In neither of these poems is the use of Elizabethan verbal forms, or the

coinage of similar forms by analogy, carried nearly as far as we shall

find it carried later on, especially in _Endymion_. The abstract nouns

expressing qualities pleasant to the senses or the sensuous imagination,

on the model of those in Chapman's _Hymn to Pan_, increase in number,

and we get the 'quaint mossiness of aged roots,' the 'hurrying

freshnesses' of a stream running over gravel, the 'pure deliciousness'

of the Endymion story, the 'pillow silkiness' of clouds, the 'blue

cragginess' of other clouds, and the 'widenesses' of the ocean of

poetry. Once, evidently with William Browne's 'roundly form' in his

mind, Keats invents, infelicitously enough, an adjective 'boundly' for

'bounden.' In the matter of metre, he is now fairly well at home in the

free Elizabethan use of the couplet, letting his periods develop

themselves unhampered, suffering his full pauses to fall at any point in

the line where the sense calls for them, the rime echo to come full and

emphatic or faint and light as may be, and the pause following the

rime-word to be shorter or longer or almost non-existent on occasion. If

his ear was for the moment attuned to the harmonies of any special

master among the Elizabethans, it was by this time Fletcher rather than

Browne: at least in _Sleep and Poetry_ the double endings no longer come

in clusters as they did in the earlier epistle, nor are the intervening

couplets so nearly regular, while there is a marked preference for

emphasizing an adjective by placing it at the end of a line and letting

its noun follow at the beginning of the next,--'the high |

Imagination,'--'the small | Breath of new buds unfolding.' The reader

will best see my point if he will compare the movement of the passages

in _Sleep and Poetry_ where these things occur with the Endymion passage

he will find quoted later on from the _Faithful Shepherdess_ (p. 168).

As to contemporary influences apparent in Keats's first volume, enough

has been said concerning that of Leigh Hunt. The influence of an

incommensurably greater poet, of Wordsworth, is also to be traced in it.

That Keats was by this time a diligent and critical admirer of

Wordsworth we know: both of the earlier poems and of the _Excursion_,

which had appeared when his passion for poetry was already at its height

in the last year of his apprenticeship at Edmonton. There is a famous

passage in the fourth book of _The Excursion_ where Wordsworth treats of

the spirit of Greek religion and imagines how some of its conceptions

first took shape:--

In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched

On the soft grass through half a summer's day,

With music lulled his indolent repose:

And, in some fit of weariness, if he,

When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear

A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds

Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,

Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,

A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute,

And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.

The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye

Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart

Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed

That timely light, to share his joyous sport:

And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs,

Across the lawn and through the darksome grove,

Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes

By echo multiplied from rock or cave,

Swept in the storm of chase; as moon and stars

Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven,

When winds are blowing strong.

Keats, we know, was familiar with this passage, and a little later on we

shall find him criticizing it in conversation with a friend. Leigh Hunt,

in a review written at the time, hints that it was in his mind when he

wrote the lines in '_I stood tip-toe_,' asking in what mood or under

what impulse a number of the Grecian fables were first invented and

giving the answers to his own questions. We may take Hunt's word for the

fact, seeing that he was constantly in Keats's company at the time.

Other critics have gone farther and supposed it was from Wordsworth that

Keats first learned truly to understand Greek mythology. I do not at all

think so. He would never have pored so passionately over the stories in

the classical dictionaries as a schoolboy, nor mused on them so intently

in the field walks of his apprentice days by sunset and moonlight, had

not some inborn instinct made the world of ancient fable and the world

of natural beauty each equally living to his apprehension and each

equally life-giving to the other. Wordsworth's interpretations will no

doubt have appealed to him profoundly, but not as something new, only as

putting eloquently and justly what he had already felt and divined by

native instinct.

Again, it has been acutely pointed out by Mr Robert Bridges how some of

the ideas expressed by Keats in his own way in _Sleep and Poetry_ run

parallel with some of those expressed in a very different way by

Wordsworth in _Tintern Abbey_, a poem which we know from other evidence

to have been certainly much in Keats's mind a year and a half later.

Wordsworth in _Tintern Abbey_ defines three stages of his own emotional

and imaginative development in relation to nature: first the stage of

mere boisterous physical and animal pleasure: then that of intense and

absorbing, but still unreflecting passion,--

An appetite, a feeling and a love

That had no need of a remoter charm

By thought supplied, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye,--

and lastly the higher, more humanized and spiritualized passion doubly

enriched by the ever-present haunting of 'the still, sad music of

humanity,' and by the

sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

Mr Bridges finds Wordsworth's conception of these three stages more or

less accurately paralleled in various passages of Keats's _Sleep and

Poetry_. One passage which he quotes, that in which Keats figures human

life under the string of joyous images beginning, 'A pigeon tumbling in

clear summer air', seems to me irrelevant, as being simply the answer of

the poet's soul to certain melancholy promptings of its own. On the

other hand there certainly is something that reminds us of Wordsworth's

three stages in Keats's repeated indication of the ascending scale of

theme and temper along which he hopes to work. And his long figurative

passage beginning--

And can I ever bid these joys farewell?

Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life--

may fairly, at its outset, be compared with Wordsworth's final stage:

only, as I have asked the reader to note, the procession of symbolic and

enigmatic forms and actions which Keats summons up before our mind's

eye, so far from having any fixed or increasing character of pensiveness

or gravity, winds up with a figure of sheer animal happiness and joy of

life.

Mr Bridges further notes, very justly, the striking contrast between the

methods of the elder and the younger poet in these passages, defining

Wordsworth's as a subjective and Keats's as an objective method. I

should be inclined to describe the same difference in another way, and

to say that both by gift and purpose it was the part of Wordsworth to

meditate and expound, while the part of Keats was to imagine and evoke.

Wordsworth, bringing strong powers of abstract thinking to bear on his

intense and intensely realized personal experience, expounds the

spiritual relations of man to nature as he conceives them, sometimes, as

in _Tintern Abbey_ and many passages of _The Prelude_ and _Excursion_,

with more revealing insight and a more exalted passion than any other

poet has attained; sometimes, alas! quite otherwise, when his passion

has subsided, and he must needs to go back upon his experiences and

droningly and flatly analyse and explain them. Keats, on the other hand,

had a mind constitutionally unapt for abstract thinking. When he

conceives or wishes to express general ideas, his only way of doing so

is by calling up, from the multitudes of concrete images with which his

memory and imagination are haunted, such as strike him as fitted by

their colour and significance, their quality of association and

suggestion, to stand for and symbolize the abstractions working in his

mind; and in this concrete and figurative fashion he will be found, by

those who take the pains to follow him, to think coherently and

purposefully enough. Again, Keats's sense of personal identity was ever

ready to be dissolved and carried under by the strength of his

imaginative sympathies. It is not the effect of nature on his personal

self that he realizes and ponders over; what he does is with

ever-participating joy and instantaneous instinct to go out into the

doings of nature and lose himself in them. In the result he neither

strives for or attains, as Mr Bridges truly points out, the sheer

intellectual lucidity which Wordsworth in his most impassioned moments

never loses. But as, in regard to nature, Wordsworth's is the genius of

luminous exposition, so Keats's, even among the immaturities of his

first volume, is the genius of living evocation.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The lines I mean are--

This canopy mark: 'tis the work of a fay;

Beneath its rich shade did King Oberon languish,

When lovely Titania was far, far away,

And cruelly left him to sorrow, and anguish.

Shakespeare's hint for his Oberon and Titania was taken, as is well

known, from the French prose romance _Huon of Bordeaux_ translated by

Lord Berners. The plot of Wieland's celebrated poem is founded

entirely on the same romance. With its high-spiced blend of the

marvellous and the voluptuous, the cynically gay and the heavily

moral and pathetic, it had a considerable vogue in Sotheby's

translation (published 1798) and played a part in the English

romantic movement of the time. There are several passages in Keats,

notably in _The Cap and Bells_, where I seem to catch a strain

reminiscent of this _Oberon_, and one instance where a definite

phrase from it seems to have lingered subconsciously in his memory

and been turned to gold, thus:--

Oft in this speechless language, glance on glance,

When mute the tongue, how voluble the heart!

_Oberon_, c. vi, st. 17.

No utter'd syllable, or woe betide!

But to her heart her heart was voluble.

_The Eve of St Agnes_, st. 23.

[2] March 1816 according to Woodhouse.

[3] _The Prelude_, book v.

[4] See above, p. 68.

[5] Particularly Sonnet XII:--

Voi che portate la sembianza umile,

Cogli occhi bassi mostrando dolore.

It would have been easy to suppose that Keats had learnt something of

the _Vita Nuova_ through Leigh Hunt: but they were not yet acquainted

when he wrote the Leander sonnet, so that the resemblance is most

likely accidental.

[6] In the earlier editions this sonnet is headed _On a picture of

Leander_. A note of Woodhouse (Houghton MSS., Transcripts III) puts

the matter right and gives the date. Which particular Leander gem of

Tassie's Keats had before him it is impossible to tell. The general

catalogue of Tassie's reproductions gives a list of over sixty

representing Leander swimming either alone or with Hero looking down

at him from her tower. Most of them were not from true antiques but

from later imitations.

[7] Here, for instance, are verses of Keats that have often been

charged with Cockneyism and Huntism:--

And revelled in a chat that ceased not

When at nightfall among our books we got.

The silence when some rimes are coming out,

And when they're come, the very pleasant rout.

Well, but had not Drayton written in his _Epistle to Henry

Reynolds_?--

My dearly loved friend how oft have we

In winter evenings (meaning to be free)

To some well-chosen place used to retire,

And there with moderate meat, and wine, and fire,

Have past the hour contentedly with chat,

Now talked of this and then discoursed of that,

Spoke our own verses 'twixt ourselves, if not

Other men's lines, which we by chance had got.

And Milton in the _Vacation Exercise_?--

I have some lively thoughts that rove about,

And loudly knock to have their passage out.

[8] It is to be remembered that in his famous volume of 1820 Keats

prints first the poem he had last written, _Lamia_.

[9] So Wordsworth in his famous sonnet:--

This sea that bares its bosom to the moon.

[10] In Lord Houghton's and nearly all editions of Keats, including,

I am sorry to say, my own, this phrase has been corrected, quite

without cause, into the trite 'ugly cubs.'

CHAPTER V

APRIL-DECEMBER 1817: WORK ON _ENDYMION_

'Poems' fall flat--Reviews by Hunt and others--Change of

publishers--New friends: Bailey and Woodhouse--Begins _Endymion_ at

Carisbrooke--Moves to Margate--Hazlitt and Southey--Hunt and

Haydon--Ambition and self-doubt--Stays at Canterbury--Joins brothers

at Hampstead--Dilke and Brown--Visits Bailey at Oxford--Work on

_Endymion_--Bailey's testimony--Talk on Wordsworth--Letters from

Oxford--To his sister Fanny--To Jane and J.H. Reynolds--Return to

Hampstead--Friends at loggerheads--Stays at Burford

Bridge--Correspondence--Confessions--Speculations--Imagination and

truth--Composes various lyrics--'O love me truly'--'In drear-nighted

December'--Dryden and Swinburne--_Endymion_ finished--An Autumnal

close--Return to Hampstead.

Keats's first volume had been launched, to quote the words of Cowden

Clarke, 'amid the cheers and fond anticipations of all his circle.

Everyone of us expected (and not unreasonably) that it would create a

sensation in the literary world.' The magniloquent Haydon words these

expectations after his manner:--'I have read your _Sleep and Poetry_--it

is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from their occupations and

keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that _will_ follow.'

Sonnets poured in on the occasion, and not from intimates only. I have

already quoted (p. 75) one which Reynolds, familiar with the contents of

the forthcoming book, wrote a few days before its publication to welcome

it and at the same time to congratulate Keats on his sonnet written in

Clarke's copy of the _Floure and the Lefe_. Leigh Hunt, always delighted

to repay compliment with compliment, replied effusively in kind to the

sonnet in which Keats had dedicated the volume to him. Richard

Woodhouse, of whom we shall soon hear more but who was as yet a

stranger, in the closing lines of a sonnet addressed to Apollo, welcomed

Keats as the last born son of that divinity and the herald of his return

to lighten the poetic darkness of the land:--

Have these thy glories perish'd? or in scorn

Of thankless man hath thy race ceased to quire?

