

associate. Partly owing to the persuasions of the lady to whom he was

engaged, Reynolds early gave up the hope of a literary career and went

into business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell sonnet to

the Muses in a copy of Shakespeare which he gave to Keats, and in 1821

he writes again

As time increases

I give up drawling verse for drawing leases.

In point of fact he continued to write occasionally for some years, and

in the end failed somewhat tragically to prosper in the profession of

law. During these early years he was not only one of the warmest friends

Keats had but one of the wisest, to whom Keats could open his innermost

mind with the certainty of being understood, and who once at least saved

him from a serious mistake. A sonnet written by him within three months

of their first meeting proves with what warmth of affection as well as

with what generosity of admiration the one young aspirant from the first

regarded the other. Keats one day, calling on Cowden Clarke and finding

him asleep over Chaucer, passed the time by writing on the blank space

at the end of _The Floure and the Lefe_, a poem with which he was

already familiar, the sonnet beginning 'This pleasant tale is like a

little copse.'[2] Reynolds's comment after reading it is as follows:--

Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves,

Or white flowers pluck'd from some sweet lily bed;

They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed

The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eyes,

O'er the excited soul.--Thy genius weaves

Songs that shall make the age be nature-led,

And win that coronal for thy young head

Which time's strange hand of freshness ne'er bereaves.

Go on! and keep thee to thine own green way,

Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung;

Be thou companion of the summer day,

Roaming the fields and older woods among:--

So shall thy muse be ever in her May

And thy luxuriant spirit ever young.

Reynolds had two sisters, Marianne and Jane, older than himself, and a

third, Charlotte, several years younger. With the elder two Keats was

soon on terms of almost brotherly intimacy and affection, seeing them

often at the family home in Little Britain, exchanging lively letters

with them in absence, and contributing to Jane's album sets of verses

some of which have only through this means been preserved. A little

later the piano-playing of the youngest sister, Charlotte, was often a

source of great pleasure to him.

Outside his own family Reynolds had an inseparable friend with whom

Keats also became quickly intimate: this was James Rice, a young

solicitor of literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or

worse in health, but always, in Keats's words, 'coming on his legs again

like a cat'; ever cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and

indefatigable in good offices to those about him: 'dear noble generous

James Rice,' records Dilke,--'the best, and in his quaint way one of the

wittiest and wisest men I ever knew.' It was through Rice that there

presently came to Reynolds that uncongenial business opening which in

worldly wisdom he held himself bound to accept. Besides Reynolds,

another and more insignificant young versifying member, or satellite, of

Hunt's set when Keats first joined it was one Cornelius Webb, remembered

now, if remembered at all, by the derisory quotation in _Blackwood's

Magazine_ of his rimes on Byron and Keats, as well as by a disparaging

allusion in one of Keats's own later letters. He disappeared early from

the circle, but not before he had caught enough of its spirit to write

sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost be taken for the work

of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his weak moments; and for

some years afterwards served as press-reader in the printing-office of

Messrs. Clowes, being charged especially with the revision of the

_Quarterly_ proofs.

To turn to other close associates of Keats during the same period, known

to him not through Hunt but through his brothers,--a word may suffice

for Charles Wells, to whom we find him addressing in the summer of 1816

a sonnet of thanks for a gift of roses. Wells had been a schoolmate of

Tom Keats and R.H. Horne, and is described as in those days a small,

red-headed, snub-nosed, blue-eyed youth of irrepressible animal spirits.

Now or somewhat later he formed an intimacy, never afterwards broken,

with Hazlitt. Keats's own regard for Wells was short-lived, being

changed a year or so later into fierce indignation when Wells played off

a heartless practical joke upon the consumptive Tom in the shape of a

batch of pretended love-letters from an imaginary 'Amena.' It was after

Keats's death that Wells earned a place of his own in literature with

the poetic drama _Joseph and his Brethren_, dead-born in its first

anonymous form and re-animated after many years, but still during the

life-time of its author, through the enthusiasm which its qualities of

intellect and passion inspired in Rossetti and Swinburne.

Of far different importance were two other acquaintanceships, which

Keats owed to his brother George and which in the same months were

ripening into affection, one of them into an affection priceless in the

sequel. The first was with a young solicitor called William Haslam (it

is odd how high a proportion of Keats's intimates were of this

profession). Of him no personal picture has come down to us, but in the

coming days we find him, of all the set, the most prompt and serviceable

on occasions of practical need or urgency: 'our oak friend' he is called

in one such crisis by Joseph Severn. It was as the friend of Haslam, and

through Haslam of his brother George, that Keats first knew Joseph

Severn, whose name is now inseparable from his own. He was two years

Keats's senior, the son of a music-master sprung from an old

Gloucestershire stock and having a good connexion in the northern

suburbs of London. The elder Severn seems to have been much of a

domestic tyrant, and in all things headstrong and hot-headed, but

blessed with an admirable wife whom he appreciated and who contrived to

make the household run endurably if not comfortably. Joseph, the son,

showing a precocious talent for drawing, was apprenticed to a stipple

engraver, but the perpetual task of 'stabbing copper' irked him too

sorely: his ambition was to be a painter, and against the angry

opposition of his father he contrived to attend the Royal Academy

schools, picking up meanwhile for himself what education in letters he

could. He had a hereditary talent for music, an untrained love for books

and poetry, and doubtless some touch already of that engaging social

charm which Ruskin noted in him when they first met five and twenty

years later in Rome. He was beginning to get a little practice as a

miniature painter and to make private attempts in history-painting when

he met the brilliant young poet-student of Guy's, with whom he was shy

and timid at first, as with a sort of superior being. But before long he

became used to drinking in with delight all that Keats, in communicative

hours, was moved to pour out from the play of his imagination or the

stores--infinite as to the innocent Severn they appeared--of his reading

in poetry and history. What especially, he recorded in after life, used

to enrapture him was Keats's talk on the meaning and beauty of the Greek

polytheism as a 'religion of joy.' On his own part he was proud to act

as cicerone to Keats in the British Museum or the British Institution

(the National Gallery as yet was not), and deferentially to point out to

him the glories of the antique or of Titian and Claude and Poussin.

Thus our obscurely-born and half-schooled young medical student, the

orphan son of a Finsbury stable-keeper, found himself at twenty-one,

before the end of his second winter in London, fairly launched in a

world of art, letters, and liberal aspirations and living in familiar

intimacy with some, and friendly acquaintance with others, of the most

gifted spirits of his time. The power and charm of genius already shone

from him, and impressed alike his older and his younger companions.

Portraits of him verbal and other exist in abundance. A small, compact,

well-turned figure, broad-chested for its height, which was barely an

inch over five feet; a shapely head set off by thickly clustering

gold-brown hair and carried with an eager upward and forward thrust from

the shoulders; the features powerful, finished, and mobile, with an

expression at once bold and sensitive; the forehead sloping and not

high, but broad and strong: the brows well arched above hazel-brown,

liquid flashing eyes, 'like the eyes of a wild gypsy maid in colour, set

in the face of a young god,' Severn calls them. To the same effect

Haydon,--'an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a

Delphian priestess who saw visions': and again Leigh Hunt,--'the eyes

mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a

noble action or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears and

his mouth tremble.' In like manner George Keats,--'John's eyes moistened

and his lip quivered at the relation of any tale of generosity or

benevolence or noble daring, or at sights of loveliness or distress.'

And once more Haydon,--'Keats was the only man I ever met who seemed and

looked conscious of a high calling, except Wordsworth.... He was in his

glory in the fields. The humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the

glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble, then his eyes

flashed, his cheek glowed and his mouth quivered.' 'Nothing seemed to

escape him,'--I now quote paragraphs compiled by the late Mr William

Sharp from many jotted reminiscences of Severn's,--

Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of a bird and the undernote of

response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal, the changing

of the green and brown lights and furtive shadows, the motions of the

wind--just how it took certain tall flowers and plants--and the

wayfaring of the clouds: even the features and gestures of passing

tramps, the colour of one woman's hair, the smile on one child's face,

the furtive animalism below the deceptive humanity in many of the

vagrants, even the hats, clothes, shoes, wherever these conveyed the

remotest hint as to the real self of the wearer. Withal, even when in

a mood of joyous observance, with flow of happy spirits, he would

suddenly become taciturn, not because he was tired, not even because

his mind was suddenly wrought to some bewitching vision, but from a

profound disquiet which he could not or would not explain.

Certain things affected him extremely, particularly when 'a wave was

billowing through a tree,' as he described the uplifting surge of air

among swaying masses of chestnut or oak foliage, or when, afar off, he

heard the wind coming across woodlands. 'The tide! the tide!' he would

cry delightedly, and spring on to some stile, or upon the low bough of

a wayside tree, and watch the passage of the wind upon the meadow

grasses or young corn, not stirring till the flow of air was all

around him, while an expression of rapture made his eyes gleam and his

face glow till he 'would look sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for

some cry from the forest depths,' or like 'a young eagle staring with

proud joy before taking flight.'...

Though small of stature, not more than three-quarters of an inch over

five feet, he seemed taller, partly from the perfect symmetry of his

frame, partly from his erect attitude and a characteristic backward

poise (sometimes a toss) of the head, and, perhaps more than anything

else, from a peculiarly dauntless expression, such as may be seen on

the face of some seamen....

The only time he appeared as small of stature was when he was reading,

or when he was walking rapt in some deep reverie; when the chest fell

in, the head bent forward as though weightily overburdened, and the

eyes seemed almost to throw a light before his face....

