A week later (September 5) he discourses pleasantly to Taylor on the

virtues and drawbacks of different kinds of country air and on the

effects of field labour on the character; and by way of a specimen of

his work sends a passage of thirty lines from _Lamia_. By this time

Brown had gone off to visit friends at Bedhampton and elsewhere, and

Keats was left alone at Winchester. Presently came a disturbing letter

from George, established by this time at the then remote trading

settlement of Louisville, Ohio, and in difficulties from a heavy loss

incurred through a venture into which he had been led, dishonestly as he

believed, by the naturalist Audubon. He asks in consequence that Abbey

should be pressed to send him the share due to him from their brother

Tom's estate. This could only be done if their aunt Jennings could be

persuaded to free Abbey's hands by dropping her threatened Chancery

suit. Hurrying to London to try and put this business through, Keats

stayed there three days (Septr. 10-13), but dared not break his serenity

by sight or touch of his enchantress. In a note to her he writes, 'I

love you too much to venture to Hampstead, I feel it is not paying a

visit, but venturing into a fire.... I am a Coward, I cannot bear the

pain of being happy, 'tis out of the question; I must admit no thought

of it.' He found few of his friends in town; dined with the Wylies, the

family of his sister-in-law; and had much talk with Mr Abbey, who seemed

inclined to dangle before him some prospect of employment in the

hatter's business which he combined with his tea-dealing, and read to

him with approval a passage from _Don Juan_ ('Lord Byron's last flash

poem,' says Keats) against literary ambition. He went to see his sister

Fanny at Walthamstow, passed some time with Rice, and had a long six

hours' talk with Woodhouse: of this Keats's own letters make no mention,

but Woodhouse's account of it, written a week later to Taylor, has been

preserved and is curiously interesting.[3]

Keats, warm from the composition of _Lamia_, had had an impulse to

publish it immediately, together with the _Eve of St Agnes_, but the

publishers had thought the time inopportune. Woodhouse asked why not

_Isabella_ too? and Keats answered that he could not bear that poem now

and thought it mawkish. Whereupon Woodhouse makes the judicious comment:

'this certainly cannot be so, the feeling is very likely to come across

an author on review of a former work of his own, particularly when the

object of his present meditations is of a more sober and unimpassioned

character. The feeling of mawkishness seems to me that which comes upon

us when anything of great tenderness and simplicity is met with when we

are not in a sufficiently tender and simple frame of mind to hear it:

when we experience a sort of revulsion or resiliency (if there be such a

word) from the sentiment or expression.' Keats, full of _Lamia_, read it

out to his friend, who comments: 'I am much pleased with it. I can use

no other terms for you know how badly he reads his own poetry.' (Other

witnesses on the contrary tell of the thrilling effect of Keats's

reading--a reading which was half chanting, 'in a low, tremulous

undertone'--of his own work.) 'And you know,' continues Woodhouse, 'how

slow I am to catch the effect of poetry read by the best reader for the

first time.' Nevertheless he is able to give his correspondent a quite

accurate sketch of the plot, and adds, 'you may suppose all these events

have given K. scope for some beautiful poetry, which even in this

cursory hearing of it, came every now and then upon me and made me

"start, as tho' a sea-nymph quired."'

The talk turning to the _Eve of St Agnes_, Keats showed Woodhouse some

changes he had just made in recopying it. One of these introduced a

slight but disfiguring note of cynical realism or 'pettish disgust' into

the concluding lines telling of the deaths of old Angela and the

beadsman, and is the first sign we find of that inclination to mix a

worldly would-be Don Juanish vein with romance which was soon to appear

so disastrously in the _Cap and Bells_. The other change was to make it

clear that the melting of Porphyro into Madeline's dream, at the

enchanted climax of the poem, implied love's full fruition between them

then and there. At this point Woodhouse's prudery took alarm. He pleaded

against the change vehemently, and Keats to tease him still more

vehemently defended it, vowing that his own and his hero's character for

virility required the new reading, and that he did not write for misses.

The correct and excellent Woodhouse, scandalized though he somewhat was

by what he calls his friend's 'rhodomontade,' declares that they had a

delightful time together. He was leaving London the same afternoon for

Weymouth, and Keats came to the coach-office to see him off. At parting

they each promised to mend their ways in the matter of letter-writing,

Keats holding out the hope, which was not fulfilled, of a rimed epistle

to follow. Woodhouse tells how, being the only inside passenger in the

coach, he 'amused himself by diving into a deep reverie, and recalling

all that had passed during the six hours we were _tete a tete_.'

Such touches of over-sensitive prudery set aside, the more light we get

on this friend of Keats, Richard Woodhouse, the higher grows our esteem

both for his character and judgment. In other extant letters to Taylor

of this date, he comments with fine insight on Keats's own confessions

of secret pride and obstinacy, and on his vice ('for a vice in a poor

man it is') of lending more than he could afford to friends in need. And

what can be more sagacious than the following, from a letter of

Woodhouse to a lady cousin of his own?--

You were so flattered as to say the other day, you wished I had been

in a company where you were, to defend Keats.--In all places, and at

all times, and before all persons, I would express and as far as I am

able, support, my high opinion of his poetical merits--such a genius,

I verily believe, has not appeared since Shakspeare and Milton.... But

in our common conversation upon his merits, we should always bear in

mind that his fame may be more hurt by indiscriminate praise than by

wholesale censure. I would at once admit that he has great

faults--enough indeed to sink another writer. But they are more than

counter-balanced by his beauties: and this is the proper mode of

appreciating an original genius. His faults will wear away--his fire

will be chastened--and then eyes will do homage to his brilliancy. But

genius is wayward, trembling, easily daunted. And shall we not excuse

the errors, the luxuriancy of youth? Are we to expect that poets are

to be given to the world, as our first parents were, in a state of

maturity? Are they to have no season of childhood? are they to have no

room to try their wings before the steadiness and strength of their

flight are to be finally judged of?... Now, while Keats is unknown,

unheeded, despised of one of our arch-critics, neglected by the

rest--in the teeth of the world, and in the face of 'these curious

days,' I express my conviction, that Keats, during his life (if it

please God to spare him to the usual age of man, and the critics not

to drive him from the free air of the Poetic heaven before his Wings

are fully fledged) will rank on a level with the best of the last or

of the present generation: and after his death will take his place at

their head. But, while I think thus, I would make persons respect my

judgment by the discrimination of my praise, and by the freedom of my

censure where his writings are open to it. These are the Elements of

true criticism. It is easy, like Momus, to find fault with the

clattering of the slipper worn by the Goddess of beauty; but 'the

serious Gods' found better employment in admiration of her

unapproachable loveliness. A Poet ought to write for Posterity. But a

critic ought to do so too.

By September 14 Keats was back at Winchester, where during the next

three weeks he had a chance of testing his capacity for solitude. He

seems to have looked at _Hyperion_ again, but made up his mind to go no

farther with it, having got to feel its style too latinized and

Miltonic. A very few weeks before, in August, he had written to two

different correspondents that _Paradise Lost_ was becoming every day a

greater wonder to him. Now, in the third week of September he had come

to regard it, 'though so fine itself,' as a 'corruption of our

language,' a case of 'a northern dialect accommodating itself to Greek

and Latin inversions and intonations;' and had convinced himself,

paradoxically, that the purest English was Chatterton's,--which is in

truth no right English at all, but the attempt of a brilliant

self-taught boy to forge himself a fifteenth-century style by gathering

miscellaneous half-understood archaisms out of dictionaries and

stringing them in fluent stanzas of Spenserian, or post-Spenserian,

rhythm and syntax. But it was probably not of Chatterton's vocabulary

that Keats was thinking, but rather of the unartificial, straightforward

flow of his verse in contrast with Milton's. The apparent suddenness of

Keats's change of mind on this matter is characteristic, like his quite

unjust return upon himself in regard to _Isabella_, of what Haydon calls

his lack of decisions and fixity of aim:--'One day he was full of an

epic poem; the next day epic poems were splendid impositions on the

world. Never for two days did he know his own intentions.' By these

words, to be taken with the usual discount, Haydon means the same thing

as Keats means himself when he speaks of his 'unsteady and vagarish

disposition'; let us rather say his sensitive and receptive openness of

mind to contradictory impressions, even on questions of that art of

which he had become so fine a master, and withal his habit of complete

surrender to whatever was the dominant impression of the moment.

With reference to his other occupations of the hour,--_Lamia_ he had

finished, and for the present he did no more to _King Stephen_.

Realizing the low repute into which critical derision had brought him as

a member of the Cockney School, he proposed to withhold his next volume

of poems in hope that the production of _Otho the Great_ at Drury Lane

in the autumn might, if successful, create a more favourable atmosphere

for its reception; and was in consequence seriously dashed when he

learnt that Kean was on the point of starting for America. One of his

chief present pursuits was studying Italian in the pages of Ariosto. The

wholesome brightness of an unusually fine season continuing to sustain

and soothe him, he wrote the last, most unclouded and serenely

accomplished of his meditative odes, that _To Autumn_. A sudden return

of the epistolary mood came upon him, and between September 17th and

27th he poured himself out to his brother and sister-in-law in a new

long journal-letter, full of confidences on every subject that dwelt in

or flitted through his mind except the one master-subject of the passion

he was striving to keep subdued by absence. 'I am inclined,' he says,

'to write a good deal; for there can be nothing so remembrancing and

enchaining as a good long letter, be it composed of what it may.'