O no! thou hear'st! for lo! the beamed morn

Chases our night of song: and, from the lyre

Waking long dormant sounds, Keats, thy last born,

To the glad realm proclaims the coming of his sire.

Sonnets are not often addressed by publishers to their clients: but one

has been found in the handwriting of Charles Ollier, and almost

certainly composed by him, expressing admiration for Keats's work. The

brothers Ollier, it will be remembered, were Shelley's publishers, and

for a while also Leigh Hunt's and Lamb's, and Charles was the

poetry-loving and enthusiastic brother of the two, and himself a writer

of some accomplishment in prose and verse. But in point of fact, outside

the immediate Leigh Hunt circle, the volume made extremely little

impression, and the public was as far as possible from being roused from

its occupations or made tremble. 'Alas!' continues Cowden Clarke, 'the

book might have emerged in Timbuctoo with far stronger chance of fame

and appreciation. The whole community as if by compact, seemed

determined to know nothing about it.'

Clarke here somewhat exaggerates the facts. Leigh Hunt kept his own

review of the volume back for some three months, very likely with the

just idea that praise from him might prejudice Keats rather than serve

him. At length it appeared, in three numbers of the _Examiner_ for June

and July, the first number setting forth the aims and tendencies of the

new movement in poetry with a conscious clearness such as to those

taking part in a collective, three-parts instinctive effort of the kind

comes usually in retrospect only and not in the thick of the struggle.

In the second and third notices Hunt speaks of the old graces of poetry

reappearing, warns 'this young writer of genius' against

disproportionate detail and a too revolutionary handling of metre, and

after quotation winds up by calling the volume 'a little luxuriant heap

of

Such sights as youthful poets dream

On summer eves by haunted stream.'

Two at least of the established critical reviews noticed the book at

length, Constable's _Scots and Edinburgh Magazine_, and the _Eclectic

Review_, the chief organ of lettered nonconformity, owned and edited by

the busy dissenting poet and bookseller Josiah Conder. Both criticisms

are of the preaching and admonishing kind then almost universally in

fashion. The Scottish reviewer recognizes in the new poet a not wholly

unsuccessful disciple of Spenser, but warns him against 'the appalling

doom which awaits the faults of mannerism or the ambition of a sickly

refinement,' and with reference to his association with the person and

ideas of Hazlitt and Hunt declares that 'if Mr Keats does not forthwith

cast off the uncleanness of this school, he will never make his way to

the truest strain of poetry in which, taking him by himself, it appears

he might succeed.' The preachment of the _Eclectic_ is still more

pompous and superior. There are mild words of praise for some of the

sonnets, but none for that on Chapman's Homer. _Sleep and Poetry_,

declares the critic, would seem to show of the writer that 'he is indeed

far gone, beyond the reach of the efficacy of either praise or censure,

in affectation and absurdity. Seriously, however, we regret that a young

man of vivid imagination and fine talents should have fallen into so bad

hands as to have been flattered into the resolution to publish verses,

of which a few years hence he will be glad to escape from the

remembrance.'

Notices such as this could not help a new writer to fame or his book to

sale. But before they appeared Keats and his brothers, or they for him,

had begun to fret at the failure of the volume and to impute it, as

authors and their friends will, to some mishandling by the publishers.

George in John's absence wrote to the Olliers taking them to task pretty

roundly, and received the often-quoted reply drafted, let us hope, not

by the sonneteer but by James Ollier, his business brother, and alleging

of the work that--

By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us

have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many

cases offered to take it back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule

which has, time after time, been showered upon it. In fact, it was

only on Saturday last that we were under the mortification of having

our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman, who

told us he considered it 'no better than a take in.'

Meanwhile Keats had found other publishers ready to take up his next

work, and destined to become his staunch and generous friends. These

were Messrs Taylor and Hessey of 93 Fleet Street. John Taylor, the chief

partner, was a man of high character and considerable attainments, who

had come up from Nottinghamshire to open a business in London ten years

earlier. He was already noted as an authority on Junius and was to be a

little later the editor as well as publisher of the _London Magazine_,

and the good friend and frequent entertainer (in the back parlour of the

publishing house in Fleet Street) of his most distinguished

contributors. How and through whom Keats was introduced to his firm is

not quite clear: probably through Benjamin Bailey, a new acquaintance

whom we know to have been a friend of Taylor's. Bailey was an Oxford man

five years older than Keats. He had been an undergraduate of Trinity and

was now staying up at Magdalen Hall to read for orders. He was an ardent

student of poetry and general literature as well as of theology, a

devout worshipper of Milton, and scarcely less of Wordsworth, with whom

he had some personal acquaintance. Of his appetite for books Keats wrote

when they had come to know each other well: 'I should not like to be

pages in your way; when in a tolerably hungry mood you have no mercy.

Your teeth are the Rock Tarpeian down which you capsize epic poems like

mad. I would not for forty shillings be Coleridge's Lays [i.e. _Lay

Sermons_] in your way.' Bailey was intimate with John Hamilton Reynolds

and his family, and at this time a suitor for the hand of his sister

Marianne. In the course of the winter 1816-17 Reynolds had written to

him enthusiastically of Keats's poetical promise and personal charm.

When at the beginning of March Keats's volume came out, Bailey was much

struck, and on a visit to London called to make the new poet's

acquaintance. Though it was not until a few months later that this

acquaintance ripened into close friendship, it may well have been Bailey

who recommended Keats and Taylor to each other.

Relations of business or friendship with Taylor necessarily involved

relations with Richard Woodhouse, a lettered and accomplished young

solicitor of twenty-nine who was an intimate friend of Taylor's and at

this time apparently the regular reader and adviser to the firm.

Woodhouse was sprung from an old landed stock in Herefordshire, some of

whose members were now in the wine-trade (his father, it seems, was

owner or part owner of the White Hart at Bath). He had been educated at

Eton but not at the university: his extant correspondence, as well as

notes and version-books in his hand, show him to have been a good

linguist in Spanish and Italian and a man of remarkably fine literary

taste and judgment. He afterwards held a high position as a solicitor

and was one of the founders of the Law Life Insurance Society.

These three new friendships, with Benjamin Bailey, John Taylor, and

Richard Woodhouse, formed during the six weeks between the publication

of his book (March 3) and the mid-April following, turned out to be

among the most valuable of Keats's life, and were the best immediate

results the issue of his first volume brought him. During this interval

he and his brothers were lodging at 17 Cheapside, having left their old

quarters in the Poultry. Some time in March it was decided, partly on

Haydon's urging, that John should for the sake of quiet and

self-improvement go and spend some time by himself in the country, and

try to get to work upon his great meditated _Endymion_ poem. He writes

as much to Reynolds, concluding with an adaptation from Falstaff

expressive of anxiety for the health of some of those dear to

him--probably his brother Tom and James Rice:--

My brothers are anxious that I should go by myself into the

country--they have always been extremely fond of me, and now that

Haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that I should be alone to

improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me

continually for a great good which I hope will follow. So I shall soon

be out of Town. You must soon bring all your present troubles to a

close, and so must I, but we must, like the Fox, prepare for a fresh

swarm of flies. Banish money--Banish sofas--Banish Wine--Banish Music;

but right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health--Banish

Health and banish all the world.

On the 14th of April Keats took the night mail for Southampton, whence

he writes next day a lively letter to his brothers. By the 17th, having

looked at Shanklin and decided against it, he was installed in a lodging

at Carisbrooke. Writing to Reynolds he gives the reasons for his choice,

mentioning at the same time that he is feeling rather nervous from want

of sleep, and enclosing the admirable sonnet _On the Sea_ which he has

just composed--

It keeps eternal whisperings around

Desolate shores, etc.--

It was the intense haunting of the lines in the scene on Dover Cliff in

_King Lear_ beginning 'Do you not hear the sea,' which moved him, he

says, to this effort. He was reading and re-reading his Shakespeare with

passion, and phrases from the plays come up continually in his letters,

not only, as in the following extract, in the form of set quotations,

but currently, as though they were part of his own mind and being.

Having found in the lodging-house passage an engraved head of

Shakespeare which pleased him and hung it up in his room (his landlady

afterwards made him a present of it), he bethinks him of the approaching

anniversary, April 23:--

I'll tell you what--on the 23d was Shakespeare born. Now if I should

receive a letter from you, and another from my Brothers on that day

'twould be a parlous good thing. Whenever you write say a word or two

on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you,

which must be continually happening, notwithstanding that we read the

same Play forty times--for instance, the following from the Tempest

never struck me so forcibly as at present,

Urchins

_Shall, for the vast of night that they may work_,

All exercise on thee--

How can I help bringing to your mind the line--

In the dark backward and abysm of time.

I find I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal Poetry--half the

day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has

made me a Leviathan I had become all in a Tremble from not having

written anything of late--the Sonnet over-leaf did me good. I slept

the better last night for it--this Morning, however, I am nearly as

bad again. Just now I opened Spenser, and the first Lines I saw were

these--

The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought,

And is with child of glorious great intent,

Can never rest until it forth have brought

Th' eternal brood of glory excellent.

'I shall forthwith begin my _Endymion_,' he adds, and looks forward to

reading some of it out, when his correspondent comes to visit him, in a

nook near the castle which he has already marked for the purpose.

But Haydon's prescription of solitude turned out the worst Keats could

well have followed in the then state of his mind, fermenting with a

thousand restless thoughts and inchoate imaginations and with the

feverish conflict between ambition and self-distrust. The result at any

rate was that he passed the time, to use his own words, 'in continual

burning of thought, as an only resource,' and what with that and lack of

proper food felt himself after a week or ten days 'not over capable in

his upper stories' and in need of change and companionship. He made

straight for his last year's lodging at Margate and got Tom to join him

there. Thence in the second week of May he writes a long letter to Hunt

and another to Haydon. To Hunt he criticizes some points in the last

number of the _Examiner_, and especially, in his kind-hearted,

well-conditioned way, deprecates a certain vicious allusion to grey

hairs in an attack of Hazlitt upon Southey. Later on we shall have to

tell of the critical savagery of _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_, now

long since branded and proverbial. But it should be borne in mind, as it

by no means always is, that the Tories were far from having the savagery

to themselves. When Hazlitt, for one, chose to strike on the liberal

side, he could match Gifford or Lockhart or Wilson or Maginn with their

own weapons. To realize the controversial atmosphere of the time, here

is a passage, and not the fiercest, from the Hazlitt article in which

Keats found too venomous a sting. Southey's first love, rails Hazlitt,

had been the Republic, his second was Legitimacy, 'her more fortunate

and wealthy rival':--

He is becoming uxorious in his second matrimonial connection; and

though his false Duessa has turned out a very witch, a murderess, a

sorceress, perjured, and a harlot, drunk with insolence, mad with

power, a griping rapacious wretch, bloody, luxurious, wanton,

malicious, not sparing steel, or poison, or gold, to gain her

ends--bringing famine, pestilence, and death in her train--infecting

the air with her thoughts, killing the beholders with her looks,

claiming mankind as her property, and using them as her

slaves--driving every thing before her, and playing the devil wherever

she comes, Mr Southey sticks to her in spite of everything, and for

very shame lays his head in her lap, paddles with the palms of her

hands, inhales her hateful breath, leers in her eyes and whispers in

her ears, calls her little fondling names, Religion, Morality, and

Social Order, takes for his motto,

Be to her faults a little blind,

Be to her virtues very kind--

sticks close to his filthy bargain, and will not give her up, because

she keeps him, and he is down in her will. Faugh!

It is fair to note that the mistress thus depicted as Southey's is an

allegorical being, while the Blackwood scurrilities were often directly

personal.

After asking how Hunt's own new poem, _The Nymphs_, is getting on, Keats

tells how he has been writing some of _Endymion_ every day the last

fortnight, except travelling days, and how thoughts of the greatness of

his ambition and the uncertainty of his powers have thrown him into a

fit of gloom; hinting at such moods of bleak and blank despondency as we

shall find now and again figuratively described in the text of

_Endymion_ itself.

I have asked myself so often why I should be a poet more than other

men, seeing how great a thing it is,... that at last the idea has

grown so monstrously beyond my seeming power of attainment that the

other day I nearly consented with myself to drop into a Phaeton ... I

see nothing but continual uphill journeying. Now is there anything

more unpleasant than to be so journeying and to miss the goal at last?