The only thing that would bring Keats out of one of his fits of

seeming gloomful reverie--the only thing, during those

country-rambles, that would bring the poet 'to himself again' was the

motion 'of the inland sea' he loved so well, particularly the violent

passage of wind across a great field of barley. From fields of oats or

barley it was almost impossible to allure him; he would stand, leaning

forward, listening intently, watching with a bright serene look in his

eyes and sometimes with a slight smile, the tumultuous passage of the

wind above the grain. The sea, or thought-compelling images of the

sea, always seemed to restore him to a happy calm.

In regard to Keats's social qualities, he is said, and owns himself, to

have been not always quite well conditioned or at his ease in the

presence of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was

pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by

turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and

unaffected. His voice was rich and low, and when he joined in

discussion, it was usually with an eager but gentle animation, while his

occasional bursts of fierce indignation at wrong or meanness bore no

undue air of assumption, and failed not to command respect. 'In my

knowledge of my fellow beings,' says Cowden Clarke, 'I never knew one

who so thoroughly combined the sweetness with the power of gentleness,

and the irresistible sway of anger, as Keats. His indignation would have

made the boldest grave; and they who had seen him under the influence of

injustice and meanness of soul would not forget the expression of his

features--"the form of his visage was changed."'

In lighter moods his powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are

described as great and never used unkindly. He loved the exhibition of

any kind of energy, and was as almost as keen a spectator of the rough

and violent as of the tender and joyous aspects and doings of life and

nature. 'Though a quarrel in the streets,' he says, 'is a thing to be

hated the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a

grace in his quarrel.' His yearning love for the old polytheism and

instinctive affinity with the Greek spirit did not at all blunt his

relish of actualities. To complete our picture and illustrate the wide

and unfastidious range of his contact with life and interest in things,

let us take Cowden Clarke's account of the way he could enjoy and

re-enact such a scene of brutal sport and human low-life as our

refinement no longer tolerates:--

His perception of humour, with the power of transmitting it by

imitation, was both vivid and irresistibly amusing. He once described

to me having gone to see a bear-baiting. The performance not having

begun, Keats was near to, and watched, a young aspirant, who had

brought a younger under his wing to witness the solemnity, and whom he

oppressively patronized, instructing him in the names and qualities of

all the magnates present. Now and then, in his zeal to manifest and

impart his knowledge, he would forget himself, and stray beyond the

prescribed bounds into the ring, to the lashing resentment of its

comptroller, Mr William Soames, who, after some hints of a practical

nature to 'keep back' began laying about him with indiscriminate and

unmitigable vivacity, the Peripatetic signifying to his pupil. 'My

eyes! Bill Soames giv' me sich a licker!' evidently grateful, and

considering himself complimented upon being included in the general

dispensation. Keats's entertainment with and appreciation of this

minor scene of low life has often recurred to me. But his concurrent

personification of the baiting, with his position,--his legs and arms

bent and shortened till he looked like Bruin on his hind legs, dabbing

his fore paws hither and thither, as the dogs snapped at him, and now

and then acting the gasp of one that had been suddenly caught and

hugged--his own capacious mouth adding force to the personation, was a

remarkable and as memorable a display.

Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have

described, Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check,

but rather everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and

half awe-stricken, passion for the poetic life. Poetry and the love of

poetry were at this period in the air. It was a time when even people of

business and people of fashion read: a time of literary excitement,

expectancy, discussion, and disputation such as England has not known

since. Fortunes, even, had been made or were being made in poetry; by

Scott, by Byron, by Moore, whose _Irish Melodies_ were an income to him

and who was known to have just received a cheque of L3000 in advance for

_Lalla Rookh_. In such an atmosphere Keats, having enough of his

inheritance left after payment of his school and hospital expenses to

live on for at least a year or two, soon found himself induced to try

his luck and his powers with the rest. The backing of his friends was

indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. His brothers, including the

business member of the family, the sensible and practical George, were

as eager that John should become a famous poet as he was himself. So

encouraged, he made up his mind to give up the pursuit of surgery for

that of literature, and declared his decision, being now of age, firmly

to his guardian; who naturally but in vain opposed it to the best of his

power. The consequence was a quarrel, which Mr Abbey afterwards related,

in a livelier manner than we should have expected from him, in the same

document, now unfortunately gone astray, to which I have already

referred as containing his character of the poet's mother. The die was

cast. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the Hampstead cottage, in the

City lodgings of the three brothers and the social gatherings of their

friends, it was determined that John Keats (or according to his

convivial _alias_ 'Junkets') should put forth a volume of his poems.

Leigh Hunt brought on the scene a firm of publishers supposed to be

sympathetic, the brothers Charles and James Ollier, who had already

published for Shelley and who readily undertook the issue. The volume

was printed, and the last proof-sheets were brought one evening to the

author amid a jovial company, with the intimation that if a dedication

was to be added the copy must be furnished at once. Keats going to one

side quickly produced the sonnet _To Leigh Hunt Esqr_, with its

excellent opening and its weak conclusion:--

Glory and Loveliness have pass'd away;

For if we wander out in early morn,

No wreathed incense do we see upborne

Into the East to meet the smiling day:

No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay,

In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,

Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn

The shrine of Flora in her early May.

But there are left delights as high as these,

And I shall ever bless my destiny,

That in a time when under pleasant trees

Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,

A leafy luxury, seeing I could please,

With these poor offerings, a man like thee.

With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the

old pagan world and of gratitude for present friendship, the young

poet's first venture was sent forth, amid the applauding expectations of

all his circle, in the first days of March 1817.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] These drawings are preserved in the Department of Prints and

Drawings at the British Museum.

[2] Cowden Clarke, writing many years later, suggests that this was

Keats's first acquaintance with Chaucer. He is certainly mistaken. It

was on Feb. 27, 1817, that Keats called and found him asleep as

related in the text. Within a week was published the volume of

_Poems_, with the principal piece, _Sleep and Poetry_, partly

modelled on the _Floure and the Lefe_ itself and headed with a

quotation from it. It is needless to add that later criticism does

not admit _The Floure and Lefe_ into the canon of Chaucer's works.

CHAPTER IV

THE 'POEMS' OF 1817

Spirit and chief contents of the volume--Sonnets and rimed

heroics--The Chapman sonnet--The 'How many bards' sonnet--The

sex-chivalry group--The Leigh Hunt group--The Haydon pair--The Leander

sonnet--Epistles--History of the 'heroic' couplet--The closed and free

systems--Marlowe--Drayton--William Browne--Chapman and Sandys--Decay

of the free system--William Chamberlayne--Milton and

Marvell--Waller--Katherine Philips--Dryden--Pope and his

ascendency--Reaction: The Brothers Warton--Symptoms of

Emancipation--Coleridge, Wordsworth and Scott--Leigh Hunt and couplet

reform--Keats to Mathew: influence of Browne--_Calidore_: influence of

Hunt--Epistle to George Keats--Epistle to Cowden Clarke--_Sleep and

Poetry_ and _I stood tiptoe_--Analysis of _Sleep and Poetry_--Double

invocation--Vision of the Charioteer--Battle-cry of the new

poetry--Its strength and weakness--Challenge and

congratulation--Encouragements acknowledged--Analysis of _I stood

tiptoe_--Intended induction to _Endymion_--Relation to

Elizabethans--Relation to contemporaries--Wordsworth and Greek

Mythology--_Tintern Abbey_ and the three stages--Contrasts of

method--Evocation _versus_ Exposition.

The note of Keats's early volume is accurately struck in the motto from

Spenser which he prefixed to it:--

What more felicity can fall to creature

Than to enjoy delight with liberty?

The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of

release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true

nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered.

And the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight:

delight in the beauty and activities of nature, in the vividness of

sensation, in the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of

friendship and affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the

exercise of the art itself which expresses and communicates all these

joys.

Technically considered, the volume consists almost entirely of

experiments in two metrical forms: the one, the Italian sonnet of octave

and sestet, not long fully re-established in England after being

disused, with some exceptions, since Milton: the other, the decasyllabic

or five-stressed couplet first naturalized by Chaucer, revived by the

Elizabethans in all manner of uses, narrative, dramatic, didactic,

elegiac, epistolary, satiric, and employed ever since as the predominant

English metre outside of lyric and drama. The only exceptions in the

volume are the boyish stanzas in imitation of Spenser,--truly rather of

Spenser's eighteenth century imitators; the _Address to Hope_ of

February 1815, quite in the conventional eighteenth century style and

diction, though its form, the sextain stanza, is ancient; the two copies

of verses _To some Ladies_ and _On receiving a curious Shell from some

Ladies_, composed for the Misses Mathew, about May of the same year, in

the triple-time jingle most affected for social trifles from the days of

Prior to those of Tom Moore; and the set of seven-syllabled couplets

drafted in February 1816 for George Keats to send as a valentine to Miss

Wylie. So far as their matter goes these exceptions call for little

remark. Both the sea-shell verses and the valentine spring from a brain,

to quote a phrase of Keats's own,

--new stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay

Of old romance,--

especially with chivalric images and ideas from Spenser. Of the second

set of shell stanzas it may perhaps be noted that they seem to suggest

an acquaintance with Oberon and Titania not only through the _Midsummer

Night's Dream_ but through Wieland's _Oberon_, a romance poem which

Sotheby's translation had made well known in England and in which the

fairy king and queen are divided by a quarrel far deeper and more

durable than in Shakespeare's play.[1]

Taking first the score or so of sonnets in the volume, we find that none

of them are love-sonnets and that few are written in any high mood of

passion or exaltation. They are for the most part of the class called

'occasional',--records of pleasant experience, addresses of friendly

greeting or invocation, or compact meditations on a single theme. They

bespeak a temper cordial and companionable as well as enthusiastic,

manifest sincerity in all expressions of personal feeling, and contain

here and there a passage of fine mature poetry. These, however, are

seldom sustained for more than a single quatrain. The great exception of

course is the sonnet, almost too well known to quote,--but I will quote

it nevertheless,--on Chapman's _Homer_. That walk in the morning

twilight from Clerkenwell to the Borough had enriched our language with

what is by common consent one of its masterpieces in this form, having a

close unsurpassed for the combined qualities of serenity and

concentration: concentration twofold, first flashing on our mind's eye

the human vision of the explorer and his companions with their looks and

gestures, then symbolically evoking through that vision a whole

world-wide range of the emotions of discovery.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer rul'd as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The 'realms of gold' lines in the Chapman sonnet, recording Keats's

range of reading in our older poetry, had been in a measure anticipated

in this other, written six months earlier[2]:--

How many bards gild the lapses of time!