Accordingly he ranges as usual over all manner of miscellaneous themes,

discussing his own and his brother's situation and future; telling of

Haydon and his inconsiderate behaviour about the loan, and of Dilke's

political dogmatism and over-anxiety about his boy; giving accounts of

the several members of the Hampstead circle, mixed up with playful

messages to his sister-in-law, whom he represents as caring nothing for

these tiresome people and interrupting her husband's reading of the

letter to insist on prattling about her baby. He adds anecdotes of his

visit to her family in London, and a propos of babies tells of a thing

he had heard Charles Lamb say. 'A child in arms was passing by his chair

toward its mother, in the nurse's arms. Lamb took hold of the long

clothes, saying: "Where, God bless me, where does it leave off?"' With

an unexpressed shaft of inward mockery at his own plight, he describes

the ridiculous figure cut by a man in love, the victim in this case

being his friend Haslam; relates jokes practical and other which had

lately passed between Brown, Dilke, and himself, and after a very

sensible excursion into history and current politics, to which he was

never at all so indifferent as is commonly said, he dwells with a

kindly, humorous enjoyment on the sedate maiden-ladylike ways and

aspects of the cathedral town where he found the autumn quietude so

comforting. This sets him thinking of his fragment of a poem written

seven months earlier and breathing a similar spirit, the _Eve of St

Mark_; so he transcribes it for their benefit, and also, in odd

contrast, a long passage from Burton's _Anatomy_ which had tickled some

queer corner of his brain by its cumulative effect of exuberant and

grotesque disgustfulness, and which he declares he would love to hear

delivered by an actor across the footlights.

During the same days at Winchester Keats also wrote intimately and

purposefully to Reynolds, Brown, and Dilke. In all these letters we see

the well conditioned, wise and admirable Keats, the sane and healthy

partner in his so dual and divided nature, for the time being holding

firmly, or at any rate hopeful and confident of being able to hold

firmly, the upper hand. He resolves manfully to rally his moral powers,

to banish over-passionate and fretful feelings and to put himself on a

right footing with the world. Imaginary troubles, he declares, are what

prey upon a man: real troubles spur him to exertion, and exert himself

and fight against morbid imaginings he will. In reference to George's

money troubles, 'Rest in the confidence,' he says, 'that I will not omit

any exertion to benefit you by some means or other: if I cannot remit

you hundreds, I will tens, and if not that, ones:' a promise which we

shall find George taking only too literally later on. Of his brothers

and his own immediate prospect he writes with seriousness, nevertheless

more encouragingly than the occasion well warranted. He will not let

himself seem too much depressed even by the heavy check which his and

Brown's hopes about _Otho the Great_ had just received from the news of

Kean's intended departure for America.

We are certainly in a very low estate--I say we, for I am in such a

situation, that were it not for the assistance of Brown and Taylor, I

must be as badly off as a man can be. I could not raise any sum by the

promise of any poem, no, not by the mortgage of my intellect. We must

wait a little while. I really have hopes of success. I have finished a

tragedy, which if it succeeds will enable me to sell what I may have

in manuscript to a good advantage. I have passed my time in reading,

writing, and fretting, the last I intend to give up, and stick to the

other two. They are the only chances of benefit to us. Your wants will

be a fresh spur to me. I assure you you shall more than share what I

can get whilst I am still young. The time may come when age will make

me more selfish. I have not been well treated by the world, and yet I

have, capitally well. I do not know a person to whom so many

purse-strings would fly open as to me, if I could possibly take

advantage of them, which I cannot do, for none of the owners of these

purses are rich.... Mine, I am sure, is a tolerable tragedy; it would

have been a bank to me, if just as I had finished it, I had not heard

of Kean's resolution to go to America. That was the worst news I could

have had.... But be not cast down any more than I am; I feel I can

bear real ills better than imaginary ones. Whenever I find myself

growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt,

brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly, and in fact

adonize as if I were going out. Then, all clean and comfortable, I sit

down to write. This I find the greatest relief.

And again, in still better heart:--

With my inconstant disposition it is no wonder that this morning, amid

all our bad times and misfortunes, I should feel so alert and

well-spirited. At this moment you are perhaps in a very different

state of mind. It is because my hopes are ever paramount to my

despair. I have been reading over a part of a short poem I have

composed lately, called _Lamia_, and I am certain there is that sort

of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way. Give them

either pleasant or unpleasant sensation--what they want is a sensation

of some sort. I wish I could pitch the key of your spirits as high as

mine is; but your organ-loft is beyond the reach of my voice.

To Dilke and Brown he writes at the same time of his own immediate

plans, telling them that he is determined to give up trusting to mere

hopes of ultimate success, whether from plays or poems, and to turn to

the natural resource of a man fit for nothing but literature and needing

to support himself by his pen; the resource, that is, of journalism and

reviewing. These are some of his words to Dilke:--

Wait for the issue of this Tragedy? No--there cannot be greater

uncertainties east, west, north, and south than concerning dramatic

composition. How many months must I wait! Had I not better begin to

look about me now? If better events supersede this necessity what harm

will be done? I have no trust whatever on Poetry. I don't wonder at

it--the marvel is to me how people read so much of it. I think you

will see the reasonableness of my plan. To forward it I purpose living

in a cheap Lodging in Town, that I may be in the reach of books and

information of which there is here a plentiful lack. If I can find any

place tolerably comfortable I will settle myself and fag till I can

afford to buy Pleasure--which if I never can afford I must go without.

He had been living since May on an advance from Taylor and a loan from

Brown to be repaid out of the eventual profits of their play, and was

uneasy at putting Brown to a present sacrifice. He writes to him

accordingly:--

I have not known yet what it is to be diligent. I purpose living in

town in a cheap lodging, and endeavouring, for a beginning, to get the

theatricals of some paper. When I can afford to compose deliberate

poems, I will.... I had got into a habit of mind of looking towards

you as a help in all difficulties. You will see it as a duty I owe

myself to break the neck of it. I do nothing for my subsistence--make

no exertion. At the end of another year you shall applaud me, not for

verses, but for conduct.

Brown, returning to Winchester a few days later, found his friend

unshaken in the same healthy resolutions, and however loth to lose him

for housemate and doubtful of his power to live the life he proposed,

respected his motives too much to contend against them. It was

accordingly settled that the two friends, after travelling up to London

together, should part company, Brown returning to his home at Hampstead,

while Keats went to live by himself and look out for employment on the

press. The Dilkes, who were living in Great Smith Street, Westminster,

at his desire engaged a lodging for him close by, at the corner of

College Street (no. 25), and thither he betook himself, it would seem on

the 7th or 8th of October.

College Street, as all Londoners or visitors to London know, is one of

sedately picturesque Queen Anne or early Georgian houses overlooking the

Abbey gardens. No corner of the town could have been more fitted to

soothe him with a sense of cathedral quietude resembling that which he

had just left. But the wise and purposeful Keats had reckoned without

his other self, the Keats distracted by uncontrollable love-cravings.

His blood proved traitor to his will, and the plan of life and literary

hackwork in London broke down at once on trial, or even before trial. On

the 10th he went up to Hampstead, and in a moment all his strength, to

borrow words of his own, was uncrystallized and dissolved. It was the

first time he had seen his mistress since June. He found her kind, and

from that hour was utterly passion's slave again. In the solitude of his

London lodging he found that he could not work nor rest nor fix his

thoughts. He writes to her three days later:--

This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot

proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and

see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so

short a time. Upon my Soul I can think of nothing else. The time is

passed when I had power to advise and warn you against the unpromising

morning of my Life. My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist

without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again--my

Life seems to stop there--I see no further. You have absorb'd me.

He seems to have spent the next week going backwards and forwards

between Hampstead and London, staying for three nights as a guest at

her mother's house ('my three days' dream,' he calls the visit) and for

one or two at the Dilkes' in Westminster, and finally about the 20th

settling back into his old quarters with Brown at Wentworth Place next

door to her. 'I shall be able to do nothing,' he writes.--and again

there comes the cry, 'I should like to cast the die for Love or death.'

It was for death that the die was cast, and three months later came the

seizure which made manifest the certainty of the issue. In the meantime

he lived outwardly through the autumn and early winter much the same

life as before among his own friends and Brown's. Some of them noticed

in him at times a loss of natural gaiety and an unaccustomed strain of

recklessness and moodiness. Severn, who had spent with him part of one

of his days at the College Street lodgings, hearing him read _Lamia_ and

tell of the change of mind about _Hyperion_ (to Severn as an ardent

Miltonian a sore disappointment), called there again a few days later

only to find him flown; and going to see him the next Sunday at

Hampstead was perturbed by the change in him. 'He seemed well neither in

mind nor in body, with little of the happy confidence and resolute

bearing of a week earlier: while alternating moods of apathetic

dejection and spasmodic gaiety rendered him a companion somewhat

difficult to humour.' His correspondence at the same time falls off, and

from mid-October until past Christmas we get only one letter to Severn,

one to Rice, one to Taylor the publisher, and three or four to his

sister Fanny. For other evidence we have the recollections, fairly full

but somewhat enigmatical withal, of his housemate Brown; some

blatancies, little to be trusted, of Haydon; and what is more revealing,

the tenor of his own attempts at new poetical work, as well as a few

private utterances in verse which the stress of passion forced from him.

For some weeks he was able to ply at Wentworth Place a double daily

task: one, that of writing each morning in the same sitting-room with

Brown, who copied as he wrote, some stanzas of a comic fairy poem which

they had devised together, to be called _The Cap and Bells, or The

Jealousies_, and to come out under the pseudonym of 'Lucy Vaughan

Lloyd': the other, carried on each evening in the seclusion of his own

room, that of remodelling _Hyperion_ into the form of a Dream or Vision,

in which parts of the poem as begun a year before should be incorporated

with certain changes of style and diction. At the former scheme Keats

worked with great fluency but little felicity: the mere, almost

mechanical act of spinning the verses of _The Cap and Bells_ seems to

have come all the easier to him in that they sprang from no vital or

inward part of his imaginative being, and the result is as nearly

worthless as anything written by such a man can be conceived to be. In

his solitary work on the recast of _Hyperion_ Keats wrote, on the other

hand, out of the truest--which had come, alas! also to be the

saddest--depths of himself; and the fragment needs to be studied with as

much care as the best of his earlier work by those who would understand

the ripening thoughts of this great, now stricken, spirit on the

destinies of poets and the relation of poetry to human life. To that

study we shall come by and by. For the present let it be only noted that

these twofold occupations seem to have been kept up by Keats through

November, and broken off soon afterwards 'owing to a circumstance

which,' says Brown, mysteriously, 'it is needless to mention.' But

judging by the rest of Brown's narrative, as well as by some of Keats's

own private outpourings, no special or external circumstance can have

been needed,--his inward sufferings were quite enough of themselves,--to

put a stop to his writing. The wasting of his vital powers by latent

disease was turning all his sensations and emotions into pain: at once

darkening the shadow of impending poverty, increasing the natural

importunity of ill-boding instincts at his heart, and exasperating into

agony the unsatisfied cravings of his passion. During his 'three days'

dream' under the same roof with his betrothed in October he had been

able to write peaceably at nightfall:--

Faded the flower and all its budded charms,

Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,

Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,

Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise--

Vanish'd unseasonably at shut of eve,

When the dusk holiday--or holinight

Of fragrant-curtain'd love begins to weave

The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight;

But, as I've read love's missal through to-day,

He'll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.