But I intend to whistle all those cogitations into the sea, where I

hope they will breed storms enough to block up all exit from Russia.

Does Shelley go on telling strange stories of the deaths of kings?[1]

Tell him there are strange stories of the deaths of poets. Some have

died before they were conceived.

The same evening Keats begins to answer a letter of encouragement and

advice he had just had from Haydon. This is the letter of Haydon's from

which I have already quoted the passage about the efficacy of prayer as

Haydon had experienced it. Perfectly sincere and genuinely moved, he can

never for a minute continuously steer clear of rant and fustian and

self-praise at another's expense.

Never despair, he goes on, while the path is open to you. By habitual

exercise you will have habitual intercourse and constant

companionship; and at every want turn to the Great Star of your hopes

with a delightful confidence that will never be disappointed. I love

you like my own brother: Beware, for God's sake, of the delusions and

sophistications that are ripping up the talents and morality of our

friend.[2] He will go out of the world the victim of his own weakness

and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of his

enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to

support injured by his own neglect of character. I wish you would come

up to town for a day or two that I may put your head in my picture. I

have rubbed in Wordsworth's, and advanced the whole. God bless you, my

dear Keats! do not despair; collect incident, study character, read

Shakespeare, and trust in Providence, and you will do, you must.

Keats in answer quotes the opening speech of the King in _Love's

Labour's Lost_,--

Let Fame, that all pant after in their lives

Live registered upon our brazen tombs, etc.,

saying that he could not bear to think he had not the right to couple

his own name with Haydon's in such a forecast, and acknowledging the

occasional moods of depression which have put him into such a state of

mind as to read over his own lines and hate them, though he has picked

up heart again when he found some from Pope's Homer which Tom read out

to him seem 'like Mice' to his own. He takes encouragement also from the

notion that has visited him lately of some good genius--can it be

Shakespeare?--presiding over him. Continuing the next day, he is

downhearted again at hearing from George of money difficulties actual

and prospective. 'You tell me never to despair--I wish it was as easy

for me to deserve the saying--truth is I have a horrid morbidity of

Temperament which has shown itself at intervals it is I have no doubt

the greatest Enemy and stumbling block I have to fear--I may even say it

is likely to be the cause of my disappointment.' Then referring to

Haydon's warning in regard to Hunt, he goes half way in agreement and

declares he would die rather than be deceived about his own achievements

as Hunt is. 'There is no greater sin after the seven deadly,' he says,

'than to flatter oneself into the idea of being a great poet: the

comfort is, such a crime must bring its own penalty, and if one is a

self-deluder indeed accounts must one day be balanced.'

In the same week, moved no doubt by the difficulties George had

mentioned about touching the funds due from their grandmother's estate,

Keats writes to Taylor and Hessey, in a lively and familiar strain

showing the terms of confidence on which he already stood with them,

asking them to advance him an instalment of the agreed price for

_Endymion_. He mentions in this letter that he is tired of Margate (he

had already to another correspondent called it a 'treeless affair') and

means to move to Canterbury. At this point there occurs an unlucky gap

in Keats's correspondence. We know that he and Tom went to Canterbury

from Margate as planned, but we do not know exactly when, nor how long

he stayed there, nor what work he did (except that he was certainly

going on with the first book of _Endymion_), nor what impressions he

received. It was his first visit to a cathedral city, and few in the

world, none in England, are more fitted to impress. Chichester and

Winchester he came afterwards to know, Winchester well and with

affection; but it was with thoughts of Canterbury in his mind that he

planned, some two years later, first a serious and then a frivolous

verse romance having an English cathedral town for scene (_The Eve of St

Mark_, _The Cap and Bells_). The heroine of both was to have been a

maiden of Canterbury called Bertha; not, of course, the historic

Frankish princess Bertha, daughter of Haribert and wife of Ethelbert

king of Kent, who converted her husband and prepared his people for

Christianity before the landing of Saint Augustin, and who sleeps in the

ancient church of Saint Martin outside the walls: not she, but some

damsel of the city, named after her in later days, whom Keats had heard

or read of or invented,--I would fain know which; but I have found no

external evidence of his studies or doings during this spring stay at

Canterbury, and his correspondence is, as I have said, a blank.

Some time in June he returned and the three brothers were together

again: not now in City lodgings but in new quarters to which they had

migrated in Well Walk, Hampstead. Their landlord was one Bentley the

postman, with whom they seem to have got on well except that Keats

occasionally complains of the 'young carrots,' his children, now for

making a 'horrid row,' now for smelling of damp worsted stockings. The

lack of letters continues through these first summer months at

Hampstead. The only exception is a laughingly apologetic appeal to his

new publishers for a further advance of money, dated June 10th and

ending with the words,--'I am sure you are confident of my

responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me.'

For the rest, indirect evidence allows us to picture Keats in these

months as working regularly at _Endymion_, having now reached the second

book, and as living socially, not without a certain amount of convivial

claret-drinking and racket, in the company of his brothers and of his

friends and theirs. Leigh Hunt was still close by in the Vale of Health,

and both in his circle and in Haydon's London studio Keats was as

welcome as ever. Reynolds and Rice were still his close intimates, and

Reynolds's sisters in Lamb's Conduit Street almost like sisters of his

own. He was scarcely less at home in the family of his sister-in-law

that was to be, Georgiana Wylie. The faithful Severn and the faithful

Haslam came up eagerly whenever they could to join the Hampstead party.

An acquaintance he had already formed at Hunt's with the Charles Dilkes

and their friend Charles Brown, who lived as next-door neighbours at

Wentworth Place, a double block of houses of their own building in a

garden at the foot of the Heath, now ripened into friendship: that with

Dilke rapidly, that with Brown, a Scotsman who by his own account held

cannily aloof from Keats at first for fear of being thought to push,

more slowly.

Charles Wentworth Dilke, by profession a clerk in the Navy Pay Office,

by predilection a keen and painstaking literary critic and antiquary,

had been stimulated by the charm of Lamb's famous volume of _Specimens_

to work at the old English dramatic poets, and had recently (being now

twenty-seven) brought out a set of volumes in continuation of Dodsley's

_Old Plays_. In matters political and social he was something of a

radical doctrinaire and 'Godwin-perfectibility man' (the label is

Keats's), loving decision and positiveness in all things and being

therein the very opposite of Keats, who by rooted instinct as well as

choice allowed his mind to cherish uncertainties and to be a

thoroughfare for all thoughts (the phrase is again his own). There were

many but always friendly discussions between Keats and Dilke, and their

mutual regard never failed. Charles Brown, Dilke's contemporary,

schoolfellow, and close friend, was a man of Scottish descent born in

Lambeth, who had in early youth joined a business set up by an elder

brother in Petersburg. The business quickly failing, he had returned to

London and after some years of struggle inherited a modest competence

from another brother. A lively, cultivated, moderately successful

amateur in literature, journalism, and drama, he was in person bald and

spectacled, and portly beyond his years though active and robust; in

habits much of a trencher-man ('a huge eater' according to the

abstemious Trelawny) and something of a _viveur_ within his means;

exactly strict in money matters, but otherwise far from a precisian in

life or conversation; an ardent friend and genial companion, though

cherishing some fixed unreasonable aversions: in a word, a truly

Scottish blend of glowing warm-heartedness and 'thrawn' prejudice, of

frank joviality and cautious dealing.

It was in these same weeks of June or July 1817, soon after the

beginning of the Oxford vacation, that Benjamin Bailey again came to

town and sought after and learned to delight in Keats's company. He

meant to go back and read at Oxford for the latter part of the vacation,

and invited Keats to spend some weeks with him there. Keats accepted,

and the visit, lasting from soon after mid August until the end of

September, proved a happiness alike to host and guest. At this point

our dearth of documents ceases. Bailey's memoranda, though not put on

paper till thirty years later, are vivid and informing, and Keats's own

correspondence during the visit is fairly full. I will take Bailey's

recollections first, and give them in his own words, seeing that they

paint the writer almost as well as his subject; omitting only passages

that seem to drag or interrupt. First comes the impression Keats made on

him at the time of their introduction in the spring, and then his

account of the days they spent together in Oxford.

I was delighted with the naturalness and simplicity of his character,

and was at once drawn to him by his winning and indeed affectionate

manner towards those with whom he was himself pleased. Nor was his

personal appearance the least charm of a first acquaintance with the

young poet. He bore, along with the strong impress of genius, much

beauty of feature and countenance. His hair was beautiful--a fine

brown, rather than auburn, I think, and if you placed your hand upon

his head, the silken curls felt like the rich plumage of a bird. The

eye was full and fine, and softened into tenderness, or beamed with a

fiery brightness, according to the current of his thoughts and

conversation. Indeed the form of his head was like that of a fine

Greek statue:--and he realized to my mind the youthful Apollo, more

than any head of a living man whom I have known.

At the commencement of the long vacation I was again in London, on my

way to another part of the country: and it was my intention to return

to Oxford early in the vacation for the purpose of reading. I saw much

of Keats. And I invited him to return with me to Oxford, and spend as

much time as he could afford with me in the silence and solitude of

that beautiful place during the absence of the numerous members and

students of the University. He accepted my offer, and we returned

together. I think in August 1817. It was during this visit, and in my

room, that he wrote the third book of _Endymion_.... His mode of

composition is best described by recounting our habits of study for

one day during the month he visited me at Oxford. He wrote, and I

read, sometimes at the same table, and sometimes at separate desks or

tables, from breakfast to the time of our going out for

exercise,--generally two or three o'clock. He sat down to his

task,--which was about 50 lines a day,--with his paper before him, and

wrote with as much regularity, and apparently as much ease, as he

wrote his letters.... Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task,

but not often: and he would make it up another day. But he never

forced himself. When he had finished his writing for the day, he

usually read it over to me: and he read or wrote letters until we went

for a walk. This was our habit day by day. The rough manuscript was

written off daily, and with few erasures.

I remember very distinctly, though at this distance of time, his

reading of a few passages; and I almost think I hear his voice, and

see his countenance. Most vivid is my recollection of the following

passage of the finest affecting story of the old man, Glaucus, which

he read to me immediately after its composition:--

The old man raised his hoary head and saw

The wildered stranger--seeming not to see,

The features were so lifeless. Suddenly

He woke as from a trance; his snow white brows

Went arching up, _and like two magic ploughs

Furrowed deep wrinkles in his forehead large,

Which kept as fixedly as rocky marge,

Till round his withered lips had gone a smile._

The lines I have italicised, are those which then forcibly struck me

as peculiarly fine, and to my memory have 'kept as fixedly as rocky

marge.' I remember his upward look when he read of the 'magic

ploughs,' which in his hands have turned up so much of the rich soil

of Fairyland.

When we had finished our studies for the day we took our walk, and

sometimes boated on the Isis.... Once we took a longer excursion of a

day or two, to Stratford upon Avon, to visit the birthplace of

Shakespeare. We went of course to the house visited by so many

thousands of all nations of Europe, and inscribed our names in

addition to the 'numbers numberless' of those which literally

blackened the walls. We also visited the Church, and were pestered

with a commonplace showman of the place.... He was struck, I remember,

with the simple statue there, which, though rudely executed, we agreed

was most probably the best likeness of the many extant, but none very

authentic, of Shakespeare.

His enjoyment was of that genuine, quiet kind which was a part of his

gentle nature; deeply feeling what he truly enjoyed, but saying

little. On our return to Oxford we renewed our quiet mode of life,

until he finished the third Book of _Endymion_, and the time came that

we must part; and I never parted with one whom I had known so short a

time, with so much real regret and personal affection, as I did with

John Keats, when he left Oxford for London at the end of September

or the beginning of October 1817.

[Illustration: PL. IV

_Life-mask of Keats

From an electrotype in the National Portrait Gallery_]

Living as we did for a month or six weeks together (for I do not

remember exactly how long) I knew him at that period of his life,

perhaps as well as any one of his friends. There was no reserve of any

kind between us.... His brother George says of him that to his

brothers his temper was uncertain; and he himself confirms this

judgment of him in a beautiful passage of a letter to myself. But with

his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew. Gentleness was

indeed his proper characteristic, without one particle of dullness, or

insipidity, or want of spirit. Quite the contrary. 'He was gentle but

not fearful,' in the chivalric and moral sense of the term 'gentle.'

He was pleased with every thing that occurred in the ordinary mode of

life, and a cloud never passed over his face, except of indignation at

the wrongs of others.