A few of them have ever been the food

Of my delighted fancy,--I could brood

Over their beauties, earthly, or sublime:

And often, when I sit me down to rhyme,

These will in throngs before my mind intrude:

But no confusion, no disturbance rude

Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime.

So the unnumber'd sounds that evening store;

The songs of birds--the whisp'ring of the leaves--

The voice of waters--the great bell that heaves

With solemn sound,--and thousand others more,

That distance of recognizance bereaves,

Make pleasing music, and not wild uproar.

Technical points worth attention here are the bold reversal of the

regular accentual stress twice over in the first line, and the strained

use of 'store' for 'fill' and 'recognizance' for 'recognition.' But the

main interest of the sonnet is its comparison of the working of Keats's

miscellaneous poetic reading in his mind and memory with the effect of

the confused but harmonious sounds of evening on the ear,--a frank and

illuminating comment by himself on those stray echoes and reminiscences

of the older poets which we catch now and again throughout his work.

Such echoes and reminiscences are always permitted to genius, because

genius cannot help turning whatever it takes into something new of its

own: and Keats showed himself from the first one of those chartered

borrowers who have the right to draw inspiration as they please, whether

direct from nature or, in the phrase of Wordsworth,

From the great Nature that exists in works

Of mighty poets.[3]

Compare Shelley in the preface to _Prometheus Unbound_:--'One great poet

is a masterpiece of nature which another not only ought to study but

must study.'

Most of the remaining sonnets can best be taken in groups, each group

centering round a single theme or embodying a single mood or vein of

feeling. One is what may be called the sex-chivalry group, including the

sequence of three printed separately from the rest and beginning,

'Woman, when I behold thee flippant, vain'; that beginning 'Had I a

man's fair form'; that addressed to Georgiana Wylie, with its admirable

opening, 'Nymph of the downward smile, etc.,' and its rather lame

conclusion; to which, as more loosely connected with the group, and

touched in some degree with Byronic suggestion, may be added 'Happy is

England, sweet her artless daughters.' That excellent critic, the late

F.T. Palgrave, had a singular admiration for the set of three which I

have placed at the head of this group: to me its chief interest seems

not poetical but personal, inasmuch as in it Keats already defines with

self-knowledge the peculiar blend in his nature of ardent, idealizing

boyish worship of woman and beauty with an acute critical sensitiveness

to flaws of character defacing his ideal in actual women: a

sensitiveness which grew with his growth and many a time afterwards put

him ill at ease with his company and himself.

A large proportion of the remaining sonnets centre themselves more or

less closely about the figure of Leigh Hunt. Two introduce him directly

by name and had the effect of definitely marking Keats down, in the

minds of reactionary critics, as a victim to be swooped upon in

association with Hunt whenever occasion offered. The two are the early

sonnet composed on the day of Hunt's release from prison (February 5,

1815), and shown shyly as a first flight to Cowden Clarke immediately

afterwards, and the dedicatory sonnet already quoted on the decay of the

old pagan beauty, written almost exactly two years later. Intermediate

in date between these two come two or three sonnets of May and June 1816

which, whether inspired directly or not by intercourse with Hunt, are

certainly influenced by his writing, and express a townsman's enjoyment

of country walks in a spirit and vocabulary near akin to his:--'To one

who has been long in city pent' (this opening comes with only the change

of a word from _Paradise Lost_), 'O Solitude, if I with thee must

dwell,' 'As late I rambled in the happy fields.' There is a memory of

Wordsworth, and probably also of Epping Forest walks, in the cry to

Solitude:--

Let me thy vigils keep

'Mongst boughs pavillion'd, where the deer's swift leap

Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.

Next comes the autumn group definitely recording the happiness received

by the young poet from intercourse with Hunt and his friends, from the

society of his brothers in London, and from walks between the Hampstead

cottage and in their city lodgings:--'Give me a golden pen,' 'Small,

busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals,' 'Keen, fitful gusts are

whispering here and there': to which may be added the sonnet _On the_

_Grasshopper and Cricket_ written in Hunt's house and in friendly

competition with him.

A second new friend, Haydon, has a pair of sonnets in the volume all to

himself, including that well-known one which brackets him with

Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt among great spirits destined to give the world

another heart and other pulses. A few of the sonnets stand singly apart

from the rest by their subject or occasion. Such is the sonnet in honour

of the Polish hero Kosciusko; and such again is that addressed to George

Keats from Margate, with its fine ocean quatrain (Keats was always well

inspired in writing of the sea):--

The ocean with its vastness, its blue green,

Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears,

Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears

Must think on what will be, and what has been.

Now that we are posthumously acquainted with the other sonnets written

by Keats in these early years it is a little difficult to see on what

principle he made his choice of the specimens to be published in this

1817 volume. Among those excluded, he may well have thought the early

attempts on the peace of 1814, on Chatterton, and on Byron, too feeble,

though he has included others scarcely better. That headed 'As from the

darkening gloom a silver dove' he may have counted too conventionally

pious; and that satirizing the starched gloom of church-goers too likely

on the other hand to give offence. The second Haydon pair, on visiting

the Elgin marbles, and the recently discovered pair on receiving a

laurel crown from Leigh Hunt,[4] seem not to have been written (as that

on the _Floure and the Lefe_ certainly was not) until the book was

passing, or had passed, the press. The last-named pair he would probably

have had the good sense to omit in any case, as he has the sonnet

celebrating a like laureation at the hands of a young lady at an earlier

date. But why leave out 'After dark vapours' and 'Who loves to peer,'

and above all why the admirable sonnet on Leander? The date of this was

March 16, 1816, the occasion the gift by a lady of one of James Tassie's

coloured paste reproductions of an engraved gem of the subject.

'Tassie's gems' were at this time immensely popular among lovers of

Grecian taste, and were indeed delightful things, though his originals

were too uncritically chosen and included but a small proportion of true

antiques among a multitude of Renaissance and eighteenth-century

imitations. Keats at one time proposed to make a collection of them for

himself, and at another asked his young sister whether she would like a

present of some. The sonnet opens with lines curiously recalling those

invitations, or invocations, with which Dante begins some of his sonnets

in the _Vita Nuova_.[5] The last three lines are an example, hardly to

be bettered, of condensed expression and of imagination kindling into

instantaneous tragic vitality a cold and meagre image presented to the

eye.

Come hither all sweet maidens soberly,

Down-looking aye, and with a chasten'd light

Hid in the fringes of your eyelids white,

And meekly let your fair hands joined be,

As if so gentle that ye could not see,

Untouch'd, a victim of your beauty bright,

Sinking away to his young spirit's night,--

Sinking bewilder'd 'mid the dreary sea:

'Tis young Leander toiling to his death;

Nigh swooning, he doth purse his weary lips

For Hero's cheek, and smiles against her smile.

O horrid dream! see how his body dips

Dead-heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile:

He's gone: up bubbles all his amorous breath![6]

More than half the volume is taken up with epistles and meditative

pieces (Drayton would have called them Elegies and Ben Jonson Epigrams)

in the regular five-stressed or decasyllabic couplet. The earliest of

these is the epistle to Felton Mathew from which I have already given a

quotation. The form of the verse in this case is modelled pretty closely

on Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_. Keats, as has been said, was

already familiar with the work of this amiable Spenserian allegorist, so

thin and tedious in the allegorical part of his work proper, in romantic

invention so poorly inspired, so admirable, genuine, and vivacious on

the other hand in his scenes and similitudes from real west-country life

and in notes of patriotism both local and national. By the following

motto chosen from Browne's work Keats seems to put the group of

_Epistles_ in his volume under that poet's particular patronage:--

Among the rest a shepheard (though but young

Yet hartned to his pipe) with all the skill

His few yeeres could, began to fit his quill.

But before coming to questions of the special influences which

successively shaped Keats's aims both as to style and versification in

poems of this form, I shall ask the reader to pause with me awhile and

get freshly and familiarly into his ear and mind, what to special

students is well known but to others only vaguely, the story of the

chief phases which this most characteristic of English measures had gone

through until the time when Keats tried to handle it in a spirit more or

less revolutionary. Some of the examples I shall quote by way of

illustration are passages which we know to have been specially familiar

to Keats and to which we shall have occasion to recur. Let us first

consider Chaucer's use, as illustrated in a part of the prayer of

Emilia to Diana in the _Knightes Tale_:--

O chaste goddesse of the wodes grene,

To whom bothe hevene and erthe and see is sene,

Quene of the regne of Pluto derk and lowe,

Goddesse of maydens, that myn herte hast knowe

Ful many a yeer, and woost what I desire,

As keep me fro thy vengeance and thyn ire,

That Attheon aboughte cruelly.

Chaste goddesse, wel wostow that I

Desire to been a mayden al my lyf,

Ne never wol I be no love ne wyf.

I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,

A mayde, and love hunting and venerye,

And for to walken in the wodes wilde,

And noght to been a wyf, and be with childe.

Noght wol I knowe companye of man.

Now help me, lady, sith ye may and can,

For tho thre formes that thou hast in thee.