But now the hunger is uncontrollable:--

Yourself--your soul--in pity give me all,

Withold no atom's atom or I die,

Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall.

Forget, in the mist of idle misery,

Life's purposes,--the palate of my mind

Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!

And again he cries, what can he do to recover his old liberty?--

When every fair one that I saw was fair,

Enough to catch me in but half a snare,

Not keep me there:

When, howe'er poor or particolour'd things,

My muse had wings,

And ever ready was to take her course

Whither I bent her force,

Unintellectual, yet divine to me;--

Divine, I say!--What sea-bird o'er the sea

Is a philosopher the while he goes

Winging along where the great water throes?

How shall I do

To get anew

Those moulted feathers, and so mount once more

Above, above

The reach of fluttering Love,

And make him cower lowly while I soar?

Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism,

A heresy and schism,

Foisted into the canon law of love;--

No,--wine is only sweet to happy men;

More dismal cares

Seize on me unawares,--

Where shall I learn to get my peace again?

To banish thoughts of that most hateful land,

Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand

Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life;

That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour,

Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore,

Unown'd of any weedy-haired gods,

Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods,

Ic'd in the great lakes, to afflict mankind;

Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind,

Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbag'd meads

Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds;

There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song,

And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.

With that image of the sea-bird winging untroubled its chosen way over

the waves, and as free as they, the poet sheds a real light on his own

psychology in happier days, while the later lines figure direfully the

obsession that now seems to make him think of even his friendships as

wrecked and darkened, and of love as a ghastly error in nature, no joy

but a scourge that blights and devastates. That he might win peace by

marriage with the object of his passion does not seem to have occurred

to Keats as possible at the present ebb-tide of his fortune. 'However

selfishly I feel,' he had written to her some months earlier, 'I am sure

I could never act selfishly.' The Brawnes on their part were comfortably

off, but what his instincts of honour and independence forbade him to

ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly be expected to offer. As

the autumn wore into winter, he was not able to disguise his plight from

his affectionate companion Brown, though he shrank from speaking of its

causes. Looking back upon the time after ten years Brown records the

impression it left upon him thus:--

It was evident from the letters he had sent me, even in his

self-deceived assurance that he was 'as far from being unhappy as

possible,' that he was unhappy. I quickly perceived he was more so

than I had feared; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind,

and, frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great

uneasiness. He was unwilling to speak on the subject; and I could do

no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding

that word however.

Brown then tells of his morning and evening work on _The Cap and Bells_

and the revised _Hyperion_ and, in the vague terms I have quoted, of its

cessation. And then, seeming to assign to money troubles an even greater

part than they really bore in causing Keats's distress of mind, Brown

goes on--

He could not resume his employment, and he became dreadfully unhappy.

His hopes of fame, and other more tender hopes were blighted. His

patrimony, though much consumed in a profession he was compelled to

relinquish, might have upheld him through the storm, had he not

imprudently lost a part of it in generous loans.... He possessed the

noble virtues of friendship and generosity to excess; and they, in

this world, may chance to spoil a man of independent feeling, till he

is destitute. Even the 'immediate cash,' of which he spoke in the

extracts I have given from his letters, was lent, with no hope of its

speedy repayment, and he was left worse than pennyless. All that a

friend could say, or offer, or urge was not enough to heal his many

wounds. He listened, and, in kindness, or soothed by kindness, showed

tranquillity, but nothing from a friend could relieve him, except on a

matter of inferior trouble. He was too thoughtful, or too unquiet; and

he began to be reckless of health. Among other proofs of recklessness,

he was secretly taking, at times, a few drops of laudanum to keep up

his spirits. It was discovered by accident, and, without delay,

revealed to me. He needed not to be warned of the danger of such a

habit; but I rejoiced at his promise never to take another drop

without my knowledge; for nothing could induce him to break his word,

when once given,--which was a difficulty. Still, at the very moment of

my being rejoiced, this was an additional proof of his rooted misery.

Where Brown hints of his being 'careless of health,' Haydon, referring

apparently to this time of his life in particular, declares roundly and

crudely as follows:--

Unable to bear the sneers of ignorance or the attacks of envy, not

having strength of mind enough to buckle himself together like a

porcupine, and present nothing but his prickles to his enemies, he

began to despond, and flew to dissipation as a relief, which after a

temporary elevation of spirits plunged him into deeper despondency

than ever. For six weeks he was scarcely sober, and--to show what a

man does to gratify his appetites, when once they get the better of

him--once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with

Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the 'delicious coldness of

claret in all its glory,'--his own expression.

If Keats really told Haydon that silly, and I should suppose impossible,

story about the claret and cayenne it was probably only a piece of such

'rhodomontade' as his friends describe, invented on the spur of the

moment to scandalize Haydon or under the provocation of one of his

preachments. That he may at moments during these unhappy months have

sought relief in dissipation of one kind or another, as Brown tells us

he did in drug-taking, is likely: that he was now or at any time

habitually given to drink is disproved by the explicit testimony of all

his friends as well as of Brown, his closest intimate. In his few

letters of the time his secret misery is betrayed only by a single

phrase. Early in December he writes arranging to go with Severn to see

the picture with which Severn was competing for, and eventually won, the

annual gold medal of the Academy for historical painting. The subject

was 'The Cave of Despair' from Spenser. Keats in making the appointment

adds parenthetically from his troubled heart, 'you had best put me into

your Cave of Despair.' A little later we hear of him flinging out in a

fit of angered loyalty from a company of elder artists, Hilton, De Wint

and others, where the deserts of the winner were disparaged and his

success put down to favouritism.

It would seem that as late as November 17th he was still, or had quite

lately been, going on with _The Cap and Bells_. He writes on that date

to Taylor depreciating what he has recently been about and indicating in

what direction his thoughts, when he could bend them seriously upon work

at all, were inclined to turn:--

As the marvellous is the most enticing and the surest guarantee of

harmonious numbers I have been endeavouring to persuade myself to

untether Fancy and to let her manage for herself. I and myself cannot

agree about this at all. Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at

home amongst Men and women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto.

The little dramatic skill I may as yet have however badly it might

show in a Drama would I think be sufficient for a Poem. I wish to

diffuse the colouring of St Agnes eve throughout a poem in which

Character and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or

three such Poems, if God should spare me, written in the course of the

next six years, would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum. I

mean they would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine Plays--my

greatest ambition--when I do feel ambitious. I am sorry to say that is

very seldom. The subject we have once or twice talked of appears a

promising one, The Earl of Leicester's history. I am this morning

reading Holingshed's _Elizabeth_.

It does not seem clear whether his idea about Leicester was to use the

subject for a narrative poem or for a play. Scott's _Kenilworth_, be it

remembered, had not yet been written.

In December he writes to his sister Fanny of the trouble his throat

keeps giving him or threatening him with on exertion or cold, and says

that he has been ordering a thick great coat and thick shoes on the

advice of his doctor. He also mentions that he has begun to prepare a

volume of poems to come out in the spring, and that he is touching up

his and Brown's tragedy in order to brighten its interest. It had been

accepted, he tells her, by Drury Lane, but only with the promise of

coming out next season, and as that is not soon enough they intend

either to insist on its being brought out this season or else to

transfer it to Covent Gardens. He has been anxiously expecting, and has

just now received, news of George; and has promised to dine with Mrs

Dilke in London on Christmas day. Whether he was able to keep this

engagement we do not learn; but Brown at any rate was there, and between

him and Dilke there arose a challenge on which Keats among others was

called to adjudicate. The conversation, writes Mrs Dilke, 'turned on

fairy tales--Brown's forte--Dilke not liking them. Brown said he was

sure he could beat Dilke, and to let him try they betted a beefsteak

supper, and an allotted time was given. They had been read by the

persons fixed on--Keats, Reynolds, Rice, and Taylor--and the wager was

decided the night before last in favour of Dilke. Next Saturday night

the supper is to be given,--Beefsteaks and punch--the food of the

"Cockney School."'

So life went on for the friends, on the surface, pretty much as usual,

into the new year (1820). Early in January George Keats came for a short

visit to England to try and advance his affairs and get possession of

more capital for his business. He seems not to have realized at all

fully the true state of his brother's health or heart. He noticed,

indeed, a change, and looking back on the time some years afterwards

writes, 'he was not the same being; although his reception of me was as

warm as heart could wish, he did not speak with former openness and

unreserve, he had lost the reviving custom of venting his griefs.'

George was probably too full of his own affairs to enquire very closely

into John's, or he would never have allowed John, as he did, to strip

himself practically bare of future means of subsistence in fulfilment of

the brotherly promises of help conveyed, as we have seen, in his letter

from Winchester the previous September. 'It was not fair of him, was

it?' John is recorded to have said a little later from his sick-bed,

referring to George's action in so taking him at his word; and Brown

from this circumstance conceived of George a bitter bad opinion which

nothing afterwards would shake. Nevertheless there is ample evidence of

George's honourable and affectionate character, and it seems clear that

in striving for commercial success he had his brother's ultimate benefit

in view as much as his own, and that in the meantime he believed he had

reason to take for granted the willingness and ability of John's many

friends to keep him afloat.