His conversation was very engaging. He had a sweet toned voice, 'an

excellent thing' in _man_ as well as 'in woman....' In his letters he

talks of _suspecting_ everybody. It appeared not in his conversation.

On the contrary, he was uniformly the apologist for poor, frail human

nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man I ever knew,

especially for the faults of his friends. But if any act of wrong or

oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he rose into sudden

and animated indignation. He had a truly poetic feeling for women; and

he often spoke to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from

him, with great delicacy and tenderness of affection. He had a soul of

noble integrity: and his common sense was a conspicuous part of his

character. Indeed his character was in the best sense manly.

Our conversation rarely or never flagged, during our walks, or

boatings, or in the evening. And I have retained a few of his opinions

on Literature and criticism which I will detail. The following passage

from Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality was deeply felt by Keats, who

however at this time seemed to me to value this great Poet rather in

particular passages than in the full-length portrait, as it were, of

the great imaginative and philosophic Christian Poet, which he really

is, and which Keats obviously, not long afterwards, felt him to be.

Not for these I raise

The song of thanks and praise;

But for those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings;

Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realized,

_High instincts, before which our mortal nature_

Did tremble like a guilty thing surprized.

The last lines he thought were quite awful in their application to a

guilty finite creature, like man, in the appalling nature of the

feeling which they suggested to a thoughtful mind. Again, we often

talked of that noble passage in the lines on _Tintern Abbey_:--

That blessed mood,

In which _the burthen of the mystery_,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world

Is lightened.

And his references to this passage are frequent in his letters.--But

in those exquisite stanzas,

She dwelt among the untrodden ways,

Beside the springs of Dove,

ending,--

She lived unknown and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and oh,

_The difference to me_.

The simplicity of the last line he declared to be the most perfect

pathos.

Among the qualities of high poetic promise in Keats was, even at this

time, his correct taste. I remember to have been struck with this by

his remarks on that well known and often quoted passage of the

_Excursion_ upon the Greek Mythology--where it is said that

Fancy fetched

Even from the blazing chariot of the Sun

A beardless youth who touched a golden lute,

_And filled the illumined groves with ravishment_.

Keats said this description of Apollo should have ended at the 'golden

lute,' and have left it to the imagination to complete the picture,

_how_ he 'filled the illumined groves.' I think every man of taste

will feel the justice of the remark.

Every one now knows what was then known to his friends that Keats was

an ardent admirer of Chatterton. The melody of the verses of the

marvellous Boy who perished in his pride, enchanted the author of

_Endymion_. Methinks I now hear him recite, or _chant_, in his

peculiar manner, the following stanza of the Roundelay sung by the

minstrels of Ella:--

_Come with acorn cup and thorn_

Drain my hertys blood away;

Life and all its good I scorn;

Dance by night or feast by day.

The first line to his ear possessed the great charm. Indeed his sense

of melody was quite exquisite, as is apparent in his own verses; and

in none more than in numerous passages of his _Endymion_.

Another object of his enthusiastic admiration was the Homeric

character of Achilles--especially when he is described as 'shouting in

the trenches.' One of his favourite topics of discourse was the

principle of melody in verse, upon which he had his own notions,

particularly in the management of open and close vowels. I think I

have seen a somewhat similar theory attributed to Mr Wordsworth. But I

do not remember his laying it down in writing. Be this as it may,

Keats's theory was worked out by himself. It was, that the vowels

should be so managed as not to clash one with another, so as to hear

the melody,--and yet that they should be interchanged, like differing

notes of music to prevent monotony....[3]

Bailey here tries to reconstruct and illustrate from memory Keats's

theory of vowel sounds, but his attempt falters and breaks down.

Keats's own first account of himself from Oxford is in a letter of

September 5th to the Reynolds sisters, then on holiday at Littlehampton:

a piece of mere lively foolery and rattle meant to amuse, in a taste

which is not that of to-day. Five days later he writes the first of that

series of letters to his young sister Fanny which acquaints us with

perhaps the most loveable and admirable parts of his character. She was

now just fourteen, and living under the close guardianship of the

Abbeys, who had put her to a boarding school at Walthamstow. Keats shows

a tender and considerate elder-brotherly anxiety to get into touch with

her and know her feelings and likings:--

Let us now begin a regular question and answer--a little pro and con;

letting it interfere as a pleasant method of my coming at your

favourite little wants and enjoyments, that I may meet them in a way

befitting a brother.

We have been so little together since you have been able to reflect on

things that I know not whether you prefer the _History of King Pepin_

to Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_--or _Cinderella_ and her glass

slipper to Moor's _Almanack_. However in a few Letters I hope I shall

be able to come at that and adapt my scribblings to your Pleasure. You

must tell me about all you read if it be only six Pages in a Week and

this transmitted to me every now and then will procure full sheets of

Writing from me pretty frequently.--This I feel as a necessity for we

ought to become intimately acquainted, in order that I may not only,

as you grow up love you as my only Sister, but confide in you as my

dearest friend. When I saw you last I told you of my intention of

going to Oxford and 'tis now a Week since I disembark'd from his

Whipship's Coach the Defiance in this place. I am living in Magdalen

Hall on a visit to a young Man with whom I have not been long

acquainted, but whom I like very much--we lead very industrious

lives--he in general Studies and I in proceeding at a pretty good rate

with a Poem which I hope you will see early in the next year.--Perhaps

you might like to know what I am writing about. I will tell you. Many

Years ago there was a young handsome Shepherd who fed his flocks on a

Mountain's Side called Latmus he was a very contemplative sort of a

Person and lived solitary among the trees and Plains little thinking

that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in Love

with him.--However so it was; and when he was asleep on the Grass she

used to come down from heaven and admire him excessively for a long

time; and at last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms

to the top of that high Mountain Latmus while he was a dreaming--but I

dare say you have read this and all the other beautiful Tales which

have come down from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece. If you

have not let me know and I will tell you more at large of others quite

as delightful. This Oxford I have no doubt is the finest City in the

world--it is full of old Gothic

buildings--Spires--towers--Quadrangles--Cloisters--Groves etc and is

surrounded with more clear streams than ever I saw together. I take a

Walk by the Side of one of them every Evening and, thank God, we have

not had a drop of rain these days.

He goes on to tell her (herein echoing Hunt's opinion) how much better

it would be if Italian instead of French were taught everywhere in

schools, and winds up:--

Now Fanny you must write soon--and write all you think about, never

mind what--only let me have a good deal of your writing--You need not

do it all at once--be two or three or four days about it, and let it

be a diary of your Life. You will preserve all my Letters and I will

secure yours--and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have

a good Bundle--which, hereafter, when things may have strangely

altered and God knows what happened, we may read over together and

look with pleasure on times past--that now are to come.

Next follows another letter to Jane Reynolds; partly making fun, much

better fun than in the last, about Dilke's shooting and about the rare

havoc he would like to make in Mrs Dilke's garden were he at Hampstead:

partly grave in the high style into which he is apt at any moment to

change from nonsense:--

Now let us turn to the sea-shore. Believe me, my dear Jane, it is a

great happiness to see that you are, in this finest part of the year,

winning a little enjoyment from the hard world. In truth, the great

Elements we know of, are no means comforters: the open sky sits upon

our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of state--the

Earth is our throne and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before

it--able, like David's harp, to make such a one as you forget almost

the tempest cares of life. I have found in the ocean's music,--varying

(tho' self-same) more than the passion of Timotheus, an enjoyment not

to be put into words; and, 'though inland far I be,' I now hear the

voice most audibly while pleasing myself in the idea of your

sensations.

To Reynolds Keats writes on September the 21st:--

For these last five or six days, we have had regularly a Boat on the

Isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number

than your eye-lashes. We sometimes skim into a Bed of rushes, and

there become naturalized river-folks,--there is one particularly nice

nest, which we have christened 'Reynolds's Cove,' in which we have

read Wordsworth, and talked as may be; I think I see you and Hunt

meeting in the Pit.--What a very pleasant fellow he is, if he would

give up the sovereignty of a room pro bono. What evenings we might

pass with him, could we have him from Mrs H. Failings I am always

rather rejoiced to find in a man than sorry for; they bring us to a

level.

Then follows a diatribe against the literary and intellectual

pretensions of certain sets of ladies, from which he has felt an

agreeable relief in some verses he has found on taking down from

Bailey's shelves the poems of Katherine Philips, 'the matchless Orinda.'

The verses which pleased him, truly of her best, are those _To M. A. at

parting_, and Keats goes on to copy them in full. Had Orinda been a

contemporary, he might not, indeed, have failed to recognize in her a

true woman of letters: but would he not also have found something to

laugh and chafe at in the poses of that high-flying coterie of mutual

admirers, Silvander and Poliarchus, Lucasia and Rosania and Palaemon, of

which she was the centre? This is one of the very few instances to be

found in Keats's work or correspondence of interest in the poetry of the

Caroline age.

Quite in the last days of his visit Keats, whose mind and critical power

had been growing while he worked upon _Endymion_, and whom moreover the

long effort of composition was clearly beginning to fatigue, confides to

Haydon his dissatisfaction with what he has done:--'You will be glad to

hear that within these last three weeks I have written 1000 lines--which

are the third Book of my Poem. My Ideas with respect to it I assure you

are very low--and I would write the subject thoroughly again--but I am

tired of it and think the time would be better spent in writing a new

Romance which I have in my eye for next summer--Rome was not built in a

day--and all the good I expect from my employment this summer is the

fruit of Experience which I hope to gather in my next Poem.'

Coming back in the first week of October to Hampstead, whither his

brothers had by this time also returned from a trip to Paris, Keats was

presently made uncomfortable by evidences of discord among his friends

and reports of what seemed like disloyalty on the part of one of them,

Leigh Hunt, to himself. Haydon had now left the studio in Great

Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove, and the Hunts, having come

away from Hampstead and paid a long late-summer visit to the Shelleys at

Marlow, were lodging near him in the same street. 'Everybody seems at

loggerheads,' Keats writes to Bailey. 'There's Hunt infatuated--there's

Haydon's picture in statu quo--There's Hunt walks up and down his

painting-room--criticizing every head most unmercifully.' Both Haydon

and Reynolds, he goes on, keep telling him tales of Hunt: How Hunt has

been talking flippantly and patronizingly of _Endymion_, saying that if

it is four thousand lines long now it would have been seven thousand but

for him, and giving the impression that Keats stood to him in the

relation of a pupil needing and taking advice. He declares in

consequence that he is quite disgusted with literary men and will never

know another except Wordsworth; and then, more coolly and sensibly,

'now, is not this a most paltry thing to think about?... This is, to be

sure, the vexation of a day, nor would I say so many words about it to

any but those whom I know to have my welfare and reputation at heart.'

During the six or seven autumn weeks spent at Hampstead after his return

from Oxford Keats was getting on, a little flaggingly, with the fourth

book of _Endymion_, besides writing an occasional lyric or two. Fresh

from the steadying and sympathetic companionship of Bailey, he keeps up

their intimacy by affectionate letters in which he discloses much of

that which lay deepest and was best in him. Writing in the first days of

November he congratulates Bailey on having got a curacy in Cumberland

and promises some day to visit him there; says he is in a fair way to

have finished _Endymion_ in three weeks; mentions an idea he has of

shipping his brother Tom, who has been looking worse, off to Lisbon for

the winter and perhaps going with him; and gets in by a side wind a

masterly criticism of Wordsworth's poem _The Gipsies_ and also of

Hazlitt's criticism of it in the _Round Table_. A fragment of another

letter, dated November the 5th, alludes with annoyance, not for the

first time, to some failure of Haydon's to keep his word or take trouble

about a young man from Oxford named Cripps whom he had promised to

receive as pupil and in whom Bailey and Keats were interested. The same

fragment records the appearance in _Blackwood_ (the _Endinburgh

Magazine_, as Keats calls it) of the famous first article of the Cockney

School series, attacking Hunt with a virulence far beyond even the

accustomed licence of the time, and seeming by the motto prefixed to it

(verses of Cornelius Webb coupling the names of Hunt and Keats) to

threaten a similar handling of Keats later on. 'I don't mind the thing

much,' says Keats, 'but if he should go to such lengths with me as he

has done with Hunt, I must infallibly call him to an Account if he be a

human being, and appears in Squares and Theatres, where we might

possibly meet--I don't relish his abuse.'