And Palamon, that hath swich love to me,

And eek Arcite, that loveth me so sore,

This grace I preye thee with-oute more,

As sende love and pees bitwixte hem two;

And fro me turne awey hir hertes so,

That al hir hote love, and hir desyr,

And al hir bisy torment, and hir fyr

Be queynt, or turned in another place;

And if so be thou wolt not do me grace,

Or if my destinee be shapen so,

That I shal nedes have oon of hem two,

As sende me him that most desireth me.

The rime-syllables with which Chaucer ends his lines are as a rule

strong and followed by a pause, or at least by the grammatical

possibility of a pause, though there are exceptions like the division of

'I | desire.' The general effect of the metre is that of a succession of

separate couplets, though their separation is often slight and the

sentence is allowed to run on with little break through several couplets

divided from each other by no break of more than a comma. When a full

stop comes and ends the sentence, it is hardly ever allowed to break a

line by falling at any point except the end. On the other hand it is as

often as not used to divide the couplet by falling at the end not of the

second but of the first line, so that the ear has to wait a moment in

expectancy until the second, beginning a new sentence, catches up the

rime of the first like an echo. Other, slighter pauses fall quite

variably where they will, and there is no regular breathing pause or

caesura dividing the line after the second or third stress.

When the measure was revived by the Elizabethans two conflicting

tendencies began to appear in its treatment. One was to end each line

with a full and strong rime-syllable, noun or verb or emphatic

adjective, and to let each couplet consist of a single sentence, or at

any rate a single clause of a sentence, so as to be both grammatically

and rhythmically almost independent of the next. Under this, which is

called the closed or stopped couplet system, the rime-pattern and the

sense or sentence-pattern, which together compose the formal elements in

all rimed verse, are made strictly to coincide, and within the limits of

a couplet no full break of the sense is allowed. Rhetorical and

epigrammatical point and vigour are the special virtues of this system:

its weaknesses are monotony of beat and lack of freedom and variety in

sentence structure. The other and opposite tendency is to suffer the

sentence or period to develop itself freely, almost as in prose, running

over as it will from one couplet into another, and coming to a full

pause at any point in the line; and at the same time to let any syllable

whatever, down to the lightest of prepositions or auxiliaries, serve at

need as a rime-syllable. Under this system the sense and consequent

sentence-pattern winds in and out of the rime-pattern variously and

deviously, the rime-echo striking upon the ear now with emphasis, now

lightly and fugitively, and being sometimes held up to follow a full

pause and sometimes hurried on with the merest suggestion or insinuation

of a possible pause, or with none at all. The virtues of this system are

variety and freedom of movement; its special dangers are

invertebrateness and a tendency to straggle and wind itself free of all

real observance of rime-effect or metrical law.

Most of the Elizabethans used both systems interchangeably, now a string

of closed couplets, and now a flowing period carried through a

succession of couplets overrunning into one another. Spenser in _Mother

Hubbard's Tale_ and Marlowe in _Hero and Leander_ were among the

earliest and best revivers of the measure, and both inclined to the

closed couplet system, Spenser the more strictly of the two, as the

satiric and epigrammatic nature of his theme might naturally dictate.

Let us take a well known passage from Marlowe:--

It lies not in our power to love or hate,

For will in us is over-ruled by fate.

When two are stript, long ere the course begin,

We wish that one should lose, the other win;

And one especially do we affect

Of two gold ingots, like in each respect:

The reason no man knows; let it suffice,

What we behold is censured by our eyes.

Where both deliberate, the love is slight:

Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

He kneeled; but unto her devoutly prayed:

Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said,

'Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him;'

And, as she spake those words, came somewhat near him.

He started up; she blushed as one ashamed;

Wherewith Leander much more was inflamed.

He touched her hand; in touching it she trembled:

Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled.

These lovers parled by the touch of hands:

True love is mute, and oft amazed stands.

Thus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled,

The air with sparks of living fire was spangled;

And Night, deep-drenched in misty Acheron,

Heaved up her head, and half the world upon

Breathed darkness forth (dark night is Cupid's day).

The first ten lines, conveying moral saws or maxims, furnish almost a

complete example of the closed couplet system, and not only of that, but

of the division of single lines by a pause or caesura after the second

or third stress. When the narrative begins, the verse moves still

mainly in detached couplets (partly because a line of moral reflection

is now and again paired with a line of narrative), but with a growing

inclination to prolong the sentence and vary the rhythm, and with an

abundant use, in the rimes, of the double or feminine ending, for which

Chaucer affords precedent enough.

Drayton, a poet in whom Keats was well read, is commonly quoted as one

who yielded habitually to the attraction of the closed couplet; and

indeed he will often run on through page on page of twinned verses, or

'gemells' as he calls them, like these from the imaginary Epistle from

Eleanor Cobham to Duke Humphrey:--

Why, if thou wilt, I will myself deny,

Nay, I'll affirm and swear, I am not I:

Or if in that thy shame thou dost perceive,

Lo, for thy dear sake, I my name will leave.

And yet, methinks, amaz'd thou shouldst not stand,

Nor seem so much appalled at my hand;

For my misfortunes have inur'd thine eye

(Long before this) to sights of misery.

No, no, read on, 'tis I, the very same,

All thou canst read, is but to read my shame.

Be not dismay'd, nor let my name affright;

The worst it can, is but t' offend thy sight;

It cannot wound, nor do thee deadly harm,

It is no dreadful spell, no magic charm.

But Drayton is also very capable of the full-flowing period and the

loose over-run of couplet into couplet, as witness the following from

one of his epistles:--

O God, though Virtue mightily do grieve

For all this world, yet will I not believe

But that she's fair and lovely and that she

So to the period of the world will be;

Else had she been forsaken (sure) of all,

For that so many sundry mischiefs fall

Upon her daily, and so many take

Up arms against her, as it well might make

Her to forsake her nature, and behind

To leave no step for future time behind,

As she had never been, for he that now

Can do her most disgrace, him they allow

The time's chief Champion--.

Turning to Keats's next favourite among the old poets, William Browne of

Tavistock, here is a passage from _Britannia's Pastorals_ which we know

to have stuck in his memory, and which illustrates the prevailing

tendency of the metre in Browne's hands to run in a succession of

closed, but not too tightly closed, couplets, and to abound in double or

feminine rime-endings which make a variation in the beat:--

And as a lovely maiden, pure and chaste,

With naked iv'ry neck, and gown unlaced,

Within her chamber, when the day is fled,

Makes poor her garments to enrich her bed:

First, put she off her lily-silken gown,

That shrieks for sorrow as she lays it down;

And with her arms graceth a waistcoat fine,

Embracing her as it would ne'er untwine.

Her flaxen hair, ensnaring all beholders,

She next permits to wave about her shoulders,

And though she cast it back, the silken slips

Still forward steal and hang upon her lips:

Whereat she sweetly angry, with her laces

Binds up the wanton locks in curious traces,

Whilst (twisting with her joints) each hair long lingers,

As loth to be enchain'd but with her fingers.

Then on her head a dressing like a crown;

Her breasts all bare, her kirtle slipping down,

And all things off (which rightly ever be

Call'd the foul-fair marks of our misery)

Except her last, which enviously doth seize her,

Lest any eye partake with it in pleasure,

Prepares for sweetest rest, while sylvans greet her,

And longingly the down bed swells to meet her.

Chapman, a poet naturally rugged of mind and speech and moreover

hampered by having to translate, takes much greater liberties,

constantly breaking up single lines with a full stop in the middle and

riming on syllables too light or too grammatically dependent on the word

next following to allow naturally any stress of after-pause, however

slight; as thus in the sixth _Odyssey_:--

These, here arriv'd, the mules uncoach'd, and drave

Up to the gulfy river's shore, that gave

Sweet grass to them. The maids from coach then took

Their clothes, and steep'd them in the sable brook;

Then put them into springs, and trod them clean

With cleanly feet; adventuring wagers then,

Who should have soonest and most cleanly done.

When having throughly cleans'd, they spread them on

The flood's shore, all in order. And then, where

The waves the pebbles wash'd, and ground was clear,

They bath'd themselves, and all with glittering oil

Smooth'd their white skins; refreshing then their toil

With pleasant dinner, by the river's side;

Yet still watch'd when the sun their clothes had dried.

Till which time, having dined, Nausicaa

With other virgins did at stool-ball play,

Their shoulder-reaching head-tires laying by.

The other classical translation of the time with which Keats was most

familiar was that of the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid by the traveller and

colonial administrator George Sandys. As a rule Sandys prefers the

regular beat of the self-contained couplet, but now and again he too

breaks it uncompromisingly: for instance,--

Forbear yourselves, O Mortals, to pollute

With wicked food: fields smile with corn, ripe fruit

Weighs down their boughs; plump grapes their vines attire;

There are sweet herbs, and savory roots, which fire

May mollify, milk, honey redolent

With flowers of thyme, thy palate to content.

The prodigal earth abounds with gentle food;

Affording banquets without death or blood.

Brute beasts with flesh their ravenous hunger cloy:

And yet not all; in pastures horses joy:

So flocks and herds. But those whom Nature hath

Endued with cruelty, and savage wrath

(Wolves, bears, Armenian tigers, Lions) in

Hot blood delight. How horrible a sin,

That entrails bleeding entrails should entomb!

That greedy flesh, by flesh should fat become!

While by one creature's death another lives!