On January 13th, a week after George's arrival, John took up his pen to

try and write to his sister-in-law a journal letter in the old chatty

affectionate style. If he had the means, he says, he would like to come

and pay them a visit in America for a few months. 'I should not think

much of the time, or my absence from my books; or I have no right to

think, for I am very idle. But then I ought to be diligent, or at least

to keep myself within reach of the materials for diligence. Diligence,

that I do not mean to say; I should say dreaming over my books, or

rather over other people's books.' He gossips about friends and

acquaintances, less good-naturedly than usual, as he seems to be aware

when he says, 'any third person would think I was addressing myself to a

lover of scandal. But we know we do not love scandal, but fun; and if

scandal happens to be fun, that is no fault of ours.' He tells how

George is making copies of his verses, including the ode to the

Nightingale; lets his inward embitterment show through for an instant

when he says, 'If you should have a boy, do not christen him John, and

persuade George not to let his partiality for me come across: 'tis a bad

name, and goes against a man;' describes a dance he has been to at the

Dilkes, and among a good deal of rather irritable and wry-mouthed social

satire, to which he tries to give a colour of pleasantry and

playfulness, strikes into sharp definition with the fewest possible

words the characters of some of his friends and acquaintances:--

I know three witty people, all distinct in their excellence--Rice,

Reynolds, and Richards. Rice is the wisest, Reynolds the playfullest,

Richards the out-o'-the-wayest. The first makes you laugh and think,

the second makes you laugh and not think, the third puzzles your head.

I admire the first, I enjoy the second, I stare at the third.... I

know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his

excellence--A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a

negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see

him at all though he were six feet high.--I bear the first, I forbear

the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel,

the second ditch-water, the third is spilt--he ought to be wiped up.

This was written on January 17th. Ten days later George started on his

return journey, and John, having forgotten to hand him for delivery at

home the budget he had been writing, was obliged to send it after him by

post. A week later again, on February 3rd, came the crash towards which,

as we can now see, Keats's physical constitution had been hastening ever

since the over exertion of his Scottish tour twenty months before. The

weather had been very variable, almost sultry in mid-January, then

bitter cold with frost and sleet, then a thaw, whereby Keats was tempted

to leave off his greatcoat. Coming from London to Hampstead outside the

stage coach on the night of Thursday February 3rd, the chill of the thaw

caught him. Everyone knows the words in which Brown relates the

sequel:--

At eleven o'clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like

fierce intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible; it

therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, 'What is the

matter? you are fevered?' 'Yes, yes,' he answered, 'I was on the

outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled,--but

now I don't feel it. Fevered!--of course, a little.' He mildly and

instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my

request that he should go to bed. I entered his chamber as he leapt

into bed. On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the

pillow, he slightly coughed, and I heard him say,--'That is blood from

my mouth.' I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood

upon the sheet. 'Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this

blood.' After regarding it steadfastly he looked up in my face, with a

calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said,--'I know

the colour of that blood;--it is arterial blood;--I cannot be deceived

in that colour;--that drop of blood is my death-warrant;--I must die.'

I ran for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning,

I left him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep.

Keats lived for twelve months longer, but it was only, in his own words,

a life in death. Before narrating the end, let us pause and consider his

work of the two preceding years, 1818 and 1819, on which his fame as a

great English poet is chiefly founded.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Local tradition, I am informed, used to identify the house as one

called Eglantine Villa, now demolished. The existing 'Keats Crescent'

was so named, not as indicating the special neighbourhood where the

poet lodged, but only by way of general commemoration of his sojourn.

[2]

--and now his heart

Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength

Glories--.

Milton, _Par. Lost_, i. 581.

[3] Morgan MSS.

CHAPTER XIII

WORK OF 1818, 1819.--I. THE ACHIEVEMENTS

Minor achievements--_Bards of Passion and of Mirth_--_Fancy_--The

tales--_Isabella_--Story and metre--Influence of Chaucer--Apostrophes

and invocations--Horror turned to beauty--The digging scene--Its

quality--_The Eve of St Agnes_--Variety of sources--Boccaccio's

_Filocolo_--Poetic scope and method--Examples--The unrobing scene--The

feast of fruits--A rounded close--_Lamia_--Sources: and a

comparison--Metre and quality--Beauties and faults--Perplexing

moral--The sage denounced: why?--Comments of Leigh Hunt--The odes: _To

Psyche_--Sources: Burton and Apuleius--Qualities: A questionable

claim--_On Indolence_--_On a Grecian Urn_--Sources: a

composite--Spheres of art and life contrasted--Play between the two

spheres--The Nightingale ode--_Ode on Melancholy_--A grand close--The

last of the odes--_To Autumn_.

The work of Keats's two mature years (if any poet or man in his

twenty-third and twenty-fourth years can be called mature) seems to

divide itself naturally into two main groups or classes. One class

consists of his finished achievements, things successfully carried

through in accordance with his first intention; the other of his

fragments and experiments, things begun and broken off either from

external causes or because in the execution the poet changed his mind or

his inspiration failed to sustain itself. I shall ask the reader to

consider the two classes separately, the achievements first: not because

there may not be even finer work in some of the fragments, but because a

thing incomplete, a torso, however splendid in power and promise, cannot

be judged on the same terms or with the same approach to finality as a

thing of which the whole is before us. One finished thing only, the

play of _Otho the Great_, I shall turn over to the second or

experimental class, seeing that an experiment it essentially was, and

one tried under conditions which made it impossible for Keats to be his

true self.

The class of achievements will include, then, besides a score of sonnets

and a few minor pieces of various form, the three completed tales in

verse, _Isabella or the Pot of Basil_, _The Eve of St Agnes_, and

_Lamia_; with the six odes, _To Psyche_, _On Indolence_ (not published

in Keats's lifetime), _On a Grecian Urn_, _To a Nightingale_, _To

Melancholy_, and _To Autumn_. Beginning with the minor things,--the

sonnets, being mostly occasional and autobiographical, have been

sufficiently touched on in our narrative chapters, and so have several

of the shorter lyrics, _In drear-nighted December_, _Meg Merrilies_, and

_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_. There remains chiefly the batch of pieces in

the seven-syllable couplet metre printed in the _Lamia_ volume between

the odes _To Psyche_ and _To Autumn_. Two of these, _Lines on the

Mermaid Tavern_ and _Robin Hood_, were written, as we have seen, at the

beginning of 1818, in the months when Keats was living alone in Well

Walk and resting after his labour on _Endymion_. Both are easy,

spirited, and intensely English in feeling; both, for all their gay

lightness of touch, are marked with that vivid imaginative life in

single phrases which almost from the first, amidst all the rawnesses of

his youth, stamps Keats for a poet of the great lineage. Already two

years earlier, in the valentine 'Hadst thou liv'd in days of old,' he

had shown a fair command of this metre, and now we can feel that he has

an ear well trained in its cadences by familiarity with the finest early

models, from Fletcher (in the _Faithful Shepherdess_) and Ben Jonson (in

the masque of _The Satyr_, the songs _To Celia_, and the _Charis_

lyrics) down to _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_.

The other two pieces in the same form, _Bards of Passion and of Mirth_

and _Fancy_, date from nearly a year later, when Keats had settled

under Brown's roof after Tom's death, and were copied by him for his

brother in a letter dated January 2nd 1819. In the _Mermaid Tavern_

lines he had followed in fancy the poet-guests of that hostelry to the

Elysian fields and asked them if they found there any finer

entertainment than in their old haunt. In _Bards of Passion and of

Mirth_, which he wrote on a blank page in Dilke's copy of Beaumont and

Fletcher, Keats singles out this particular pair of poet-partners to

follow beyond the grave, and in a strain somewhat more serious tells of

the double lives they lead,--their souls left here on earth in their

writings, and themselves--

Seated on Elysian lawns

Brows'd by none but Dian's fawns ...

Where the nightingale doth sing

Not a senseless, tranced thing,

But divine, melodious truth;

Philosophic numbers smooth;

Tales and golden histories

Of heaven and its mysteries.

In the affirmation with which the piece concludes,--

Bards of Passion and of Mirth,

Ye have left your souls on Earth!

Ye have souls in heaven too,

Double-liv'd in regions new!--

in this affirmation it seems, as Mr Buxton Forman has pointed out, as

though Keats were gaily countering the view of Wordsworth in the

well-known stanzas where, declaring how the power of Burns survives

'deep in the general heart of men,' he goes on to ask what need has the

poet for any other kind of Elysian after-life.[1]

Following an eighteenth-century practice, Keats calls this set of

heptasyllabics an ode, a form which in strictness it no way resembles. A

higher place is taken in his work by the longest poem he sends his

brother in the same metre, _Fancy_. He calls it a rondeau, again rather

at random; but he had already called the Bacchus lyric in _Endymion_ a

roundelay, and seems to have thought that the name might apply to any

set of verses returning upon itself at the end with a repetition of its

beginning. In the present case he both opens and closes his poem with

the same idea as has been condensed by a later writer in the two-line

refrain--

But every poet, born to stray,

Still feeds upon the far-away.

The opening lines run,--

Ever let the Fancy roam,

Pleasure never is at home:

At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,

Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;

Then let winged Fancy wander

Through the thought still spread beyond her:

Open wide the mind's cage-door,

She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.

O sweet Fancy! let her loose;

Summer's joys are spoilt by use,

And the enjoying of the Spring

Fades as does its blossoming;

Autumn's red-lipp'd fruitage too,

Blushing through the mist and dew,

Cloys with tasting: What do then?