Some time about mid-November Keats, his health and strength being

steadier than in the spring, felt himself in the mood for a few weeks of

solitude and went to spend them at Burford Bridge Inn, in the beautiful

vale of Mickleham between Leatherhead and Dorking. The outing, he wrote,

was intended 'to change the scene--change the air---and give me a spur

to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting 500 lines.' Keats dearly

loved a valley: he loved even the sound of the names denoting one. In

his marginal notes to a copy of _Paradise Lost_ he gave a friend we find

the following:--

'Or have ye chosen this place

After the toil of battle to repose

Your wearied virtue, for the ease you find

To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?'

There is cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is

of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with

the very utter affection and yearning of a great Poet. It is a sort of

Delphic Abstraction--a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being

reflected and put in a Mist. The next mention of Vale is one of the

most pathetic in the whole range of Poetry:--

'Others, more mild,

Retreated in a silent valley, sing

With notes angelical to many a harp

Their own heroic deeds and hapless fall

By doom of battle.'

How much of the charm is in the valley!

There, from his inmost self, speaks a poet of another poet, and as if to

and for poets, deep calling unto deep. But in his every-day vein of

speech or writing Keats was always reticent in regard to the scenery of

places he visited, disliking nothing more than the glib ecstasies of the

tourist in search of the picturesque. When he has looked round him in

his new quarters at Burford Bridge he says simply, writing to Reynolds

on November the 22nd, 'I like this place very much. There is Hill and

Dale and a little river. I went up Box Hill this evening after the

moon--"you a' seen the Moon"--came down and wrote some lines.' 'Whenever

I am separated from you,' he continues, 'and not engaged in a continuous

Poem, every letter shall bring you a lyric--but I am too anxious for you

to enjoy the whole to send you a particle:' the whole, that is, of

_Endymion_. The sequel shows him to be just as deep and ardent in the

study of Shakespeare as when he was beginning his poem at Carisbrooke in

the spring. 'I never found so many beauties in the Sonnets--they seem to

be full of fine things said unintentionally--in the intensity of working

out conceits:' and he goes on to quote passages and phrases both from

them and from _Venus and Adonis_. Next, with a sudden change of mind

about letting Reynolds see a sample of _Endymion_, 'By the Whim-King!

I'll give you a stanza, because it is not material in connexion, and

when I wrote it I wanted you to give your vote, pro or con.'--The stanza

he gives is from the song of the Constellations in the fourth book,

certainly one of the weakest things in the poem: pity Reynolds had not

been there indeed, to give his vote _contra_.

On the same day, November 22, Keats writes to Bailey a letter even

richer in contents and more self-revealing than this to Reynolds. It

gives the indispensable key both to much in his own character and much

of the deeper speculative and symbolic meanings underlying his work,

from _Endymion_ to the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. Beginning with a wise and

tolerant reference to the Haydon trouble, and throwing out a passing

hint of the distinction between men of Genius, who have not, and men of

Power, who have, a proper individual self or determined character of

their own, Keats passes at the close to an illuminating self-confession

which is also a contrast between himself and his correspondent:--

You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly

happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked

out,--you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led

away--I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness--I look not for

it if it be not in the present hour,--nothing startles me beyond the

moment. The Setting Sun will always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow

come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the

gravel. The first thing that strikes me on hearing a misfortune having

befallen another is this--'Well, it cannot be helped: he will have the

pleasure of trying the resources of his Spirit'--and I beg now, my

dear Bailey, that hereafter should you observe anything cold in me not

to put it to the account of heartlessness, but abstraction--for I

assure you I sometimes feel not the influence of a passion or

affection during a whole Week--and so long this sometimes continues, I

begin to suspect myself, and the genuineness of my feelings at other

times--thinking them a few barren Tragedy Tears.

Readers of _Endymion_ will recognize a symbolic embodiment of a mood

akin to this in the Cave of Quietude in the fourth book. But the great

value of the letter, especially great as a help to the study of

_Endymion_ in general, is in the long central passage setting forth his

speculations as to the relation of imagination to truth, meaning truth

ultimate or transcendental. He finds his clue in the eighth book of

_Paradise Lost_, where Adam, recounting to Raphael his first experiences

as new-created man, tells how twice over he fell into a dream and awoke

to find it true: his first dream thus confirmed in the result being how

'One of shape divine' took him by the hand and led him into the garden

of Paradise:[4] his second, how the same glorious shape came to him and

opened his side and from his rib fashioned a creature:

Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair,

That what seem'd fair in all the World, seem'd now

Mean, or in her sum'd up, in her contain'd

And in her looks, which from that time infus'd

Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,

And into all things from her Air inspir'd

The spirit of love and amorous delight.

She disappear'd, and left me dark, I wak'd

To find her, or for ever to deplore

Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure:

When out of hope, behold her, not far off,

Such as I saw her in my dream, adorn'd

With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow

To make her amiable.[5]

It was no doubt this second of Adam's dreams that was chiefly in Keats's

mind. His way of explaining his speculations to his friend is quite

unstudied and inconsecutive; he is, as he says, 'continually running

away from the subject,' or shall we say letting the stream of his ideas

branch out into side channels from which he finds it difficult to come

back? But yet their main current and purport will be found not difficult

to follow, if only the reader will bear one thing well in mind: that

when Keats in this and similar passages speaks of 'Sensations' as

opposed to 'Thoughts' he does not limit the word to sensations of the

body, of what intensity or exquisiteness soever or howsoever

instantaneously transforming themselves from sensation into emotion:

what he means are intuitions of the mind and spirit as immediate as

these, as thrillingly convincing and indisputable, as independent of all

consecutive stages and formal processes of thinking: almost the same

things, indeed, as in a later passage of the same letter he calls

'ethereal musings.' And now let the poet speak for himself:--

O! I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of

your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am

certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections, and

the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must

be Truth--whether it existed before or not,--for I have the same idea

of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime,

creative of essential Beauty. In a Word you may know my favourite

speculation by my first Book, and the little Song I sent in my last,

which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of

operating in these Matters. The Imagination may be compared to Adam's

dream, he awoke and found it truth:--I am more zealous in this affair,

because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be

known for truth by consecutive reasoning--and yet it must be. Can it

be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his Goal without

putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of

Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is 'a Vision in the form of

Youth,' a shadow of reality to come--and this consideration has

further convinced me,--for it has come as auxiliary to another

favourite speculation of mine,--that we shall enjoy ourselves

hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a

finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in

Sensation, rather than hunger as you do after Truth. Adam's dream will

do here, and seems to be a Conviction that Imagination and its

empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life and its spiritual

repetition. But, as I was saying, the simple imaginative Mind may have

its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming

continually on the Spirit with a fine Suddenness. To compare great

things with small, have you never, by being surprised with an old

Melody, in a delicious place by a delicious voice, _felt_ over again

your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on

your soul? Do you not remember forming to yourself the Singer's

face--more beautiful than it was possible, and yet, with the elevation

of the Moment, you did not think so? Even then you were mounted on the

Wings of Imagination, so high that the prototype must be

hereafter--that delicious face you will see.

There is one sentence in the above which gives us special matter for

regret. Keats speaks of 'the little Song I sent in my last, which is a

representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these

matters.' Such a song, if we had it, would doubtless put forth clearly

and melodiously in concrete imagery the ideas which Keats in his letter

tries to expound in the abstract language of which he is by nature so

much less a master. Of 'my last,' that is of his preceding letter to

Bailey, unhappily but a fragment is preserved, and the song must have

been lost with the sheet or sheets which went astray, seeing that none

of Keats's preserved lyrics can be held to answer to his account of this

one. His words have a further interest as proving that now in these days

of approaching winter, with his long poem almost finished, he allowed

himself to digress into some lyric experiments, as in its earlier stages

he had not done. External testimony and reasonable inference enable us

to identify some of these experiments. Two or three lightish

love-lyrics, whether impersonal or inspired by passing adventures of his

own, are among the number. That beginning 'Think not of it, sweet one,

so,' dates definitely from November 11, before he left Hampstead. To

nearly about the same time belongs almost certainly the very daintily

finished stanzas 'Unfelt, unheard, unseen,' which one at least of

Keats's subtlest critics[6] considers (I cannot agree with her) the

first of his technically faultless achievements. So also, I am

convinced, does that much less happily wrought thing, the little

love-plaint discovered only two years ago and beginning--

You say you love, but with a voice

Chaster than a nun's who singeth

The soft vespers to herself

When the chime-bell ringeth--

O love me truly!

You say you love; but with a smile

Cold as sunrise in September,

As you were St Cupid's nun,

And kept his week of Ember.

O love me truly!--

and so forth. Here again, it seems evident, we have an instance of an

echo from one of the old Elizabethan poets (this time an anonymous

song-writer) lingering like a chime in Keats's memory. Listen to the

first three stanzas of _A Proper Wooing Song_, written to the tune of

the _Merchant's Daughter_ and printed in Clement Robinson's _Handful of

Pleasant Delites_, 1584:--

Maide will ye loue me yea or no?

tell me the trothe and let me go.

It can be no lesse than a sinful deed,

trust me truly,

To linger a Louer that lookes to speede,

in due time duly.

You maides that thinke yourselves as fine,

as Venus and all the Muses nine:

The Father Himselfe when He first made man,

trust me truly,

Made you for his helpe when the world began,

in due time duly.

Then sith God's will was even so

why should you disdaine your Louer tho?

But rather with a willing heart,

loue him truly;

For in so doing you do your part

let reason rule ye.

The metrical form of Keats's verses is not, indeed, the same as that of

the Elizabethan song, but I think he must certainly have had the cadence

of its refrains more or less consciously in his mind's ear.[7]

A definite and dated case of a lyrical experiment suggested to Keats at

this time by an older model is the famous little 'drear-nighted

December' song in which he re-embodies, with new and seasonable imagery,

the ancient moral of the misery added to misery by the remembrance of

past happiness. This was composed, as Woodhouse on the express testimony

of Jane Reynolds informs us, in the beginning of this same December,

1817, when Keats was finishing _Endymion_ at Burford Bridge. Any reader

familiar with the aspect of the spot at that season, when the

overhanging trees have shed their last gold, and spars of ice have begun

to fringe the sluggish meanderings of the Mole, will realize how deeply

the sentiment of the scene and season has sunk into Keats's verse. Well

as the piece is known, I shall quote it entire, not in the form in which

it is printed in the editions, but in that in which alone it exists in

his own hand-writing and in the transcripts by his friends Woodhouse and

Brown[8]:--

In drear-nighted December,

Too happy, happy tree,

Thy branches ne'er remember

Their green felicity:

The north cannot undo them,

With a sleety whistle through them;

Nor frozen thawings glue them

From budding at the prime.

In drear-nighted December,

Too happy, happy brook,

Thy bubblings ne'er remember

Apollo's summer look;

But with a sweet forgetting,

They stay their crystal fretting,

Never, never petting

About the frozen time.

Ah! would 'twere so with many

A gentle girl and boy!

But were there ever any

Writh'd not at passed joy?

The feel of _not_ to feel it,

When there is none to heal it,

Nor numbed sense to steel it,

Was never said in rhyme.[9]

Keats's model in this instance is a song from Dryden's _Spanish Fryar_,

a thing rather beside his ordinary course of reading: can he perhaps

have taken the volume containing it from Bailey's shelves, as he took

the poems of Orinda? Here is a verse to show the tune as set by

Dryden:--

Farewell ungrateful Traitor,

Farewell my perjured swain,

Let never injured creature

Believe a man again.

The pleasure of possessing

Surpasses all expressing,

But 'tis too short a blessing,

And Love too long a pain.

Do readers recall what the greatest of metrical magicians, who would be

so very great a poet if metrical magic were the whole of poetry, or if

the body of thought and imagination in his work had commonly half as

much vitality as the verbal music which is its vesture,--do readers

recall what Mr Swinburne made of this same measure when he took it up

half a century later in the _Garden of Proserpine_?

But in attending to these incidental lyrics we risk losing sight of what

was Keats's main business in these weeks, namely the bringing to a close

his eight months' task upon _Endymion_. In finishing the poem he was

only a little behind the date he had fixed when he wrote its opening

lines at Carisbrooke:--

Many and many a verse I hope to write,

Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white,

Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees

Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,

I must be near the middle of my story.