Contemporary masters of elegiac and epistolary verse often deal with the

metre more harshly and arbitrarily still. Thus Donne, the great Dean of

St Paul's, though capable of riming with fine sonority and richness,

chooses sometimes to write as though in sheer defiance of the obvious

framework offered by the couplet system; and the same refusal to stop

the sense with the couplet, the same persistent slurring of the rime,

the same broken and jerking movement, are plentifully to be matched from

the epistles of Ben Jonson. In later and weaker hands this method of

letting the sentence march or jolt upon its way in almost complete

independence of the rime developed into a fatal disease and decay of the

metre, analogous to the disease which at the same time was overtaking

and corrupting dramatic blank verse. A signal instance, to which we

shall have to return, is the _Pharonnida_ of William Chamberlayne,

(1659) a narrative poem not lacking momentary gleams of intellect and

imagination, and by some insatiate students, including Southey and

Professor Saintsbury, admired and praised in spite of its (to one reader

at least) intolerable tedium and wretched stumbling, shuffling verse,

which rimes indeed to the eye but to the ear is mere mockery and

vexation. For example:--

Some time in silent sorrow spent, at length

The fair Pharonnida recovers strength,

Though sighs each accent interrupted, to

Return this answer:--'Wilt, oh! wilt thou do

Our infant love such injury--to leave

It ere full grown? When shall my soul receive

A comfortable smile to cherish it,

When thou art gone? They're but dull joys that sit

Enthroned in fruitless wishes; yet I could

Part, with a less expense of sorrow, would

Our rigid fortune only be content

With absence; but a greater punishment

Conspires against us--Danger must attend

Each step thou tread'st from hence; and shall I spend

Those hours in mirth, each of whose minutes lay

Wait for thy life? When Fame proclaims the day

Wherein your battles join, how will my fear

With doubtful pulses beat, until I hear

Whom victory adorns! Or shall I rest

Here without trembling, when, lodged in thy breast,

My heart's exposed to every danger that

Assails thy valour, and is wounded at

Each stroke that lights on thee--which absent I,

Prompted by fear, to myriads multiply.'

The tendency which culminated in this kind of verse was met by a

counteracting tendency in the majority of poets to insist on the regular

emphatic rime-beat, and to establish the rime-unit--that is the separate

couplet--as the completely dominant element in the measure, the 'heroic'

measure as it had come to be called. The rule is nowhere so dogmatically

laid down as by Sir John Beaumont, the elder brother of the dramatist,

in an address to King James I:--

In every language now in Europe spoke

By nations which the Roman Empire broke,

The relish of the Muse consists in rime:

One verse must meet another like a chime.

Our Saxon shortness hath peculiar grace

In choice of words fit for the ending place,

Which leave impression in the mind as well

As closing sounds of some delightful bell.

Milton at nineteen, in a passage of his college _Vacation Exercise_,

familiar to Keats and for every reason interesting to read in connexion

with the poems expressing Keats's early aspirations, showed how the

metre could still be handled nobly in the mixed Elizabethan manner:--

Hail native Language, that by sinews weak

Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak,

* * * * *

I have some naked thoughts that rove about

And loudly knock to have their passage out;

And wearie of their place do only stay

Till thou hast deck't them in thy best array;

That so they may without suspect or fears

Fly swiftly to this fair Assembly's ears;

Yet I had rather if I were to chuse,

Thy service in some graver subject use,

Such as may make thee search thy coffers round,

Before thou cloath my fancy in fit sound:

Such where the deep transported mind may soare

Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav'ns dore

Look in, and see each blissful Deitie

How he before the thunderous throne doth lie,

Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings

To th' touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings

Immortal Nectar to her Kingly Sire:

Then passing through the Spheres of watchful fire,

And mistie Regions of wide air next under,

And hills of Snow and lofts of piled Thunder,

May tell at length how green-ey'd Neptune raves,

In Heav'ns defiance mustering all his waves;

Then sing of secret things that came to pass

When Beldam Nature in her cradle was;

And last of Kings and Queens and Hero's old,

Such as the wise Demodocus once told

In solemn Songs at King Alcinous feast,

While sad Ulisses soul and all the rest

Are held with his melodious harmonie

In willing chains and sweet captivitie.

But the strictly closed system advocated by Sir John Beaumont prevailed

in the main, and by the days of the Commonwealth and Restoration was

with some exceptions generally established. Some poets were enabled by

natural fineness of ear and dignity of soul to make it yield fine rich

and rolling modulations: none more so than Andrew Marvell, as for

instance in his noble poem on the death of Cromwell. The name especially

associated in contemporary and subsequent criticism with the attainment

of the admired quality of 'smoothness' (another name for clipped and

even monotony of rime and rhythm) in this metre is Waller, the famous

parliamentary and poetical turncoat who could adulate with equal unction

first the Lord Protector and then the restored Charles. By this time,

however, every rimer could play the tune, and thanks to the controlling

and suggesting power of the metre itself, could turn out couplets with

the true metallic and epigrammatic ring: few better than Katherine

Philips ('the matchless Orinda'), who was a stickler for the strictest

form of the couplet and wished even to banish all double endings. Take

this from her elegy on the death of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia

(1662):--

Although the most do with officious heat

Only adore the living and the great,

Yet this Queen's merits Fame so far hath spread,

That she rules still, though dispossest and dead.

For losing one, two other Crowns remained;

Over all hearts and her own griefs she reigned.

Two Thrones so splendid as to none are less

But to that third which she does now possess.

Her heart and birth Fortune as well did know,

That seeking her own fame in such a foe,

She drest the spacious theatre for the fight:

And the admiring World call'd to the sight:

An army then of mighty sorrows brought,

Who all against this single virtue fought;

And sometimes stratagems, and sometimes blows,

To her heroic soul they did oppose:

But at her feet their vain attempts did fall,

And she discovered and subdu'd them all.

Cowley in his long 'heroic' poem _The Davideis_ admits the occasional

Alexandrine or twelve-syllable line as a variation on the monotony of

the rhythm. Dryden, with his incomparably sounder and stronger literary

sense, saw the need for a richer variation yet, and obtained it by the

free use both of triple rimes and of Alexandrines: often getting fine

effects of sweeping sonority, although by means which the reader cannot

but feel to be arbitrary, imported into the form because its monotony

calls for relief rather than intrinsic and natural to it. Chaucer's

prayer, above quoted, of Emilia to Diana runs thus in Dryden's

'translation':--

O Goddess, Haunter of the Woodland Green,

To whom both Heav'n and Earth and Seas are seen;

Queen of the nether Skies, where half the Year

Thy Silver Beams descend, and light the gloomy Sphere;

Goddess of Maids, and conscious of our Hearts,

So keep me from the Vengeance of thy Darts,

Which Niobe's devoted Issue felt,

When hissing through the Skies the feather'd Deaths were dealt:

As I desire to live a Virgin-life,

Nor know the Name of Mother or of Wife.

Thy Votress from my tender Years I am,

And love, like thee, the Woods and Sylvan Game.

Like Death, thou know'st, I loath the Nuptial State,

And Man, the Tyrant of our Sex, I hate,

A lowly Servant, but a lofty Mate.

Where Love is Duty on the Female Side,

On theirs mere sensual Gust, and sought with surly Pride.

Now by thy triple Shape, as thou art seen

In Heav'n, Earth, Hell, and ev'ry where a Queen,

Grant this my first Desire; let Discord, cease,

And make betwixt the Rivals lasting Peace:

Quench their hot Fire, or far from me remove

The Flame, and turn it on some other Love.

Or if my frowning Stars have so decreed,

That one must be rejected, one succeed,

Make him my Lord, within whose faithful Breast

Is fix'd my Image, and who loves me best.

In serious work Dryden avoided double endings almost entirely, reserving

them for playful and colloquial use in stage prologues, epilogues, and

the like, thus:--

I come, kind Gentlemen, strange news to tell ye;

I am the Ghost of poor departed Nelly.

Sweet Ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil;

I'm what I was, a little harmless Devil.

For, after death, we Sprights have just such Natures,

We had, for all the World, when human Creatures.

In the following generation Pope discarded, with the rarest exceptions,

all these variations upon the metre and wrought up successions of

separate couplets, each containing a single sentence or clause of a

sentence complete, and each line having its breathing-pause or caesura

almost exactly in the same place, to a pitch of polished and glittering

elegance, of striking, instantaneous effect both upon ear and mind,

which completely dazzled and subjugated not only his contemporaries but

three full generations of rimers and readers after them. Everyone knows

the tune; it is the same whether applied to purposes of pastoral

sentiment or rhetorical passion or playful fancy, of Homeric translation

or Horatian satire, of witty and plausible moral and critical reflection

or of savage personal lampoon and invective. Let the reader turn in

memory from Ariel's account of the duties of his subordinate elves and

fays:--

Some in the fields of purest ether play,

And bask and whiten in the blaze of day:

Some guide the course of wandering orbs on high,

Or roll the planets through the boundless sky:

Some, less refin'd, beneath the moon's pale light

Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night,

Or suck the mists in grosser air below,

Or dip their pinions in the painted bow,

Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main,

Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain.

Others, on earth, o'er human race preside,

Watch all their ways, and all their actions guide,--

let the reader turn in memory from this to the familiarly known lines in

which Pope congratulates himself

That not in fancy's maze he wandered long,

But stoop'd to truth, and moraliz'd his song;

That not for fame, but virtue's better end,

He stood the furious foe, the timid friend,

The damning critic, half approving wit,

The coxcomb hit, or fearing to be hit;

Laughed at the loss of friends he never had,

The dull, the proud, the wicked, and the mad;

The distant threats of vengeance on his head,

The blow unfelt, the tear he never shed;

The tale revived, the lie so oft o'erthrown,

The imputed trash, and dulness not his own,--

and again from this to his castigation of the unhappy Bayes:--

Swearing and supperless the hero sate,

Blasphem'd his gods, the dice, and damn'd his fate;

Then gnaw'd his pen, then dash'd it on the ground,

Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound!

Plung'd for his sense, but found no bottom there,

Yet wrote and flounder'd on in mere despair.

Round him much embryo, much abortion lay,

Much future ode, and abdicated play;

Nonsense precipitate, like running lead,

That slipped through cracks and zigzags of the head.