The answer is that the thing to do is to sit by the chimney corner while

Fancy goes ranging abroad to find and bring home a harvest of

incompatible and contradictory delights; and after the evocation of a

number of such the poem comes round at the end to a slightly altered

repetition of its opening couplet,--

Let the winged Fancy roam

Pleasure never is at home.

I like to think that Keats may have drawn his impulse to writing this

poem from the fine passage in Fuller's _Holy State_ quoted by Lamb in

his brief 'Specimens' of that author[2]:--

_Fancy._--It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul

... it digs without spade, sails without ship, flies without wings,

builds without charges, fights without bloodshed; in a moment striding

from the centre to the circumference of the world; by a kind of

omnipotency creating and annihilating things in an instant; and things

divorced in Nature are married in Fancy as in a lawless place.

At any rate Keats's poem, in its best and central part, is a delightful

embroidery on the ideas here expressed. The notion, or vision, of a

lawless place where all manner of things divorced in nature abide

together and happily jostle, was one that often haunted him, as witness

his verse-epistle to Reynolds from Teignmouth, the fragment he calls

_The Castle Builder_, and again the piece beginning 'Welcome joy and

welcome sorrow,' to which there has been posthumously given the title _A

Song of Opposites_. The lines evoking such a vision in this poem,

_Fancy_, are almost his happiest in his lighter vein, and are written in

the true Elizabethan tradition: the predominant influence in the

handling of the measure being, to my ear, that of Ben Jonson, who is

wont to give it a certain weight and slowness of movement by the free

use of long syllables in the unaccented places; even so Keats, in the

passage quoted above, puts in such places words like 'sweet,' 'rain,'

'still,' 'cage,' 'dart,' 'lipp'd.'

Passing from the minor to the major achievements of the time, the

earliest, and to my mind the finest, of these is _Isabella or the Pot of

Basil_. During the writing of _Endymion_, Keats had intended his next

effort to be on the lofty classic and symbolic theme of the dethronement

of Hyperion and the Titans and the accession of Apollo and the

Olympians. But certain reading and talk in the Hunt circle having

diverted him from this purpose for a while, and made him take up the

idea of a volume of metrical tales from Boccaccio to be written jointly

by himself and Reynolds, he chose the tale of the Pot of Basil (the

fifth of the fourth day in the _Decameron_), made a sudden beginning at

it before he left Hampstead at the end of February, (1819), and

finished it at Teignmouth in the course of April. As an appropriate

vehicle for an Italian story he took the Italian _ottava rima_ or stanza

of eight. Several of the earlier English poets had used this metre:

Keats's main model for it was doubtless Edward Fairfax, who, following

other Elizabethan translators, had in his fine version from Tasso,

_Godfrey of Bulloigne_, done much more than any of his predecessors

towards suppling and perfecting its treatment in English. Since then it

had been little employed in our serious poetry, but had lately been

brilliantly revived for flippant and satiric uses, after later Italian

models, by Hookham Frere and Byron. Keats goes over the heads of these

direct to Fairfax, and in certain points at least, in variety of pause

and cadence and subtle adaptation of verbal music to emotional effect,

by a good deal outdoes even that excellent master.[3] Of course it is of

the essence of his treatment to avoid, in the closing couplet of the

stanza, the special effect of witty snap and suddenness which fits it so

well for the purpose of satire.

Every one knows the story: how a maiden of Messina (Keats chooses to

transfer the scene to Florence), living in the house of her merchant

brothers, in secret loves one of their clerks: how her brothers,

discovering her secret, take out her lover to the forest and there slay

and bury him: how his ghost appearing to her in a dream reveals his fate

and burial place: how she hastens thither with her nurse, digs till she

finds the corpse and having found it carries home the head and sets it

in a pot of basil, or sweet marjoram, which she cherishes and waters

with her tears until her brothers take it from her, whereupon she pines

away and dies.

Boccaccio tells this story with that admirable combination of

straightforward conciseness and finished grace which characterizes his

mature prose. Keats in his poem romantically amplifies and embroiders

it. In his way of doing so we can trace the influence of Chaucer, with

whose _Troilus and Criseyde_, that miracle of detailed, long-drawn, yet

ever human and rarely tedious narrative, he was by this time familiar.

Keats, while avoiding Chaucer's prolixity, diversifies his tale with

invocations to Love and to the Muses, with apostrophes to the reader and

ejaculatory comments on the events, entirely in Chaucer's manner: only

whereas Chaucer relegates the more part of such matter to the 'proems'

of his several books, Keats, having plunged into the thick of the story

in his first line, finds room for his apostrophes and invocations in the

course of the narrative itself. Most critics have taken the view that

this is evidence of weak or immature art. To my mind this is not so: the

pauses thus introduced are never long enough to hold up the flow and

interest of the narrative, while they afford welcome rests to the

attention, pleasant changes from a too sustained narrative construction,

with consequent beautiful and happy modulations in the movement of the

verse.

One of these invocations--invocation and apology together--is to

Boccaccio himself, disowning all idea of improving the tale and defining

the poet's attempt as made but to honour him,--

To stead thee as a verse in English tongue,

An echo of thee in the north-wind sung.

The definition is exact. The revived spirit of English romantic poetry

breathes in every line of the verse, and as in _Endymion_, so here, the

southern setting is conceived as though it were English. 'So the two

brothers and their murder'd man' (the force of the anticipatory epithet

has been celebrated by every critic since Lamb)--

So the two brothers and their murder'd man

Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream

Gurgles through straiten'd banks, and still doth fan

Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream

Keep head against the freshets.

Another such criticized 'digression' tells of the toilers yoked in all

quarters of the world to the service of these avaricious merchant

brothers. In calling up their sufferings Keats for a moment strikes an

unexpected verbal echo from the _Annus Mirabilis_ of Dryden.[4] Dryden,

telling of the monopolies of the Dutch in the East India trade, had

written,--

For them alone the Heav'ns had kindly heat,

In eastern quarries ripening precious dew:

For them the Idumean balm did sweat,

And in hot Ceilon spicy forests grew.

Keats writes of Isabella's brothers,--

For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,

And went all naked to the hungry shark,

For them his ears gush'd blood--

with more in the same strain, very vividly and humanly imagined, but

somewhat unevenly written. On the other hand the last of the rests or

interruptions in this poem is to my thinking one of its most original

and admirable beauties: I mean the invocation beginning 'O Melancholy,

linger here awhile,' repeated with lovely modulations in stanzas lv,

lvi, and lxi; the poet deliberately pausing to heighten his effect as it

were by an accompaniment of words chosen purely for their pathetic

melody and more musical than music itself.

Keats's way of imagining and telling the story is not less delicate than

it is intense. Flaws and false notes there are: phrases, as in

_Endymion_, too dulcet and cloying, like that which tells how the

lover's lips grew bold, 'And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme:' a flat

line where it is most out of place--'And Isabella did not stamp or

rave:' a far-fetched rime, as where 'love' and 'grove' draw in after

them the alien idea of Lorenzo not being embalmed in 'Indian clove.' But

such flaws, abundant in _Endymion_, are in _Isabella_ rare and need to

be searched for. If we want an example of the staple tissue of the poem

we shall rather find it in a stanza like this:--

Parting they seem'd to tread upon the air,

Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart

Only to meet again more close, and share

The inward fragrance of each other's heart.

She, to her chamber gone, a ditty fair

Sang of delicious love and honey'd dart;

He with light steps went up a western hill,

And bade the sun farewell, and joy'd his fill.

The image of love-happiness in the last couplet is as jocund and

uplifting as some radiant symbolic drawing by Blake, and poetry has few

things more perfect or easier in their perfection.

In a far more difficult kind, where Keats has to deal with the features

of the story that might easily make for the repulsive or the _macabre_,

he triumphs not by shirking but by sheer force of passionate

imagination. 'The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of

making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close

relationship with beauty and truth.' This dictum of Keats can scarcely

be better illustrated than by his own handling of the _Isabella_ story.

Take the vision of the murdered man appearing to the girl at night:--

Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spake;

For there was striving, in its piteous tongue,

To speak as when on earth it was awake,

And Isabella on its music hung:

Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake,

As in a palsied Druid's harp unstrung;

And through it moan'd a ghostly under-song,

Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briars among.

Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright

With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof

From the poor girl by magic of their light.

How wonderfully, in these touches, do we feel love prevailing over

horror and purging the apparition of all its charnel ghastliness. When

we come to the discovery and digging up of the body, Boccaccio turns

the difficulty which must inhere in any realistic treatment of the theme

by simply saying that it was uncorrupted; as though some kind of miracle

had kept it fresh. Keats on the other hand confronts the difficulty and

overcomes it. First he acknowledges how the imagination in dwelling on

the dead is prone to call up images of corruptibility:--

Who hath not loiter'd in a green church-yard,

And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,

Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,

To see scull, coffin'd bones, and funeral stole;

Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr'd,

And filling it once more with human soul?

Ah! this is holiday to what was felt

When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.

Then he compulsively leads away the mind from such images to think only

of the passionate absorption with which Isabella flings herself upon her

task:--

She gaz'd into the fresh-thrown mould, as though

One glance did fully all its secrets tell;

Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know

Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;

Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow,

Like to a native lilly of the dell:

Then with her knife, all sudden, she began

To dig more fervently than misers can.

Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon

Her silk had play'd in purple phantasies,

She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone,

And put it in her bosom, where it dries

And freezes utterly unto the bone

Those dainties made to still an infant's cries:

Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care,

But to throw back at times her veiling hair.