O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,

See it half finish'd: but let Autumn bold,

With universal tinge of sober gold,

Be all about me when I make an end.

The gold had almost all fallen: in the passage in which Keats makes

Endymion bid what he supposes to be his last farewell to his mortal love

it is the season itself, the season and the autumnal scene, which speak,

just as they spoke in the 'drear-nighted December' lyric:--

The Carian

No word return'd: both lovelorn, silent, wan,

Into the vallies green together went.

Far wandering, they were perforce content

To sit beneath a fair lone beechen tree;

Nor at each other gaz'd, but heavily

Por'd on its hazle cirque of shedded leaves.

and again:--

At this he press'd

His hands against his face, and then did rest

His head upon a mossy hillock green,

And so remain'd as he a corpse had been

All the long day; save when he scantly lifted

His eyes abroad, to see how shadows shifted

With the slow move of time,--sluggish and weary

Until the poplar tops, in journey dreary,

Had reach'd the river's brim. Then up he rose,

And slowly as that very river flows,

Walk'd towards the temple grove with this lament:

'Why such a golden eve? The breeze is sent

Careful and soft, that not a leaf may fall

Before the serene father of them all

Bows down his summer head below the west.

Now am I of breath, speech, and speed possest,

But at the setting I must bid adieu

To her for the last time. Night will strew

On the damp grass myriads of lingering leaves,

And with them shall I die; nor much it grieves

To die, when summer dies on the cold sward.'

That point about making, as it were, a dial-hand of a certain group of

poplars with their moving shadows would have a special local interest if

one could find the place which suggested it. The sun sets early in this

valley in the winter. I know not if there is any group of trees still

standing that could be watched thus lengthening out its afternoon shadow

to the river's edge.

Opposite the last line in the manuscript of _Endymion_ Keats wrote the

date November 28, whence it would appear that it had taken him some ten

days at most to complete the required five hundred lines. He did not

immediately leave Burford Bridge, but stayed on through the first week

or ten days of December, setting to work at once, it would appear, on

the revision of his long poem, and composing, we know, the

'drear-nighted December' lyric, and perhaps one or two others, before he

returned to the fraternal lodgings at Hampstead. The scheme of a winter

flight to Lisbon for the suffering Tom had been given up, and it had

been arranged instead that George should take him to spend some months

at Teignmouth. They were to be there by Christmas, and Keats timed his

return so as to be with them for a week or two at Hampstead before they

started. _Endymion_ was not published until the following April, but

inasmuch as with its completion there ends the first, the uncertain,

experimental, now rapturously and now despondently expectant phase of

Keats's mind and art, let us make this our opportunity for studying it.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 'Sad stories' in the original text of _Richard II_. The allusion

is to the well-known incident of Shelley alarming an old lady in a

stage coach by suddenly breaking out with this quotation. Whether

Keats had been in his company at the time we do not know.

[2] 'Our friend' of course is Leigh Hunt.

[3] Houghton MSS.

[4] _Paradise Lost_, viii, 288-311.

[5] _Ibid._ viii, 452-490.

[6] The late precociously gifted and prematurely lost Mary Suddard,

in _Essays and Studies_ (Cambridge, 1912).

[7] If it is objected that _The Handful of Pleasant Delites_ is an

excessively rare book, which Keats is not likely to have known, the

answer is that it had been reprinted three years earlier in

_Heliconia_, the great three-volume collection edited by Thomas Park;

and moreover that Park, one of the most zealous and learned of

researchers in the field of old English literature, had long been

living in Church Row, Hampstead, and both as neighbour and elder

fellow-worker can hardly fail to have been known to Dilke and his

circle.

[8] Crewe MSS.

[9] This poem was first printed posthumously in 1829: both in _The

Gem_, a periodical of the _Keepsake_ type then edited by Thomas Hood,

and in Galignani's collective edition of the poems of Coleridge,

Shelley, and Keats published the same year in Paris. In these and all

versions subsequently printed the first lines of stanzas I and II are

altered and read 'In a drear-nighted December,' and the fifth line is

made to run, 'To know the change and feel it.' The first line thus

gets two light syllables instead of one before the first stress,

giving a faint suggestion of a triple-time movement which certainly

does not hurt the metre. The new fifth line is to modern ears more

elegant than the original, as getting rid of the vulgar substantive

form 'feel' for feeling. But 'feel,' which after all had been good

enough for Horace Walpole and Fanny Burney, was to Keats and the

Leigh Hunt circle no vulgarism at all, it was a thing of every day

usage both in verse and prose. And does not the correction somewhat

blunt the point of Keats's meaning? To be emphatically aware of no

longer feeling a joy once felt is a pain that may indeed call for

steeling or healing, while to steel or heal a 'change' seems neither

so easy nor so needful: at all events the phrase is more lax. It may

be doubted whether the alterations are due to Keats at all and not to

someone (conceivably, in the case of _The Gem_, Thomas Hood) editing

him after his death. I should add, however, that I have found what

must perhaps be regarded as evidence that Keats did try various

versions of this final stanza, in the shape of another transcript

made in 1827 by a brother of his friend Woodhouse. In this version

the poem is headed _Pain of Memory_, an apt title, and while the

first and second stanzas keep their original form, the third runs

quite differently, as follows:--

But in the Soul's December

The fancy backward strays,

And darkly doth remember

The hue of golden days,

In woe the thought appalling

Of bliss gone past recalling

Brings o'er the heart a falling

Not to be told in rhyme.

This can hardly be other than an alternative version tried by Keats

himself. The 'Fallings from us, vanishings' of Wordsworth's _Ode on

Intimations of Immortality_, may be responsible for the 'falling' in

the seventh line, and though 'the thought appalling' is a

common-place phrase little in Keats's manner, it is worth noting that

the word occurs in Bailey's report of his spoken comment on this very

passage of Wordsworth (see above, p. 146).

CHAPTER VI

_ENDYMION._--I. THE STORY: ITS SOURCES, PLAN, AND SYMBOLISM

Invention and imagination--What the moon meant to Keats--Elizabethan

Precedents--Fletcher and Drayton--Drayton's two versions--Debt of

Keats to Drayton--Strain of allegory--The Soul's quest for

beauty--Phantasmagoric adventures--The four elements theory--Its

error--Book I. The exordium--The forest scene--Confession to

Peona--Her expostulation--Endymion's defence--The ascending scale--The

highest hope--Book II. The praise of love--Underworld marvels--The

awakening of Adonis--Embraces in the Jasmine Bower--The quest

renewed--New sympathies awakened--Book III. Exordium--Encounter with

Glaucus--Glaucus relates his doom--The predestined deliverer--The

deliverance--Meaning of the Parable--Its machinery explained--The

happy sequel--Book IV. Address to the Muse--The Indian damsel--An

ethereal flight--Olympian visions--Descent and

renunciation--Distressful farewells--The mystery solved--A chastened

victory--Above analysis justified.

Keats had long been in love with the Endymion story. The very music of

the name, he avers, had gone into his being. We have seen how in the

poem beginning 'I stood tiptoe,' finished at the end of 1816, he tried a

kind of prelude or induction to the theme, and how, laying this aside,

he determined to start fresh on a 'poetical romance' of Endymion on a

great scale. When in April 1817, six weeks after the publication of the

volume of _Poems_, he went off to the Isle of Wight to get firmly to

work on his new task, it is clear that he had its main outlines and

dimensions settled in his mind, but nothing more. He wrote to George

soon after his departure:--

As to what you say about my being a Poet, I can return no Answer but

by saying that the high Idea I have of poetical fame makes me think I

see it towering too high above me. At any rate, I have no right to

talk until _Endymion_ is finished, it will be a test, a trial of my

Powers of Imagination, and chiefly of my invention which is a rare

thing indeed--by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare

circumstance, and fill them with poetry--and when I consider that this

is a great task, and that when done it will take me but a dozen paces

towards the temple of fame--it makes me say--God forbid that I should

be without such a task! I have Heard Hunt say, and I may be asked--why

endeavour after a long Poem? To which I should answer, Do not the

Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in, where they

may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many

are forgotten and found new in a second Reading.... Besides, a long

Poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar Star of

Poetry, as Fancy is the Sails--and Imagination the rudder.--Did our

great Poets ever write Short Pieces? I mean in the shape of Tales.

This same invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten

as a Poetical excellence--But enough of this, I put on no Laurels till

I shall have finished _Endymion_, and I hope Apollo is not angered at

my having made a Mockery at Hunt's--

In his reiterated insistence on Invention and Imagination as the prime

endowments of a poet, Keats closely echoes Joseph Warton's protest

uttered seventy years before: is this because he had read and remembered

it, or only because the same words came naturally to him in pleading the

same cause? When his task was finished he confessed, in the draft of a

preface afterwards cancelled,--'Before I began I had no inward feel of

being able to finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain.'

But so far as the scale of the poem was concerned he adhered almost

exactly to his original purpose, dividing it into four books and finding

in himself resources enough to draw them out, all except the first, to a

little over a thousand lines each.

Throughout Keats's work, the sources of his inspiration in his finest

passages can almost always be recognized as dual, some special joy in

the delights or sympathy with the doings of nature working together in

him with some special stimulus derived from books. Of such a dual kind

is the whole inspiration of _Endymion_. The poem is a joint outcome of

his intense, his abnormal susceptibility to the spell of moonlight and

of his pleasure in the ancient myth of the loves of the moon-goddess

Cynthia and the shepherd-prince Endymion[1] as made known to him through

the earlier English poets.

The moon was to Keats a power very different from what she has always

been to popular astrology and tradition. Traditionally and popularly she

was the governess of floods, the presiding planet of those that ply

their trade by sea, river, or canal, also of wanderers and vagabonds

generally: the disturber and bewilderer withal of mortal brains and

faculties, sending down upon men under her sway that affliction of

lunacy whose very name was derived from her. For Keats it was her

transmuting and glorifying power that counted, not her pallor but her

splendour, the magic alchemy exercised by her light upon the things of

earth, the heightened mystery, poetry, and withal unity of aspect which

she sheds upon them. He can never keep her praises long out of his early

poetry, and we have seen, in '_I stood tiptoe_,' what a range of

beneficent activities he attributes to her. Now, as he settles down to

work on _Endymion_, we shall find her, by reason of that special

glorifying and unifying magic of her light, become for him, at first

perhaps instinctively and unaware, but more and more consciously as he

goes on, a definite symbol of Beauty itself--what he calls in a letter

'the principle of Beauty in all things,' the principle which binds in a

divine community all such otherwise unrelated matters as those we shall

find him naming together as things of beauty in the exordium of his

poem. Hence the tale of the loves of the Greek shepherd-prince and the

moon-goddess turns under his hand into a parable of the adventures of

the poetic soul striving after full communion with this spirit of

essential Beauty.

As to the literary associations which drew Keats to the Endymion story,

there is scarce one of our Elizabethan poets but touches on it briefly

or at length. Keats was no doubt acquainted with the _Endimion_ of John

Lyly, an allegorical court comedy in sprightly prose which had been

among the plays edited, as it happened, by one of his new Hampstead

friends, Charles Dilke: but in it he could have found nothing to his

purpose. Marlowe is likely to have been in his mind, with

--that night-wandering, pale, and watery star,

When yawning dragons draw her thirling car

From Latmus' mount up to the gloomy sky,

Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty,

She proudly sits.

So will Shakespeare have been certainly, with the call--

Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion,

And would not be awaked,

uttered by Portia at the close of the most enchanting moonlight scene in

all literature. Scarcely less familiar to Keats will have been the

invocation near the end of Spenser's _Epithalamion_, or the reference to

'pale-changeful Cynthia' and her Endymion in Browne's _Britannia's

Pastorals_;[2] or those that recur once and again in the sonnets of

Drummond of Hawthornden, or those he would have remembered from the

masque in the _Maid's Tragedy_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, or in

translations of the love-elegies and heroical epistles of Ovid. But the

two Elizabethans, I think, who were chiefly in his conscious or

unconscious recollection when he meditated his theme are Fletcher and

Michael Drayton. Here is the fine Endymion passage, delightfully

paraphrased from Theocritus, and put into the mouth of the wanton Cloe,

by Fletcher in the _Faithful Shepherdess_, that tedious, absurd,

exquisitely written pastoral of which the measures caught and charmed

Keats's ear in youth as they had caught and charmed the ear of Milton

before him.