The author thus brilliantly and evenly accomplished in one metre and so

many styles ruled as a sovereign long after his death, his works being

published in nearly thirty editions before the end of the century; and

the measure as thus fixed and polished by him became for a full hundred

years the settled norm and standard for English 'heroic' verse, the

length and structure of periods, sentences and clauses having to be

rigidly clipped to fit it. In this respect no change of practice came

till after the whole spirit of English poetry had been changed. Almost

from Pope's own day the leaven destined to produce what came afterwards

to be called the romantic revolution was working, in the main

unconsciously, in men's minds. Of conscious rebels or pioneers, two of

the chief were that admirable, ridiculous pair of clerical brothers

Joseph and Thomas Warton, Joseph long headmaster of Winchester, Thomas

professor of poetry at Oxford and later poet laureate. Joseph Warton

made at twenty-four, within two years of Pope's death, a formal protest

against the reign of the polished and urbane moral essay in verse, and

at all times stoutly maintained 'Invention and Imagination' to be the

chief qualities of a poet; illustrating his views by what he called

odes, to us sadly uninspired, of his own composition. His younger

brother Thomas, with his passion for Gothic architecture, his masterly

editing of Spenser, and his profound labours on the origin and history

of our native English poetry, carried within him, for all his grotesque

personality, many of the germs of the spirit that was to animate the

coming age. As the century advanced, other signs and portents of what

was to come were Chatterton's audaciously brilliant blunder of the

Rowley forgeries, with the interest which it excited, the profound

impression created by the pseudo-Ossian of Macpherson, and the

enthusiastic reception of Percy's _Reliques_. But current critical taste

did not recognize the meaning of these signs, and tacitly treated the

breach between our older and newer literatures as complete. Admitting

the older as a worthy and interesting subject of study and welcoming the

labour of scholars--even those of pretended scholars--in collecting and

publishing its remains or what purported to be such, criticism none the

less expected and demanded of contemporary production that it should

conform as a matter of course to the standards established since

language and style had been 'polished' and reduced to 'correctness' by

Dryden and Pope. Thomas Warton, wishing to celebrate in verse the

glories of the Gothic architecture of Oxford, finds himself constrained

to do so strictly in the dominant style and measure. His brother, the

protesting Joseph, actually has to enrol himself among Pope's editors,

and when for once he uses the heroic couplet and lets his fancy play

upon the sight of a butterfly in Hackwood Park, must do so, he too, in

this thoroughly Popeian wise:--

Fair child of Sun and Summer, we behold

With eager eyes thy wings bedropp'd with gold;

The purple spots that o'er thy mantle spread,

The sapphire's lively blue, the ruby's red,

Ten thousand various blended tints surprise,

Beyond the rainbow's hues or peacock's eyes:

Not Judah's king in eastern pomp array'd,

Whose charms allur'd from far the Sheban maid,

High on his glitt'ring throne, like you could shine

(Nature's completest miniature divine):

For thee the rose her balmy buds renews,

And silver lillies fill their cups with dews;

Flora for thee the laughing fields perfumes,

For thee Pomona sheds her choicest blooms.

William Blake, in his _Poetical Sketches_ of 1784, poured scorn on the

still reigning fashion for 'tinkling rhymes and elegances terse', and

himself struck wonderful lyric notes in the vein of our older poetry:

but nobody read or marked Blake: he was not for his own age but for

posterity. Even those of the eighteenth century poets who in the main

avoided the heroic couplet, and took refuge, like Thomson, in the

Spenserian stanza or Miltonic blank verse, or confined themselves to

lyric or elegiac work like Gray,--even they continued to be hampered by

a strict conventional and artificial code of poetic style and diction.

The first full and effective note of emancipation, of poetical

revolution and expansion, in England was that struck by Coleridge and

Wordsworth with the publication and defence of their _Lyrical Ballads_

(1798, 1800). Both these young masters had written in the established

mould in their quite earliest work, but afterwards disused it almost

entirely (_The Happy Warrior_ is of course a conspicuous exception);

while their contemporary Walter Scott avoided it from the first.

The new poetry, whether cast in forms derived from or coloured by the

old ballad literature of the country, or helping itself from the

simplicities and directnesses of common every-day speech, or going back

to Miltonic and pre-Miltonic tradition, fought its way to recognition

now slowly, as in the case of Wordsworth, in whose style all these three

elements play their part, now rapidly in the face of all opposition, as

in the case of Scott with his dashing Border lays. But the heroic

couplet on the Queen Anne model still held the field as the reigning and

official form of verse; and among the most admired poets of Keats's day,

Rogers, Campbell, and Crabbe in the older generation, each in his own

manner, still kept sounding the old instrument essentially to the old

tune, with Byron in the younger following, in _The Corsair_ and _Lara_,

at a pace more rapid and helter-skelter but with a beat even more

monotonous and hammering than any of theirs. We have seen how Leigh Hunt

declared his intention to try a reform of the measure, and how he

carried out his promise in _Rimini_. He did little more than revive

Dryden's expedients of the occasional triplet and Alexandrine, with a

sprinkling of Elizabethan double-endings; failing withal completely to

catch any touch either of the imaginative passion of the Elizabethans or

of Dryden's fine virile energy and worldly good-breeding.

_Rimini_ was not yet published, nor had Keats yet met its author, when

Keats wrote his Epistle to Felton Mathew in November 1815. If, as is the

case, his strain of social ease and sprightliness jars on us a little in

the same manner as Hunt's, it is that there was really as he himself

said on another occasion, something in common between them. At the same

time it should be remembered that some of Keats's most Huntian-seeming

rimes and phrases contain really an echo of the older masters.[7] That

William Browne was his earliest model in the handling of the metre will,

I think, be apparent to any reader who will put the passage from

_Britannia's Pastorals_ above quoted (p. 98), with its easily flowing

couplets varied at intervals by whole clusters or bunches of double

endings, alongside of the following from Keats's first Epistle:--

Too partial friend! fain would I follow thee

Past each horizon of fine poesy;

Fain would I echo back each pleasant note

As o'er Sicilian seas, clear anthems float

'Mong the light skimming gondolas far parted,

Just when the sun his farewell beam has darted:

But 'tis impossible; far different cares

Beckon me sternly from soft 'Lydian airs,'

And hold my faculties so long in thrall,

That I am oft in doubt whether at all

I shall again see Phoebus in the morning:

Or flush'd Aurora in the roseate dawning!

Or a white Naiad in a rippling stream;

Or a rapt seraph in a moonlight beam;

Or again witness what with thee I've seen,

The dew by fairy feet swept from the green,

After a night of some quaint jubilee

Which every elf and fay had come to see:

When bright processions took their airy march

Beneath the curved moon's triumphal arch.

But might I now each passing moment give

To the coy muse, with me she would not live

In this dark city, nor would condescend

'Mid contradictions her delights to lend.

Should e'er the fine-ey'd maid to me be kind,

Ah! surely it must be whene'er I find

Some flowery spot, sequester'd, wild, romantic,

That often must have seen a poet frantic;

Where oaks, that erst the Druid knew, are growing,

And flowers, the glory of one day, are blowing;

Where the dark-leav'd laburnum's drooping clusters

Reflect athwart the stream their yellow lustres,

And intertwin'd the cassia's arms unite,

With its own drooping buds, but very white.

This is artless enough as writing, but obviously sincere, and

interesting as showing how early and instinctively both Greek and

mediaeval mythology had become to Keats symbols and incarnations, as

living as in the days of their first creation, of the charm and power of

nature. The piece ends with a queer Ovidian fancy about his friend, to

the effect that he, Mathew, had once been a 'flowret blooming wild'

beside the springs of poetry, and that Diana had plucked him and thrown

him into the stream as an offering to her brother Apollo, who had turned

him into a goldfinch, from which he was metamorphosed into a black-eyed

swan fed by Naiads.

The next experiments in this measure, the fragment of _Calidore_ with

its _Induction_, date from a few months later, after the publication of

_Rimini_, and express the longing of the young aspirant to follow the

example of Hunt, the loved Libertas, and tell, he too, a tale of

chivalry. But the longing is seconded by scarce a touch of inspiration.

The Gothic and nature descriptions are quite cheap and external, the

figures of knights and ladies quite conventional, the whole thing a

matter of plumes and palfreys and lances, shallow graces of costume and

sentiment, much more recalling Stothard's sugared illustrations to

Spenser than the spirit of Spenser himself, whose patronage Keats

timorously invokes. He at the same time entreats Hunt to intercede with

Spenser on his behalf: and in the result it seems as though Hunt had

stepped bodily in between them. In the handling of the metre, indeed,

there is nothing of Hunt's diluted Drydenism: there is the same direct

though timid following of Elizabethan precedents as before, varied by an

occasional echo of _Lycidas_ in the use of the short six-syllable

line:--

Anon he leaps along the oaken floors

Of halls and corridors.

But in the style and sentiment we trace Leigh Hunt, or those elements in

Keats which were naturally akin to him, at every turn. We read, for

instance, of trees that lean

So elegantly o'er the waters brim

And show their blossoms trim:

and of

The lamps that from the high-roof'd hall were pendent

And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent.

A few months later, on his August and September holiday at Margate,

Keats resumes the measure again, in two familiar epistles, one to his

brother George, the other to Cowden Clarke. To his brother he expresses

frankly, and in places felicitously, the moods and aspirations of a

youth passionately and justly conscious of the working of the poetic

impulse in him, but not less justly dissatisfied with the present fruits

of such impulse, and wondering whether any worth gathering will ever

come to ripeness. He tells us of hours when all in vain he gazes at the

play of sheet lightning or pries among the stars 'to strive to think

divinely,' and of other hours when the doors of the clouds break open

and show him visions of the pawing of white horses, the flashing of

festal wine cups in halls of gold, and supernatural colours of dimly

seen flowers. In such moods, he asks concerning an imagined poet:--

Should he upon an evening ramble fare

With forehead to the soothing breezes bare,

Would he naught see but the dark silent blue

With all its diamonds trembling through and through?