[Illustration: PL. X

PAGE FROM ISABELLA; OR, THE POT OF BASIL

FROM AN AUTOGRAPH BY KEATS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM]

Is any scene in poetry written with more piercing, more unerring,

vision? The swift despairing gaze of the girl, anticipating with too

dire a certainty the realization of her dream: the simile in the third

and fourth lines, emphasizing the clearness of that certainty, and at

the same time relieving its terror by an image of beauty: the new simile

of the lily, again striking the note of beauty, while it intensifies the

impression of her rooted fixity of posture and purpose: the sudden

solution of that fixity, with the final couplet, into vehement action,

as she begins (with a fine implied commentary on the relative strength

of passions) to dig 'more fervently than misers can':--then the first

reward of her toil, in the shape of a relic not ghastly, but beautiful

both in itself and for the tenderness of which it is a token: her

womanly action in kissing it and putting it in her bosom, while all the

woman and mother in her is in the same words revealed to us as blighted

by the tragedy of her life: then the resumption and continuance of her

labours, with gestures once more of vital dramatic truth as well as

grace:--to imagine and to write like this is the privilege of the best

poets only, and even the best have not often combined such concentrated

force and beauty of conception with such a limpid and flowing ease of

narrative.[5] Poetry had always come to Keats as naturally as leaves to

a tree. So he considered it ought to come, and now that it came of a

quality like this, he had fairly earned the right, which his rash youth

had too soon arrogated, to look down on the fine artificers of the

school of Pope. In comparison with the illuminating power of true

imaginative poetry, the closest rhetorical condensations of that school

seem thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms mechanical: nay,

those who admire them most justly will know better than to think the two

kinds of writing comparable.

The final consignment by Isabella of her treasure to its casket is told

with the same genius for turning horror into beauty: note the third and

fourth lines of the following, with the magically cooling and soothing

effect of their open-vowelled sonority;--

Then in a silken scarf,--sweet with the dews

Of precious flowers pluck'd in Araby,

And divine liquids come with odorous ooze

Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully,--

She wrapp'd it up; and for its tomb did choose

A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by,

And cover'd it with mould, and o'er it set

Sweet Basil, which her tears kept ever wet.

And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,

And she forgot the blue above the trees,

And she forgot the dells where waters run,

And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;

She had no knowledge when the day was done,

And the new morn she saw not: but in peace

Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,

And moisten'd it with tears unto the core.

In passages like these of _Isabella_ Keats, for one reader at least,

reaches his high-water mark in human feeling, and in felicity both

imaginative and executive. The next of his three poetic tales, _The Eve

of St Agnes_, does not strike so deep, though it is more nearly

faultless and lives as the most complete and enchanting English pure

romance-poem of its time. Little or none of the effect is due in this

case to elements of magic weirdness or supernatural terror such as

counted for so much in the general romantic poetry of the day, and had

been of the very essence of achievements so diverse as _The Ancient

Mariner_, _Christabel_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and _Isabella_

itself. The tale hinges on the popular belief that on St Agnes's Eve

(January the 20th) a maiden might win sight of her future husband in a

dream by going to bed supperless, silent and without looking behind her,

and sleeping on her back with her hands on the pillow above her head.

This belief is mentioned by two writers at least with whom Keats was

very familiar: by Ben Jonson in his masque _The Satyr_ and Robert Burton

in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_. An eighteenth century book of reference

which he may well have known also, Brand's _Popular Antiquities_, cites

the superstition and adds from a current chapbook a fuller account of

it, mentioning other and alternative rites. But one feature of the

promised vision which in Keats's mind was evidently essential, that the

lover should regale his mistress after her fasting dream with exquisite

viands and music, is not noted in any of these sources: Keats must

either have invented it or drawn it from some other authority which

criticism has not yet recognized.

It was an obvious and easy idea for Keats to weave into the St Agnes' Eve

motive the motive of a love-passion between the son and daughter of

hostile houses, and to bring the youth to a festival in the halls of his

enemies in a manner which reminds one both of Romeo and Juliet and of the

young Lochinvar in Scott's ballad. A remoter source has lately been

pointed out as probable for the subsequent incidents of the lover's

concealment by the old nurse in a closet next the maiden's chamber, his

coming in to her while she sleeps, the melting of his real self into her

dream of him, her momentary disenchantment and alarm on awakening, her

re-assurance and surrender and their ensuing happy union and flight. All

these circumstances, it has been shown, except the immediate flight of

the lovers, are closely paralleled in Boccaccio's early novel _Il

Filocolo_, and look as though they must have been derived from it. The

_Filocolo_ is an excessively tedious and occasionally coarse

amplification in prose, made by Boccaccio when his style was still

unformed, of the old French metrical romance, long popular throughout

Europe, of _Floire et Blancheflor_. The question is, how should Keats

have come to be acquainted with it? At this time he knew very little

Italian. He was accustomed to read his _Decameron_ in a translation,[6]

and eight months later we find him with difficulty making out Ariosto at

the rate of ten or a dozen stanzas a day. A French seventeenth-century

version of the _Filocolo_ indeed existed, but none in English. Can it be

that Hunt had told Keats the story, or at least those parts of it which

would serve him, in the course of talk about Boccaccio? One would not

have expected even Hunt's love of Italian reading to sustain him through

the tedium of this early and little known novel by the master: moreover

in criticizing _The Eve of St Agnes_ he gives no hint that Keats was

indebted to him for any of its incidents. But there the resemblances are,

too close to be easily explained as coincidences. The part played by the

old nurse Angela in Keats's poem echoes pretty closely the part played by

Glorizia in the _Filocolo_; the drama, dreaming and awake, played between

Madeline and Porphyro, repeats, though in a far finer strain, that

between Biancofiore and Florio; so that Keats's narrative reads truly

like a magically refined and enriched quintessence distilled from the

corresponding chapter in Boccaccio's tale.[7]

But the question of sources is one for the special student, and its

discussion may easily tire the lay reader. Passing to the poem and its

qualities, we have to note first that, fresh from treading, in his

_Hyperion_ attempt, in the path of Milton, Keats in _The Eve of St

Agnes_ went back, so far as his manner is derivative at all, to the

example of his first master, Spenser. He shows as perfect a command of

the Spenserian stanza, with its 'sweet-slipping movement,' as Spenser

himself, and as subtle a sense as his of the leisurely meditative pace

imposed upon the metre by the lingering Alexandrine at the close.

Narrating at this pace and in this mood, he is able at any moment with

the lightest of touches to launch the imagination to music on a voyage

beyond the beyonds, and to charge every line, every word almost, with a

richness and fullness of far-away suggestion that yet never clogs the

easy harmonious flow of the verse. At the same time he does not, in this

new poem, attempt anything like the depth of human passion and pathos

which he had touched in Isabella, and his personages appeal to us in the

manner strictly defined as 'romantic,' that is to say not so much

humanly and in themselves as by the circumstances, scenery, and

atmosphere amidst which they move.

In handling these Keats's method is the reverse of that by which some

writers vainly endeavour to rival in literature the effects of the

painter and sculptor. He never writes for the eye merely, but vivifies

everything he touches, telling even of dead and senseless things in

terms of life, movement, and feeling. From the opening stanza, which

makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones,--telling us first of

its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood and field, and next

how the frozen breath of the old beadsman in the chapel aisle 'seem'd

taking flight for heaven, without a death,'--from thence to the close,

where the lovers disappear into the night, the poetry throbs in every

line with the life of imagination and beauty. The monuments in the aisle

are brought before us, not by any effort of description, but solely

through our sympathy with the shivering fancy of the beadsman:--

Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries,

He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails

To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.

Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels supporting the

banquet-hall roof the poet strikes life:--

The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,

Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests,

With wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their breasts.[8]

The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out

their beauties in detail, he calls--

Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes

As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings,--

a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the

colour-imagination of the reader, giving it at the same time a

sufficient clue by the simile drawn from a particular specimen of

nature's blazonry.[9] In the last line of the same stanza--

A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings,

--the word 'blush' makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind

is at the same time sent travelling from the maiden's chamber on

thoughts of her lineage and ancestral fame. Observation, I believe,

shows that moonlight has not the power to transmit the separate hues of

painted glass as Keats in this celebrated passage represents it, but

fuses them into a kind of neutral or indiscriminate opaline shimmer. Let

us be grateful for the error, if error it is, which has led him to

heighten, by these saintly splendours of colour, the sentiment of a

scene wherein a voluptuous glow is so exquisitely attempered with

chivalrous chastity and awe. If any reader wishes to realise how the

genius of Elizabethan romantic poetry re-awoke in Keats, and how much

enriched and enhanced, after two hundred years, let him compare all this

scene of Madeline's unrobing with the passage from Brown's _Britannia's

Pastorals_ which was probably in his memory when he wrote it (see above,

p. 98).

When Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would have dwelt on

their lustre or other visible qualities: Keats puts those aside, and

speaks straight to our spirits in an epithet breathing with the very

life of the wearer,--'Her warmed jewels.' When Porphyro spreads the

feast of dainties beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how

those ideal and rare sweets of sense surround and minister to her, not

only with their own natural richness, but with the associations and the

homage of all far countries whence they have been gathered--

From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.

Concerning this sumptuous passage of the spread feast of fruits, not

unequally rivalling the famous one in Milton,[10] Leigh Hunt has some

interesting things to say in his _Autobiography_[11]:--

I remember Keats reading to me, with great relish and particularity,

conscious of what he had set forth, the lines describing the supper

and ending with the words,

And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.

Mr Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not varied enough; but

Keats knew where his vowels were _not_ to be varied. On the occasion

above alluded to, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the

concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare's line about

bees:--

The _singing_ masons _building_ roofs of gold.

This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Keats

thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with

the continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare's negligence,

if negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in the best

manner.

The reader will remember how Bailey records this subject of the musical

and emotional effect of vowel sounds, open and close, varied or iterated

as the case might be, as one on which Keats's talk had often run at

Oxford. Whatever his theories, he was by this time showing himself as

fine a master of such effects as any, even the greatest, of our poets.

This same passage, or interlude, of the feast of fruits has despite its

beauty been sometimes blamed as a 'digression.' A stanza which in

Keats's original draft stood near the beginning of the poem shows that

in his mind it was no mere ornament and no digression at all, but an

essential part of his scheme. In revision he dropped out this stanza,

doubtless as being not up to the mark poetically: pity that he did not

rather perfect it and let it keep its place: but even as it is the

provision of the dainties made beforehand by the old nurse at Porphyro's

request (stanza xx) proves the feast essential to the story.