Shepherd, I pray thee stay, where hast thou been?

Or whither go'st thou? Here be Woods as green

As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet,

As where smooth _Zephyrus_ plays on the fleet

Face of the curled Streams, with Flowers as many

As the young Spring gives, and as choise as any;

Here be all new Delights, cool Streams and Wells,

Arbors o'rgrown with Woodbinds, Caves, and Dells,

Chuse where thou wilt, whilst I sit by, and sing,

Or gather Rushes to make many a Ring

For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of Love,

How the pale _Phoebe_ hunting in a Grove,

First saw the Boy _Endymion_, from whose Eyes

She took eternal fire that never dyes:

How she convey'd him softly in a sleep,

His temples bound with poppy, to the steep

Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night,

Gilding the Mountain with her Brothers light,

To kiss her sweetest.

In regard to Drayton's handling of the story there is more to note. In

early life he wrote a poem in heroic couplets called _Endimion and

Phoebe_. This he never reprinted, but introduced passages from it into a

later piece in the same metre called the _Man in the Moone_. The volume

containing Drayton's earlier _Endimion and Phoebe_ became so rare that

when Payne Collier reprinted it in 1856 only two copies were known to

exist. It is unlikely that Keats should have seen either of these. But

he possessed of his own a copy of Drayton's poems in Smethwick's edition

of 1636 (one of the prettiest of seventeenth century books). The _Man in

the Moone_ is included in that volume, and that Keats was familiar with

it is evident. In it, as in the earlier version, but with a difference,

the poet, having enthroned his shepherd-prince beside Cynthia in her

kingdom of the moon, weaves round him a web of mystical disquisition and

allegory, in which popular fancies and superstitions are queerly jumbled

up with the then current conceptions of the science of astronomy and the

traditions of mediaeval theology as to the number and order of the

celestial hierarchies. In Drayton's earlier poem all this is highly

serious and written in a rich and decorated vein of poetry intended, it

might seem, to rival Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_: in his later, where

the tale is told by a shepherd to his mates at the feast of Pan, the

narrator lets down his theme with a satiric close in the vein of Lucian,

recounting the human delinquencies nightly espied by Cynthia and her

lover from their sphere.

The particular points in Keats's _Endymion_ where I seem to find

suggestions from Drayton's _Man in the Moone_ are these. First the idea

of introducing the story with the feast of Pan,--but as against this it

may be said with truth that feasts of Pan are stock incidents in

Elizabethan masques and pastorals generally. Second, his sending his

hero on journeys beside or in pursuit of his goddess through manifold

bewildering regions of the earth and air: for this antiquity affords no

warrant, and the hint may have been partly due to the following passage

in Drayton (which is also interesting for its exceptionally breathless

and trailing treatment of the verse):--

Endymion now forsakes

All the delights that shepherds do prefer,

And sets his mind so gen'rally on her

That, all neglected, to the groves and springs,

He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings

(As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers,

Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers

The silver Naides bathe them in the brack.

Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back,

Amongst the blue Nereides; and when,

Weary of waters, goddess-like again

She the high mountains actively assays,

And there amongst the light Oriades,

That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort;

Sometimes amongst those that with them comport,

The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent;

And there she stays not; but incontinent

Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw,

And with Endymion pleased that she saw,

Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye,

Stripping the winds, beholding from the sky

The Earth in roundness of a perfect ball,--

the sequel is irrelevant, and the passage so loose in grammar and

construction that it matters not where it is broken off.

Thirdly, we have the curious invention of the magic robe of Glaucus in

Keats's third book. In it, we are told, all the rulers and all the

denizens of ocean are figured and indued with magic power to dwindle and

dilate before the beholder's eyes. Keats describes this mystic garment

in a dozen lines[3] which can scarcely be other than a summary and

generalized recollection of a long passage of eighty in which Drayton

describes the mantle of Cynthia herself, inwoven with figures of sea and

storm and shipwreck and sea-birds and of men fishing and fowling (crafts

supposed to be subject to the planetary influence of the moon) in tidal

or inland waters. And lastly, Keats in his second book has taken a

manifest hint from Drayton where he makes Venus say archly how she has

been guessing in vain which among the Olympian goddesses is Endymion's

lover.[4]

Not merely by delight in particular poets and familiarity with favourite

passages, but by rooted instinct and by his entire self-training, Keats

was beyond all his contemporaries,--and it is the cardinal fact to be

borne in mind about him,--the lineal descendant and direct heir of the

Elizabethans. The spirit of Elizabethan poetry was born again in him

with its excesses and defects as well as its virtues. One general

characteristic of this poetry is its prodigality and confusion of

incidental, irrelevant, and superfluous beauties, its lack, however much

it may revel in classical ideas and associations, of the classical

instinct for clarity, simplicity, and selection. Another (I speak

especially of narrative poetry) is its habitual wedding of allegory and

romance, its love of turning into parable every theme, other than mere

chronicle, which it touches. All the masters with whom Keats was at this

time most familiar--Spenser of course first and foremost, William Browne

and practically all the Spenserians,--were men apt to conceive alike of

Grecian myth and mediaeval romance as necessarily holding moral and

symbolic under-meanings in solution. Again, it was from Ovid's

_Metamorphoses_, as Englished by that excellent Jacobean translator,

George Sandys, that Keats, more than from any other source, made himself

familiar with the details of classic fable; and Sandys, in the fine

Oxford folio edition of his book which we know Keats used, must needs

conform to a fixed mediaeval and Renaissance tradition by 'mythologizing'

his text, as he calls it, with a commentary full not only of

illustrative parallel passages but of interpretations half rationalist,

half ethical, which Ovid never dreamt of. Neither must it be forgotten

that among Keats's own contemporaries Shelley had in his first important

poem, _Alastor_, set the example of embarking on an allegoric theme,

and one shadowing forth, as we shall find that _Endymion_ shadows forth

though on different lines, the adventures and experiences of the poetic

soul in man.

The bewildering redundance and intricacy of detail in _Endymion_ are

obvious, the presence of an underlying strain of allegoric or symbolic

meaning harder to detect. Keats's letters referring to his poem contain

only the slightest and rarest hints of the presence of such ideas in it,

and in the execution they are so little obtruded or even made clear that

they were wholly missed by two generations of his earlier readers. It is

only of late years that they have yielded themselves, and even now none

too definitely, to the scrutiny of students reading and re-reading the

poem by the light of incidental utterances in his earlier and later

poetry and in his miscellaneous letters. But the ideas are certainly

there: they account for and give interest to much that, taken as mere

narrative, is confusing or unpalatable: and the best way of finding a

clue through the mazes of the poem is by laying and keeping hold upon

them wherever we can.

For such a clue to serve the reader, he must have it in his hand from

the beginning. Let it be borne in mind, then, that besides the

fundamental idea of treating the passion of Endymion for Cynthia as a

type of the passion of the poetic soul for essential Beauty, Keats wrote

under the influence of two secondary moral ideas or convictions,

inchoate probably in his mind when he began but gaining definiteness as

he went on. One was that the soul enamoured of and pursuing Beauty

cannot achieve its quest in selfishness and isolation, but to succeed

must first be taken out of itself and purified by active sympathy with

the lives and sufferings of others: the other, that a passion for the

manifold separate and dividual beauties of things and beings upon earth

is in its nature identical with the passion for that transcendental and

essential Beauty: hence the various human love-adventures which befall

the hero in dreams or in reality, and seem to distract him from his

divine quest, are shown in the end to be in truth no infidelities but

only attractions exercised by his celestial mistress in disguise.

In devising the adventures of his hero in accordance with these leading

ideas, Keats works in part from his own mental experience. He weaves

into his tale, in terms always of concrete imagery, all the complex

fluctuations of joy and despondency, gleams of confident spiritual

illumination alternating with faltering hours of darkness and

self-doubt, which he had himself been undergoing since the ambition to

be a great poet seized him. He cannot refrain from also weaving in a

thousand and one irrelevant matters which the activity and ferment of

his young imagination suggest, thus continually confusing the main

current of his narrative and breaking the coherence of its symbolism. He

draws out 'the one bare circumstance,' to use his own phrase, of the

story into an endless chain of intricate and flowery narrative, leading

us on phantasmagoric journeyings under the bowels of the earth and over

the floor of ocean and through the fields of air. The scenery, indeed,

is often not merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy: there is

something of Oriental bewilderment--an Arabian Night's jugglery with

space and time--in the vague suddenness with which its changes are

effected.

Critics so justly esteemed as Mr Robert Bridges and Professor de

Selincourt have sought a key to the organic structure of the poem in the

supposition that each of its four books is intended to relate the hero's

probationary adventures in one of the four elements, the first book

being assigned to Earth, the second to Fire, the third to Water, the

fourth to Air. I am convinced that this view is mistaken. The action of

the first book passes on earth, no doubt, and that of the second beneath

the earth. Now it is true that according to ancient belief there existed

certain subterranean abodes or focuses of fire,--the stithy of Vulcan,

the roots of Etna where the giants lay writhing, the river of bale

rolling in flames around the city of the damned. But such things did not

make the under-world, as the theory of these critics assumes, the

recognized region of the element fire. According to the cosmology fully

set forth by Ovid at the beginning of his first book, and therefore

thoroughly familiar to Keats, the proper region or sphere of fire was

placed above and outside that of air and farthest of all from earth.[5]

Not only had Keats therefore no ancient authority for thinking of the

under-world as the special region of fire, he had explicit authority to

the contrary. Moreover, if he had meant fire he would have given us

fire, whereas in his under-world there is never a gleam of it, not a

flicker of the flames of Phlegethon nor so much as a spark from the

anvil of Vulcan; but instead, endless shadowy temple corridors, magical

cascades spouting among prodigious precipices, and the gardens and bower

of Adonis in their spring herbage and freshness. It is true, again, that

the third book takes us and keeps us under sea. But the reason is the

general one that Endymion, typifying the poetic soul of man in love with

the principle of essential Beauty, has to leave habitual things behind

him and

wander far

In other regions, past the scanty bar

To mortal steps,

in order to learn secrets of life, death, and destiny necessary to his

enlightenment and discipline. Where else should he learn such secrets if

not in the mysterious hollows of the earth and on the untrodden floor of

ocean? 'Our friend Keats,' Endymion is made to say in one of the poet's

letters from Oxford, 'has been hauling me through the earth and sea

with unrelenting perseverance': and in like manner in the poem itself

the hero asks,

Why am I not as are the dead,

Since to a woe like this I have been led

Through the dark earth, and through the wondrous sea?

But never a word to suggest any thought of the element fire--an element

from which Keats's too often fevered spirit seems even to have shrunk,

for except in telling of the blazing omens of _Hyperion's_ downfall it

is scarce mentioned in his poetry at all. Lastly, it is again true that

in the fourth book Endymion and his earthly love are carried by winged

horses on an ethereal excursion among the stars (though only for two

hundred and seventy lines out of a thousand, the rest of the action

passing, like that of the first book, on the soil of Caria). But this

flight has nothing to do with the element air as such; it is the flight

of the soul on the coursers of imagination through a region of dreams

and visions destined afterwards to come true. Hints for such submarine

and ethereal wanderings will no doubt have come into Keats's mind from

various sources in his reading,--from the passage of Drayton above

quoted,--from the _Arabian Nights_,--it may be from like incidents in

the mediaeval Alexander romances (in which the hero's crowning exploits

are always a flight to heaven with two griffins and a plunge under-sea

in a glass case), or possibly even from the _Endimion_ of Gombauld, a

very wild and withal tiresome French seventeenth-century prose romance

on Keats's own theme.[6]

BOOK I. This book is entirely introductory, and carries us no farther

than the exposition by the hero of the trouble in which he finds

himself. For its exordium Keats uses a line, and probably a whole

passage, which he had written many months before and kept by him. One

day in 1816, while he was still walking the hospitals and sharing rooms

in St Thomas's Street with his fellow students Mackereth and Henry

Stephens, Keats called out to Stephens from his window-seat to listen to

a new line he had just written,--'A thing of beauty is a constant

joy,'--and asked him how he liked it. Stephens indicating that he was

not quite satisfied, Keats thought again and came out with the amended

line, now familiar and proverbial even to triteness, 'A thing of beauty

is a joy for ever.'[7] Using this for the first line of his new poem,

Keats runs on from it into a passage, which may or may not have been

written at the same time, declaring the virtues of those things of

beauty--sun, moon, trees, rivulets, flowers, tales of beauty and

heroism indiscriminately--which make for health and quietude amidst the

gloom and distemper of the world. Then he tells of his own happiness in

setting about his cherished task in the prime of spring, and his hopes

of finishing it before winter. He takes us to a Pan-haunted forest on

Mount Latmos, with many paths leading to an open glade. The hour is

dawn, the scene in part manifestly modelled on a similar one in the

Chaucerian poem, _The Floure and Lefe_, in which he took so much

pleasure. First a group of little children come in from the forest paths

and gather round the altar, then a bevy of damsels, then a company of

shepherds; priests and people follow, and last of all the young

shepherd-prince and hero Endymion, now wan and pining from a new,

unexplained soul-sickness.