Or the coy moon, when in the waviness

Of whitest clouds she does her beauty dress,

And staidly paces higher up, and higher,

Like a sweet nun in holy-day attire?

Ah, yes! much more would start into his sight--

The revelries, and mysteries of night:

And should I ever see them, I will tell you

Such tales as needs must with amazement spell you.

But richer even than these privileges of the poet in his illuminated

moments is the reward which he may look for from posterity. In a long

passage, deeply pathetic considering the after-event, Keats imagines

exultingly what must be a poet's deathbed feelings when he foresees how

his name and work will be cherished in after times by men and women of

all sorts and conditions--warrior, statesman, and philosopher, village

May-queen and nursing mother (the best and most of the verses are those

which picture the May-queen taking his book from her bosom to read to a

thrilled circle on the village green). He might be happier, he admits,

could he stifle all these ambitions. Yet there are moments when he

already tastes the true delights of poetry; and at any rate he can take

pleasure in the thought that his brother will like what he writes; and

so he is content to close with an attempt at a quiet description of the

Thanet scenery and surroundings whence he writes.

In addressing Cowden Clarke Keats begins with an odd image, likening the

way in which poetic inspiration eludes him to the slipping away of drops

of water which a swan vainly tries to collect in the hollows of his

plumage. He would have written sooner, he tells his correspondent, but

had nothing worthy to submit to one so familiar with the whole range of

poetry and recently, moreover, privileged to walk and talk with Leigh

Hunt,--

One, who, of late, had ta'en sweet forest walks

With him who elegantly chats, and talks--

The wrong'd Libertas,--who has told you stories

Of laurel chaplets, and Apollo's glories;

Of troops chivalrous prancing through a city,

And tearful ladies made for love, and pity.

(The allusion in the last three lines is of course to _The Feast of the

Poets and Rimini_. The passage seems to make it certain that whatever

intercourse Keats himself may up to this time have had with Hunt was

slight.) Even now, he goes on, he would not show Clarke his verses but

that he takes courage from their old friendship and from his sense of

owing to it all he knows of poetry. Recurring to the pleasantness of his

present surroundings, he says that they have inspired him to attempt the

verses he is now writing for his friend, which would have been better

only that they have been too long parted. Then follow the lines quoted

farther back (p. 37) in affectionate remembrance of old Enfield and

Edmonton days.

In these early attempts Keats again ventures some way, but not yet far,

in the direction of breaking the fetters of the regular couplet. He runs

his sentences freely enough through a succession of lines, but nine

times out of ten with some kind of pause as well as emphasis on the

rime-word. He deals freely in double endings, and occasionally, but not

often (oftenest in the epistle to George) breaks the run of a line with

a full stop in or near the middle. He is in like manner timid and

sparing as yet in the use, to which a little later he was to give rein

so fully, of Elizabethan word-forms, or forms modelled for himself on

Elizabethan usage.

Somewhat more free and adventurous alike in metre and in diction are the

two poems, _Sleep and Poetry_ and '_I stood tip-toe_,' which Keats wrote

after he came back to London in the autumn. These are the things which,

together with two or three of the sonnets, give its real distinction and

high promise to the volume. Both in substance and intention they are

preludes merely, but preludes of genius, and, although marked by many

immaturities, as interesting and attractive perhaps as anything which

has ever been written by a poet of the same age about his art and his

aspirations. In them the ardent novice communes intently with himself on

his own hopes and ambitions. Possessed by the thrilling sense that

everything in earth and air is full, as it were, of poetry in solution,

he has as yet no clearness as to the forms and modes in which these

suspended elements will crystallize for him. In _Sleep and Poetry_ he

tries to get into shape his conceptions of the end and aim of poetical

endeavour, conjures up the difficulties of his task, counts over the new

achievement and growing promise of the time in which he lives, and gives

thanks for the encouragement by which he has been personally sustained.

In '_I stood tip-toe_' he runs over the stock of nature-images which are

his own private and peculiar delight, traces in various phases and

aspects of nature a symbolic affinity, or spiritual identity, with

various forms and kinds of poetry; tells how such a strain of verse will

call up such and such a range of nature images, and conversely how this

or that group of outdoor delights will inspire this or that mood of

poetic invention; and finally goes on to speculate on the moods which

first inspired some of the Grecian tales he loves best, and above all

the tale of Endymion and Cynthia, the beneficent wonders of whose bridal

night he hopes himself one day to retell.

_Sleep and Poetry_ is printed at the end of the volume, '_I stood

tip-toe_' at the beginning. It is hard to tell which of the two pieces

was written first.[8] _Sleep and Poetry_ is the longer and more

important, and has more the air of having been composed, so to speak,

all of a piece. We know that '_I stood tip-toe_' was not finished until

the end of December 1816. _Sleep and Poetry_ cannot well have been

written later, seeing that the book was published in the first days of

the following March, and must therefore have gone to press early in the

new year. What seems likeliest is that _Sleep and Poetry_ was written

without break during the first freshness of Keats's autumn intimacy at

the Hampstead cottage; while '_I stood tip-toe_' may have been begun in

the summer and resumed at intervals until the year's end. I shall take

_Sleep and Poetry_ first and let '_I stood tip-toe_' come after, as

being the direct and express prelude to the great experiment,

_Endymion_, which was to follow.

The scheme of _Sleep and Poetry_ is to some extent that of _The Floure

and the Lefe_, the pseudo-Chaucerian poem which, as we have seen, had so

strongly caught Keats's fancy. Keats takes for his motto lines from that

poem telling of a night wakeful but none the less cheerful, and avers

that his own poem was the result of just such another night. An opening

invocation sets the blessings of sleep above a number of other

delightful things which it gives him joy to think of, and recounts the

activities of Sleep personified,--'Silent entangler of a beauty's

tresses,' etc.,--in lines charming and essentially characteristic, for

it is the way of his imagination to be continually discovering active

and dynamic qualities in things and to let their passive and inert

properties be. But far higher and more precious than the blessings of

sleep are those of something else which he will not name:--

What is it? And to what shall I compare it?

It has a glory, and nought else can share it:

The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy,

Chasing away all worldliness and folly;

Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder,

Or the low rumblings earth's regions under;

And sometimes like a gentle whispering

Of all the secrets of some wond'rous thing

That breathes about us in the vacant air;

So that we look around with prying stare,

Perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning,

And catch soft floatings from a faint-heard hymning;

To see the laurel wreath, on high suspended.

That is to crown our name when life is ended.

Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice,

And from the heart up-springs, rejoice! rejoice!

Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things,

And die away in ardent mutterings.

Every enlightened spirit will guess, he implies, that this thing is

poetry, and to Poetry personified he addresses his next invocation,

declaring that if he can endure the overwhelming favour of her

acceptance he will be admitted to 'the fair visions of all places' and

will learn to reveal in verse the hidden beauty and meanings of things,

in an ascending scale from the playing of nymphs in woods and fountains

to 'the events of this wide world,' which it will be given him to seize

'like a strong giant.'

At this point a warning voice within him reminds him sadly of the

shortness and fragility of life, to which an answering inward voice of

gay courage and hope replies. Keats could only think in images, and

almost invariably in images of life and action: those here conveying the

warning and its reply are alike felicitous:--

Stop and consider! life is but a day;

A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way

From a tree's summit; a poor Indian's sleep

While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep

Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan?

Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown;

The reading of an ever-changing tale;

The light uplifting of a maiden's veil;

A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;

A laughing school-boy, without grief or care,

Riding the springy branches of an elm.

Then follows a cry for length enough of years (he will be content with

ten) to carry out the poetic schemes which float before his mind; and

here he returns to his ascending scale of poetic ambitions and sets it

forth and amplifies it with a new richness of figurative imagery. First

the realms of Pan and Flora, the pleasures of nature and the country and

the enticements of toying nymphs (perhaps with a Virgilian touch in his

memory from schoolboy days--_Panaque Silvanumque senem nymphasque

sorores_--certainly with visions from Poussin's Bacchanals in his mind's

eye): then, the ascent to loftier regions where the imagination has to

grapple with the deeper mysteries of life and experiences of the soul.

Here again he can only shadow forth his ideas by evoking shapes and

actions of visible beings to stand for and represent them symbolically.

He sees a charioteer guiding his horses among the clouds, looking out

the while 'with glorious fear,' then swooping downward to alight on a

grassy hillside; then talking with strange gestures to the trees and

mountains, then gazing and listening, 'awfully intent,' and writing

something on his tablets while a procession of various human shapes,

'shapes of delight, of mystery and fear,' sweeps on before his view, as

if in pursuit of some ever-fleeting music, in the shadow cast by a grove

of oaks. The dozen lines calling up to the mind's eye the multitude and

variety of figures in this procession--

Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways

Flit onward--

contain less suggestion than we should have expected from what has gone

before, of the events and tragedies of the world, 'the agonies, the

strife of human hearts,'--and close with the vision of

a lovely wreath of girls

Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls,

as if images of pure pagan joy and beauty would keep forcing themselves

on the young aspirant's mind in spite of his resolve to train himself

for the grapple with sterner themes.