While the unique charm of _The Eve of St Agnes_ lies thus in the

richness and vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the

actions and emotions of the personages are not less happily conceived as

far as they go. What can be better touched than the figures of the

beadsman and the old nurse Angela? How admirable in particular is the

debate held by Angela with Porphyro in her

little moonlight room

Pale, lattic'd, chill, and silent as a tomb.

Madeline, a figure necessarily in the main passive, is none the less

exquisite, whether in her gentle dealing with the nurse on the

staircase, or when closing her chamber door she pants with quenched

taper in the moonlight, and most of all when awakening she finds her

lover beside her, and contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:--

'Ah, Porphyro!' said she, 'but even now

Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,

Made tuneable with every sweetest vow;

And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:

How chang'd thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!

Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,

Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!'[12]

In all the doings and circumstances attending the departure of the

lovers for a destination left thrillingly vague in the words, 'For o'er

the southern moors I have a home for thee,'[13]--in the elfin storm sent

to cover their flight (the only touch of the supernatural in the story),

their darkling grope down the stairway, the hush that holds the house

and guest-chambers, the wind-shaken arras, the porter sprawling asleep

beside his empty flagon, the awakened bloodhound who recognizes his

mistress and is quiet--in Keats's telling of all these things a like

unflagging richness and felicity of imagination holds us spell-bound:

and with the deaths of the old nurse and beadsman, once the house has

lost its spirit of life and light in Madeline, the poet brings round the

tale, after all its glow of passionate colour and music, of trembling

anticipation and love-worship enraptured or in suspense, to a chill and

wintry close in subtlest harmony with its beginning:--

They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;

Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;

Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl,

With a huge empty flaggon by his side:

The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,

But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:

By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:

The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;

The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.

And they are gone: aye, ages long ago

These lovers fled away into the storm.

That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,

And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form

Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,

Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old

Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform;

The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,

For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.[14]

The last of the trio of Keats's tales in verse, _Lamia_, owed its

origin, and perhaps part of its temper, to his readings in Burton's

_Anatomy of Melancholy_. His own experiences under the stings of love

and jealousy had led him, during those spring months of 1819 when he

could write nothing, to pore much over the treatise of that prodigiously

read, satiric old commentator on the maladies of the human mind and

body, and especially over those sections of it which deal with the cause

and cure of love-melancholy. Entertainment in abundance, information in

cartloads, Keats could draw from the matter accumulated and glossed by

Burton, but little or nothing to gladden or soothe or fortify him. One

story, however, he found which struck his imagination so much that he

was moved to write upon it, and that was the old Greek story, quoted by

Burton from Philostratus, of _Lamia_ the serpent-lady, at once witch and

victim of witchcraft, who loved a youth of Corinth and lived with him in

a palace of delights built by her magic, until their happiness was

shattered by the scrutiny of intrusive and coldblooded wisdom.

In June 1819, soon after the inspiration which produced the Odes had

passed away, and before he left Hampstead for the Isle of Wight, Keats

made a beginning on this new task; continued it at intervals,

concurrently with his attempts in drama, at Shanklin and Winchester; and

finished it by the first week in September. It happened that Thomas Love

Peacock had published the year before a tale in verse on a nearly

similar theme,--that of the beautiful Thessalian enchantress

Rhododaphne: one wonders whether Keats may not have felt in Peacock's

attempt a challenge and stimulus to his own. Peacock's work, now unduly

neglected, is that of an accomplished scholar and craftsman sitting down

to tell an old Greek tale of magic in the form of narrative verse then

most fashionable, the mixed four-stressed couplet and ballad measure of

Scott and Byron, and telling it, for a poet not of genius, gracefully

and well. Whether Keats's _Lamia_ is a work of genius there is no need

to ask. No one can deny the truth of his own criticism of it when he

says, 'I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take

hold of people in some way--give them either pleasant or unpleasant

sensation.' But personally I cannot agree with the opinion of the late

Francis Turner Palgrave and other critics--I think they are the

majority--who give it the first place among the tales. On the contrary,

if an order of merit among them there must be, I should put it third and

lowest, for several reasons of detail as well as for one reason

affecting the whole design and composition.

As to the technical qualities of the poetry, let it be granted that

Keats's handling of the heroic couplet, modelled this time on the

example of Dryden and not of the Elizabethans, though retaining pleasant

traces of the Elizabethan usages of the over-run or _enjambement_ and

the varied pause,--let it be granted that his handling of this mode of

the metre is masterly. Let it be admitted also that there are passages

in the narrative imagined as intensely as any in _Isabella_ or _The Eve

of St Agnes_ and told quite as vividly in a style more rapid and

condensed. Such is the passage, in the introductory episode which fills

so large a relative place in the poem, where Mercury woos and wins his

wood-nymph after Lamia has lifted from her the spell of invisibility.

Such is the gorgeous, agonized transformation act of Lamia herself from

serpent to woman: such again the scene of her waylaying and ensnaring of

the youth on his way to Corinth. And such above all would be the whole

final scene of the banquet and its break-up, from 'Soft went the music

with soft air along' to the end, but for the perplexing apostrophe,

presently to be considered, which interrupts it. Still counting up the

things in the poem to be most praised, here is an example where the

poetry of Greek mythology is very eloquently woven into the rhetoric of

love:--

Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah! goddess, see

Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee!

For pity do not this sad heart belie--

Even as thou vanishest so I shall die.

Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay!

To thy far wishes will thy streams obey:

Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain,

Alone they can drink up the morning rain:

Though a descended Pleiad, will not one

Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune

Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?

And here a beautiful instance of power and justness in scenic

imagination:--

As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all,

Throughout her palaces imperial,

And all her populous streets and temples lewd,

Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd,

To the wide-spreaded night above her towers.

Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours,

Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white,

Companion'd or alone; while many a light

Flar'd here and there, from wealthy festivals,

And threw their moving shadows on the walls,

Or found them cluster'd in the cornic'd shade

Of some arch'd temple door, or dusty colonnade.

Turning now to the other side of the account: for one thing, we find

jarring and disappointing notes, such as had disappeared from Keats's

works since _Endymion_, of the old tasteless manner of the Hunt-taught

days: for instance the unpalatable passage in the first book beginning

'Let the mad poets say whate'er they please,' and worse still, with a

new note of idle cynicism added, the lines about love which open the

second book. Misplaced archaisms also reappear, such as 'unshent' and

the participle 'daft,' from the obsolete verb 'daff,' used as though it

meant to puzzle or daze; with bad verbal coinages like 'piazzian,'

'psalterian.' Moreover, though many things in the poem are potently

conceived, others are not so. The description of the magical palace-hall

is surely a failure, except for the one fine note in the lines,--

A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone

Supporters of the faery-roof, made moan

Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade.

The details of the structure, with its pairs of palms and plantains

carved in cedar-wood, its walls lined with mirrors, its panels which

change magically from plain marble to jasper, its fifty censers and

'Twelve sphered tables, by twelve seats insphered,'--all this seems

feebly and even tastelessly invented in comparison with the impressive

dream-architecture in some of Keats's other poems: I will even go

farther, and say that it scarce holds its own against the not much

dissimilar magic hall in the sixth canto of _Rhododaphne_.

But the one fundamental flaw in _Lamia_ concerns its moral. The word is

crude: what I mean is the bewilderment in which it leaves us as to the

effect intended to be made on our imaginative sympathies. Lamia is a

serpent-woman, baleful and a witch, whose love for Lycius fills him with

momentary happiness but must, we are made aware, be fatal to him.

Apollonius is a philosopher who sees through her and by one steadfast

look withers up her magic semblance and destroys her, but in doing so

fails to save his pupil, who dies the moment his illusion vanishes. Are

these things a bitter parable, meaning that all love-joys are but

deception, and that at the touch of wisdom and experience they melt

away? If so, the tale might have been told either tragically or

satirically, in either case leaving the reader impartial as between the

sage and his victim. But Keats in this apostrophe, which I wish he had

left out, deliberately points a moral and expressly invites us to take

sides:--

What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius?

What for the sage, old Apollonius?

Upon her aching forehead be there hung

The leaves of willow and of adder's tongue;

And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him

The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim

Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,

Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage

War on his temples. Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine--

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.

These lines to my mind have not only the fault of breaking the story at

a critical point and anticipating its issue, but challenge the mind to

untimely questionings and reflections. The wreaths of ominous growth

distributed to each of the three personages may symbolize the general

tragedy: but why are we asked to take sides with the enchantress,

ignoring everything about her except her charm, and against the sage? If

she were indeed a thing of bale under a mask of beauty, was not the

friend and tutor bound to unmask her? and if the pupil could not survive

the loss of his illusion,--if he could not confront the facts of life

and build up for himself a new happiness on a surer foundation,--was it

not better that he should be let perish? Is there not in all this a

slackening of imaginative and intellectual grasp? And especially as to

the last lines, do we not feel that they are but a cheap and

unilluminating repetition of a rather superficial idea, the idea phrased

shortly in Campbell's _Rainbow_ and at length in several well-known

passages of Wordsworth's _Excursion_, particularly that in the fifth

book beginning--

Ambitious spirits!--

Whom earth, at this late season, hath produced

To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh

The planets in the hollow of their hand;

And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains

Have solved the elements, or analysed

The thinking principle--shall they in fact

Prove a degraded Race?

Wordsworth had fifteen years earlier written more wisely, 'Poetry is the

impassioned expression in the countenance of all science.' The

latter-day Wordsworth, and Keats after him, should have realised that

the discoveries of 'philosophy,' meaning science, create new mysteries

while they solve the old, and leave the world as full of poetry as they

found it: poetry, it may be, with its point of view shifted, poetry of a

new kind, but none the less poetical. Leigh Hunt, in his review of

_Lamia_ published on the appearance of the volume, has some remarks

partly justifying and partly impugning Keats's treatment of the story in

this respect:--

Mr Keats has departed as much from common-place in the character and

moral of this story, as he has in the poetry of it. He would see fair

play to the serpent, and makes the power of the philosopher an

ill-natured and disturbing thing. Lamia though liable to be turned

into painful shapes had a soul of humanity; and the poet does not see

why she should not have her pleasures accordingly, merely because a

philosopher saw that she was not a mathematical truth. This is fine

and good. It is vindicating the greater philosophy of poetry.