The festival opens with a speech of thanksgiving and exhortation from

the priest, followed by a choral hymn in honour of the god: then come

dances and games and story-telling. Meantime Endymion and the priest sit

apart among the elder shepherds, who pass the time imagining what happy

tasks and ministrations it will be theirs to ply in their 'homes

ethereal' after death. In the midst of such conversation Endymion goes

off into a distressful trance, during which there comes to him his

sister Peona (this personage and her name are inventions of Keats, the

name perhaps suggested by that of Paeana in the fourth book of the

_Faerie Queene_, or by the Paeon mentioned in Lempriere as a son of

Endymion in the Elean version of the tale, or by Paeon the physician of

the gods in the _Iliad_, whom she resembles in her quality of healer and

comforter; or very probably by all three together). Peona wakes her

brother from his trance, and takes him in a shallop to an arbour of her

own on a little island in a lake. Here she lulls him to rest, the poet

first pausing to utter a fine invocation to Sleep--his second, the first

having been at the beginning of _Sleep and Poetry_. Endymion awakens

refreshed, and promises to be of better cheer in future. She sings

soothingly to the lute, and then questions him concerning his

troubles:--

Brother,'tis vain to hide

That thou dost know of things mysterious,

Immortal, starry; such alone could thus

Weigh down thy nature.

When she has guessed in vain, he determines to confide in her: tells her

how he fell asleep on a bed of poppies and other flowers which he had

found magically new-blown on a place where there had been none before;

how he dreamed that he was gazing fixedly at the stars shining in the

zenith with preternatural glory, until they began to swim and fade, and

then, dropping his eyes to the horizon, he saw the moon in equal glory

emerging from the clouds; how on her disappearance he again looked up

and there came down to him a female apparition of incomparable beauty

(in whom it does not yet occur to him to recognize the moon-goddess);

how she took him by the hand, and they were lifted together through

mystic altitudes

Where falling stars dart their artillery forth

And eagles struggle with the buffeting north

That balances the heavy meteor stone;

how thence they swooped downwards in eddies of the mountain wind, and

finally how, clinging to and embracing his willing companion in a

delirium of happiness, he alighted beside her on a flowery alp, and

there fell into a dream-sleep within his sleep; from which awakening to

reality, he found himself alone on the bed of poppies, with the breeze

at intervals bringing him 'Faint fare-thee-wells and sigh-shrilled

adieus,' and with disenchantment fallen upon everything about him:--

All the pleasant hues

Of heaven and earth had faded: deepest shades

Were deepest dungeons: heaths and sunny shades

Were full of pestilent light; and taintless rills

Seem'd sooty, and o'erspread with upturn'd gills

Of dying fish; the vermeil rose had blown

In frightful scarlet, and its thorns outgrown

Like spiked aloe.

Here we have the first of those mystic dream-flights of Endymion and his

celestial visitant in company, prefiguring the union of the soul with

the spirit of essential Beauty, which have to come true before the end

but of which the immediate result is that all other delights lose their

savour and turn to ashes. The spirit of man, so the interpretation would

seem to run, having once caught the vision of transcendental Beauty and

been allowed to embrace it, must pine after it evermore and in its

absence can take no delight in nature or mankind. Another way would have

been to make his hero find in every such momentary vision or revelation

a fresh encouragement, a source of joy and inspiration until the next:

but this was not Keats's way. Peona listens with sisterly sympathy, but

her powers of help, being purely human, cannot in this case avail. She

can only try to rouse him by contrasting his present forlorn and languid

state with his former virility and ambition:--

Yet it is strange and sad, alas!

That one who through this middle earth should pass

Most like a sojourning demi-god, and leave

His name upon the harp-string, should achieve

No higher bard than simple maidenhood,

Sighing alone, and fearfully,--how the blood

Left his young cheek; and how he used to stray

He knew not where; and how he would say, _Nay_,

If any said 'twas love: and yet 'twas love;

What could it be but love? How a ring-dove

Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path;

And how he died: and then, that love doth scathe

The gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses.

And then the ballad of his sad life closes

With sighs, and an alas! Endymion!

His reply in his own defence is long and much of it beautiful: but we

follow the chain of thought and argument with difficulty, so hidden is

it in flowers of poetry and so little are its vital links made obvious.

A letter of Keats, containing one of his very few explanatory comments

on work of his own, shows that he attached great importance to the

passage and felt that its sequence and significance might easily be

missed. Sending a correction of the proof to Mr Taylor, the publisher,

he says--'The whole thing must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a

consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere words, but I assure you that

when I wrote it, it was a regular stepping of the Imagination towards a

truth. My having written that argument will perhaps be of the greatest

service to me of anything I ever did. It set before me the gradations of

happiness, even like a kind of pleasure thermometer, and is my first

step towards the chief attempt in the drama.' The first ten lines offer

little difficulty:--

Peona! ever have I long'd to slake

My thirst for the world's praises: nothing base,

No merely slumberous phantasm, could unlace

The stubborn canvas for my voyage prepar'd--

Though now 'tis tatter'd; leaving my bark bar'd

And sullenly drifting: yet my higher hope

Is of too wide, too rainbow-large a scope,

To fret at myriads of earthly wrecks.

Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks

Our ready minds to fellowship divine,

A fellowship with essence; till we shine,

Full alchemiz'd, and free of space. Behold

The clear religion of heaven!

It seems clear that we have here shadowed forth the highest hope and

craving of the poetic soul, the hope to be wedded in full communion or

'fellowship divine'--or shall we say with Wordsworth in love and holy

passion?--with the spirit of essential Beauty in the world. In the next

lines we shall find, if we read them carefully enough, that Keats,

having thus defined his ultimate hope, breaks off and sets out again

from the foot of a new ascending scale of poetical pleasure and

endeavour which he asks us to consider. It differs from the ascending

scale of the earlier poems inasmuch as it begins, not with the toying

of nymphs in shady places and the like, but with thoughts of olden

minstrelsy and romantic tales and prophecies. The verse here is of

Keats's finest:--

--hist, when the airy stress

Of music's kiss impregnates the free winds,

And with a sympathetic touch unbinds

AEolian magic from their lucid wombs:

Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs;

Old ditties sigh above their father's grave;

Ghosts of melodious prophecyings rave

Round every spot where trod Apollo's foot;

Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit,

Where long ago a giant battle was;

And, from the turf, a lullaby doth pass

In every place where infant Orpheus slept.

It is impressed upon us in the next lines that this is a relatively

unexalted phase of imaginative feeling, and our thoughts are directed to

other experiences of the poetic soul more enthralling and more

'self-destroying' (that is more effectual in purging it of egotism),

namely the experiences of friendship and love, those of love above

all:--

Aye, so delicious is the unsating food,

That men, who might have tower'd in the van

Of all the congregated world, to fan

And winnow from the coming step of time

All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime

Left by men-slugs and human serpentry,

Have been content to let occasion die,

Whilst they did sleep in love's elysium.

And, truly, I would rather be struck dumb,

Than speak against this ardent listlessness:

For I have ever thought that it might bless

The world with benefits unknowingly;

As does the nightingale, upperched high,

And cloister'd among cool and bunched leaves--

She sings but to her love, nor e'er conceives

How tiptoe Night holds back her dark-grey hood.

If a man, next pleads Endymion, may thus reasonably give up even the

noblest of worldly ambitions for the joys of a merely mortal love, how

much more may he do so for those of an immortal. No, he re-assures Peona

in reply to her questioning glance, he is not fancy-sick:--

no, no, I'm sure

My restless spirit never could endure

To brood so long upon one luxury,

Unless it did, though fearfully, espy

A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.

We have now been carried back to the top of the scale, and these lines

again express, although vaguely, the aspirations of the poetic soul at

their highest pitch, rising through thoughts and experiences of mortal

love to the hope of communion with immortal Beauty. But that longed-for,

loftiest phase of the imaginative life, that hope beyond the shadow of a

dream, too vast and too rainbow-bright to be quenched by any fear of

earthly disaster, Endymion cannot attempt to define, least of all to the

practically-minded Peona. He can only try to convince her of its reality

by telling her of later momentary visitations with which the divinity of

his dreams has favoured him--her face reflected at him from a

spring--her voice murmuring to him from a cave--and how miserably in the

intervals he has pined and hungered for her. But now, he ends by

assuring his sister, he will be patient and pine no longer. Yet it is

but a sickly half-assurance after all.

There is a paly flame of hope that plays

Where'er I look: but yet, I'll say 'tis naught,

And here I bid it die. Have I not caught,

Already, a more healthy countenance?

And with this, as she rows him back from her island, the anxious sister

must rest content.

BOOK II. opens with a renewed declamation on the power and glory of

love, and the relative unimportance of the wars and catastrophes of

history. Juliet leaning from her balcony, the swoon of Imogen, Hero

wrongfully accused by Claudio, Spenser's Pastorella among the bandits,

he declares,

Are things to brood on with more ardency

Than the death-day of empires.

The passage has caused some critics to reproach Keats as a mere mawkish

amorist indifferent to the great affairs and interests of the world. But

must one not believe that all poor flawed and fragmentary human loves,

real or fabled, happy or miserable, are far off symbols and shadowings

of that Love which, unless the universe is quite other than we have

trusted, 'moves the sun and the other stars?' Are they not related to it

as to their source and spring? It is quite true that Keats was not yet

able to tell of such loves except in terms which you may call mawkish if

you will (he called them so himself a little later). But being a poet he

knew well enough their worth and parentage. And when the future looks

back on today, even on today, a death-day of empires in a sterner and

vaster sense than any the world has known, will all the waste and hatred

and horror, all the hope and heroism of the time, its tremendous issues

and catastrophes, be really found to have eclipsed and superseded love

as the thing fittest to fill the soul and inspire the songs of a poet?

The invocation ended, we set out with the hero on the adventures that

await him. He gathers a wild-rose bud which on expanding releases a

butterfly from its heart: the butterfly takes wing and he follows its

flight with eagerness. At last they reach a fountain spouting near the

mouth of a cave, and in touching the water the butterfly is suddenly

transformed into a nymph of the fountain, who speaking to Endymion

pities, encourages, and warns him in one breath. Endymion sits and

soliloquizes beside the fountain, at first in wavering terms which

express the ebb and flow of Keats's own inner aspirations and misgivings

about his poetic calling. Anon he invokes the virgin goddess Cynthia to

quell the tyranny of love in him (not yet guessing that his dream

visitant is really she). But no, insensibility would be the worst of

all; the goddess must, he is assured, know of some form of love higher

and purer than the Cupids are concerned with; he prays to her to be

propitious; dreams again that he is sailing through the sky with her;

and makes a wild appeal to her which is answered by a voice from within

the cavern bidding him descend 'into the sparry hollows of the world.'

He obeys, (this plunge into a spring or fountain and thence into the

under-world is a regular incident in a whole group of folk tales, one or

another of which was no doubt in Keats's mind): and we follow him at

first into a region

nor bright, nor sombre wholly,

But mingled up; a gleaming melancholy;

A dusky empire and its diadems;

One faint eternal eventide of gems.

A vein of gold sparkling with jewels serves him for path, and leads him

through twilight vaults and passages to a ridge that towers over many

waterfalls: and the lustre of a pendant diamond guides him further till

he reaches a temple of Diana. What imaginative youth but has known his

passive day-dreams haunted by visions, mysteriously impressive and

alluring, of natural and architectural marvels, huge sculptured caverns

and glimmering palace-halls in endless vista? To such imaginings, fed by

his readings and dreamings on

Memphis, and Nineveh, and Babylon,