This vision of the charioteer and his team remained in Keats's mind as a

symbol for the imagination and its energies. For the moment, so his poem

goes on, the vision vanishes, and the sense of every-day realities seems

like a muddy stream bearing his soul into nothingness. But he clings to

the memory of that chariot and its journey; and thereupon turns to

consider the history of English poetry and the dearth of imagination

from which it had suffered for so many years. Here comes the famous

outbreak, first of indignant and then of congratulatory criticism, which

was the most explicit battle-cry of the romantic revolution in poetry

since the publication of Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of

_Lyrical Ballads_ seventeen years earlier:--

Is there so small a range

In the present strength of manhood, that the high

Imagination cannot freely fly

As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds,

Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds

Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all?

From the clear space of ether, to the small

Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning

Of Jove's large eye-brow, to the tender greening

Of April meadows? Here her altar shone,

E'en in this isle; and who could paragon

The fervid choir that lifted up a noise

Of harmony, to where it aye will poise

Its mighty self of convoluting sound,

Huge as a planet, and like that roll round,

Eternally around a dizzy void?

Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy'd

With honors; nor had any other care

Than to sing out and sooth their wavy hair.

Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism

Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,

Made great Apollo blush for this his land.

Men were thought wise who could not understand

His glories: with a puling infant's force

They sway'd about upon a rocking horse

And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd!

The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd

Its gathering waves--ye felt it not. The blue

Bared its eternal bosom,[9] and the dew

Of summer nights collected still to make

The morning precious: beauty was awake!

Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead

To things ye knew not of,--were closely wed

To musty laws lined out with wretched rule

And compass vile: so that ye thought a school

Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,

Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,

Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:

A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask

Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!

That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face,

And did not know it,--no, they went about,

Holding a poor, decrepid standard out

Mark'd with most flimsy mottos, and in large

The name of one Boileau!

The two great elder captains of poetic revolution, Coleridge and

Wordsworth, have expounded their cause, in prose, with full maturity of

thought and language: Wordsworth in the austere contentions of his

famous prefaces to his second edition (1800), Coleridge in the luminous

retrospect of the _Biographia Literaria_ (1816). In the interval a cloud

of critics, including men of such gifts as Lamb, Hazlitt, and Leigh

Hunt, were in their several ways champions of the same cause. But none

of these has left any enunciation of theory having power to thrill the

ear and haunt the memory like the rimes of this young untrained recruit,

John Keats. It is easy, indeed, to pick his verses to shreds, if we

choose to fix a prosaic and rational attention on their faults. What is

it, for instance, that imagination is asked to do? Fly, or drive? Is it

she, or her steeds, that are to paw up against the light? And why paw?

Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly be other than

strange. What sort of a verb is 'I green, thou greenest?' Why should the

hair of the muses require 'soothing'?--if it were their tempers it would

be more intelligible. And surely 'foppery' belongs to civilization and

not to 'barbarism': and a standard-bearer may be decrepit but not a

standard, and a standard flimsy but not a motto. And so on without end,

if we choose to let the mind assume that attitude and to resent the

contemptuous treatment of a very finished artist and craftsman by one as

yet obviously raw and imperfect. Byron, in his controversy with Bowles a

year or two later, adopted this mode of attack effectively enough; his

spleen against a contemporary finding as usual its most convenient

weapon in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, for the genius

and the methods of Pope. But controversy apart, if we have in us a touch

of instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as distinct from

that of taste and reason and 'correctness',--however clearly we may see

the weak points of a passage like this, yet we cannot but feel that

Keats touches truly the root of the matter: we cannot but admire the

ring and power of his appeal to the elements, his fine spontaneous and

effective turns of rhetoric, and the elastic life and variety of his

verse.

So much for the indignant part of the passage. The congratulatory part

repeats with different imagery the sense of the sonnet to Haydon

beginning 'Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,' and declares that

fine sounds are once more floating wild about the earth, wherefore the

Muses are now glad and happy. But the congratulations, it next occurs to

the young poet, need to be qualified. To some of the recent achievements

of poetry he demurs, declaring that their themes of song are 'ugly

clubs' and the poets who fling them Polyphemuses 'disturbing the grand

sea of song' (Keats is here remembering the huge club which Ulysses and

his companions, in the Homeric story, find in the cave of Polyphemus,

and confusing it with the rocks which the blinded giant later tears up

and hurls after them into the sea).[10] The obvious supposition is that

Keats is here referring to Byron's Eastern tales, with their clamour and

heat and violence of melodramatic action and passion. Leigh Hunt,

indeed, who ought to have known, asserts in his review of the volume

that they are aimed against 'the morbidity which taints some of the

productions of the poets of the Lake School.' I suspect that Hunt is

here attributing to Keats some of his own poetical aversions. What

productions can he mean? Southey's _Curse of Kehama_? Coleridge's

_Ancient Mariner_ or _Christabel_? Wordsworth's relatively few poems, or

episodes, of tragic life--as the _Mad Mother_, _Ruth_, _Margaret_? For

certainly the strained simplicities and trivialities of some of his

country ballads, which were what Leigh Hunt and his friends most

disliked in Wordsworth's work, could never be called thunders.

But these jarring things, Keats goes on, shall not disturb him. He will

believe in and seek to enter upon the kingdom of poetry where all shall

be gentle and soothing like a lawn beneath a myrtle tree,

And they shall be accounted poet-kings

Who simply sing the most heart-easing things.

Then a momentary terror of his own presumption seizes him; but he puts

it away, defies despondency, and declares that for all his youth and

lack of learning and wisdom, he has a vast idea before him, and a clear

conception of the end and aim of poetry. Dare the utmost he will--and

then once more the sense of the greatness of the task comes over him,

and he falls back for support on thoughts of recent friendship and

encouragement. A score of lines follow, recalling happy talks at Hunt's

over books and prints: the memory of these calls up by association a

string of the delights ('luxuries' as in Huntian phrase he calls them)

of nature: thence he recurs to the pleasures of sleep, or rather of a

night when sleep failed him for thinking over the intercourse he had

been enjoying and the place where he now rested--that is on the couch in

Hunt's library. Here follow the lines quoted above (p. 53) about the

prints on the library walls: and the piece concludes:--

The very sense of where I was might well

Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that there came

Thought after thought to nourish up the flame

Within my breast; so that the morning light

Surprised me even from a sleepless night;

And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay,

Resolving to begin that very day

These lines; and howsoever they be done,

I leave them as a father does his son.

The best reason for thinking that the poem '_I stood tip-toe_,' though

probably finished quite as late as _Sleep and Poetry_, was begun

earlier, is that in it Keats again follows the practice which he had

attempted in _Calidore_ and its _Induction_ but gave up in _Sleep and

Poetry_, namely that of occasionally introducing a lyrical effect with a

six-syllable line, in the manner used by Spenser in the _Epithalamion_

and Milton in _Lycidas_,--

Open afresh your round of starry folds,

Ye ardent marigolds!

No conclusion as to the date when the piece was begun can be drawn from

the scene of summer freshness with which it opens, or from Leigh Hunt's

statement that this description was suggested by a summer's day when he

stood at a certain spot on Hampstead Heath. This may be quite true, but

in the mind of a poet such scenes ripen by recollection, and Keats may

at any after day have evoked it for his purpose, which was to bring his

imagination to the right taking-off place--to plant it, so to speak, on

the right spring-board--from which to start on its flight through a

whole succession of other and kindred images of natural beauty. Some of

the series of evocations that follow are already almost in the happiest

vein of Keats's lighter nature-poetry, especially the four lines about

the sweet peas on tip-toe for a flight, and the long passage recalling

his boyish delights by the Edmonton brookside and telling (in lines

which Tennyson has remembered in his idyll of _Enid_) how the minnows

would scatter beneath the shadow of a lifted hand and come together

again. When in the course of his recapitulation there comes to him the

image of the moon appearing from behind a cloud, he breaks off to

apostrophize that goddess of his imaginative idolatry, that source at

once and symbol, for such to his instinct she truly was, of poetic

inspiration. But for the moment he does not pursue the theme: he pauses

to trace the affinities between several kinds of nature-delight and

corresponding moods of poetry,--

In the calm grandeur of a sober line,

We see the waving of the mountain pine;

And when a tale is beautifully staid,

We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade,--

and so forth. And then, having in his mind's eye, as I should guess,

some of the mythological prints from Hunt's portfolios, he asks what

moods or phases of nature first inspired the poets of old with the

fables of Cupid and Psyche and of Pan and Syrinx, of Narcissus and Echo,

and most beautiful of all, that of Cynthia and Endymion,--and for the

remaining fifty lines of the poem moonlight and the Endymion story take

full possession. The lines imagining the occasion of the myth's

invention are lovely:--

He was a Poet, sure a lover too,

Who stood on Latmus' top, what time there blew

Soft breezes from the myrtle vale below;

And brought in faintness solemn, sweet, and slow

A hymn from Dian's temple; while upswelling,

The incense went to her own starry dwelling.

But though her face was clear as infant's eyes,

Though she stood smiling o'er the sacrifice,

The Poet wept at her so piteous fate,

Wept that such beauty should be desolate:

So in fine wrath some golden sounds he won,

And gave meek Cynthia her Endymion.

Then, treating the bridal night for the moment not as a myth but as a

thing that actually happened, he recounts, in a strain of purely human

tenderness which owes something to his hospital experience and which he

was hardly afterwards to surpass, the sweet and beneficent influences

diffused on that night about the world:--

The breezes were ethereal and pure,

And crept through half-closed lattices to cure

The languid sick; it cool'd their fever'd sleep,

And soothed them into slumbers full and deep.

Soon they awoke clear eyed, nor burnt with thirsting,

Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting:

And springing up, they met the wondering sight

Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight;

Who feel their arms and breasts, and kiss and stare,

And on their placid foreheads part the hair.

Young men and maidens at each other gaz'd

With hands held back, and motionless, amaz'd

To see the brightness in each other's eyes.

Then, closing, he asks himself the momentous question, 'Was there a poet

born?' which he intended that his next year's work should answer.