So far, this is a manifest piece of special pleading by Hunt on Lamia's

behalf. If she is nothing worse than a being with a soul of humanity

liable to be turned into painful shapes, why must Apollonius feel it his

duty to wither and destroy her for the safeguarding of his pupil, even

at the cost of that pupil's life? Her witchcraft must consist in

something much worse than not being a mathematical truth, else why is he

her so bitter enemy? Hunt proceeds, more to the purpose, to protest

against the poet's implication--

that modern experiment has done a deadly thing to poetry by

discovering the nature of the rainbow, the air, etc., that is to say,

that the knowledge of natural history and physics, by shewing us the

nature of things, does away with the imaginations that once adorned

them. This is a condescension to a learned vulgarism, which so

excellent a poet as Mr Keats ought not to have made. The world will

always have fine poetry, so long as it has events, passions,

affections, and a philosophy that sees deeper than this philosophy.

There will be a poetry of the heart, so long as there are tears and

smiles: there will be a poetry of the imagination, as long as the

first causes of things remain a mystery. A man who is no poet, may

think he is none, as soon as he finds out the physical cause of the

rainbow; but he need not alarm himself:--he was none before. The true

poet will go deeper. He will ask himself what is the cause of that

physical cause; whether truths to the senses are after all to be taken

as truths to the imagination; and whether there is not room and

mystery enough in the universe for the creation of infinite things,

when the poor matter-of-fact philosopher has come to the end of his

own vision.

In _Endymion_ Keats had impeded and confused his narrative by working

into it much incident and imagery symbolic of the cogitations and

aspirations, the upliftings and misgivings, of his own unripe spirit.

Three years later, writing to Shelley from his sickbed, he contrasts

that former state of his mind with its present state, saying that it was

then like a scattered pack of cards but is now sorted to a pip. The

three tales just discussed, written in the interval, show how quickly

the power of sorting and controlling his imaginations had matured itself

in him. In them he is already an artist standing outside of his own

conceptions, certain of his own aim in dealing with them (subject

perhaps to some reservation in the case of _Lamia_), and scarcely

letting his personal self intrude upon his narrative at all to

complicate or distract it.

For the expression of his private moods and meditations he had perfected

during the same interval a new and beautiful vehicle in the ode. He had

been accustomed to try his hand at odes, or what he called such, from

his earliest riming days: and odes also, to all intents and purposes,

are the two great lyrics in _Endymion_, the choral hymn to Pan and the

song of the Indian maiden to Sorrow. But those which he composed in

quick succession, as we have seen, in the late spring of 1819 are of a

reflective and meditative type, new in his work and highly personal.

That which I have shown reason for believing to be the earliest of the

group, the _Ode to Psyche_ written in the last days of April, differs

somewhat from the rest both in form and spirit. Its strophes are longer

and more irregular: its strain less inward and brooding, with more of

lyric ardour and exaltation. It tells of the poet's delight in that

late, exquisitely and spiritually symbolic product of the mythologic

spirit of expiring paganism, the story of Cupid and Psyche. What may

have especially turned his attention to this fable at that moment we

cannot tell. Possibly the mention of it in Burton's _Anatomy_ may have

set him on to reading the original source, the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius,

in Adlington's translation: there are passages in _Lamia_ which suggest

such a reading,[15] and the noble, rhythmical English of that

Elizabethan version, loose as it may be in point of scholarship, could

not fail to charm his ear. Or possibly recent study of the plates in the

_Musee Napoleon_ (as to which more by and by) may have brought freshly

to his memory the sculptured group in which the story is embodied. But

that he had always loved the story we know from the passage 'I stood

tip-toe' beginning--

So felt he, who first told how Psyche went

On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment,

as well as from his confession that in boyhood he used to admire its

languid and long-drawn romantic treatment in the poem of Mrs Tighe.

Cloying touches of languor, such as often disfigure his own earlier

work, are not wanting in the opening lines in which he tells how he came

upon the fabled couple in a dream, but are more than compensated by the

charm of the scene where he finds them reposing, 'Mid hush'd,

cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' What other poet has compressed into

a single line so much of the essential virtue of flowers, of their power

to minister to the spirit of man through all his senses at once? Such

felicity in compound epithets is by this time habitual with Keats; and

of Spenser with his 'sea-shouldering whales' he is now more than the

equal. The 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden in _St Agnes' Eve_ is

matched in this ode by the 'soft-conched ear' of Psyche,--though the

compound is perhaps a little forced and odd, like the 'cirque-couchant'

snake in _Lamia_. The invocation in the third and fourth stanzas

expresses, with the fullest reach of Keats's felicity in style and a

singular freshness and fire of music in the verse, both his sense of the

meaning of Greek nature-religion and his delight in imagining the beauty

of its shrines and ritual. For the rest, there seems at first something

strained in the turn of thought and expression whereby the poet offers

himself and the homage of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in

lieu of the worship of antiquity for which she came too late; and

especially in the terms of the metaphor which opens the famous fourth

stanza:--

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

In some untrodden region of my mind,

Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain,

Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind.

But in a moment we are carried beyond criticism by that incomparable

distillation of one, or many, of his impressions among the Lakes or in

Scotland,--

Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees

Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep.

For such a master-stroke of concentrated imaginative description no

praise, much as has been showered on it by Ruskin and lesser critics,

can be too great.

Keats declares to his brother that this is the first of his poems with

which he has taken even moderate pains. That being so, it is remarkable

that he should have let stand in it as many as three unrimed

line-endings: and what the poem truly bears in upon the reader is a

sense less of special care and finish than of special glow and ardour,

till he is left breathless and delighted at the threshold of the

sanctuary prepared by the 'gardener Fancy,' his mind enthralled by the

imagery and his ear by the verse, with its swift, mounting music and

rich, vehemently iterated assonances towards the close:--

A rosy sanctuary will I dress

With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,

With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,

With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,

With breeding flowers, will never breed the same;

And thither will I bring all soft delights

That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at nights,

To let the warm Love in!

The four remaining spring odes are slower-paced, as becomes their more

musing tenour, and are all written in a succession of stanzas repeated

uniformly or with slight variations. Throughout them all each stanza is

of ten lines and five rimes, the first and second rimes arranged in a

quatrain, the third, fourth and fifth in a sestet: the order of rimes in

the sestet varying in the different odes, and in one, the nightingale

ode, the third line from the end being shortened so as to have three

stresses instead of five.

Let us take first the two in which the imagery has been suggested to the

poet by works of Greek sculpture whether seen or imagined. In the _Ode

on Indolence_ Keats merely revives his memory of a special type of Greek

marble urn where draped figures of women, Seasons, it may be, or

priestesses, walk with joined hands behind a solemn Bacchus, or priest

in the god's guise (see Plate viii, p. 342),--he merely evokes this

memory in order to describe the way in which certain symbolic personages

have seemed in a day-dream to pass before him and re-pass and again

re-pass, appearing and disappearing as the embossed figures on such an

urn may be made to do by turning it round. From the 'man and two women'

of the March letter they are changed to three women, whom at first he

does not recognize; but seeing presently who they are, namely Love,

Ambition, and that 'maiden most unmeek,' his 'demon Poesy,' he for a

moment longs for wings to follow and overtake them. The longing passes,

and in his relaxed mood he feels that none of the three holds any joy

for him--

so sweet as drowsy noons,

And evenings steep'd in honey'd indolence.

They come by once more, and again, barely aroused from the sweets of

outdoor slumber and the spring afternoon, he will not so much as lift

his head from where he lies, but bids them farewell and sees them depart

without a tear.

Keats did not print this ode, thinking it perhaps not good enough or

else too intimately personal. But writing to Miss Jeffrey a few weeks

after it was composed, he tells her it is the thing he has most enjoyed

writing this year. It is indeed a pleasant, lovingly meditated revival

and casting into verse of the imagery which had come freshly into his

mind when he wrote to his brother of his fit of languor in the previous

March. It contains some powerful and many exquisite lines, but only one

perfect stanza, the fifth: and there are slacknesses--shall we say

lazinesses--in the execution, as where the need for rimes to 'noons' and

'indolence' prompts the all-too commonplace prayer--

That I may never know how change the moons,

Or hear the voice of busy common-sense;

or where, thinking contemptuously of the old 'intercoronation' days with

Leigh Hunt, he declines, in truly Cockney rime, to raise his head from

the flowery _grass_ in order to be fed with praise and become 'a

pet-lamb in a sentimental _farce_.'

In bidding the phantoms of this day-dream adieu, Keats avows that there

are others yet haunting him, and while imagery drawn from the sculptures

on Greek vases was still floating through his mind, he was able to rouse

himself to a stronger effort and produce a true masterpiece in his

famous _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. It is no single or actually existing

specimen of Attic handicraft that he celebrates in this ode, but a

composite conjured up instinctively in his mind out of several such

known to him in reality or from engravings. During and after those

hour-long silent reveries among the museum marbles of which Severn tells

us, the creative spirit within him will have been busy almost unaware

combining such images and re-combining them. Cricitism can plausibly

analyse this creation into its several elements. In calling the scene a

'leaf-fringed legend' Keats will have remembered that the necks and

shoulders of this kind of urn are regularly encircled by bands of

leaf-pattern ornament. The idea of a sacrifice and a Bacchic dance being

figured together in one frieze, a thing scarcely elsewhere to be found,

will have come to him from the well known vase of Sosibios (so called

from the name of the sculptor inscribed upon it), from the print of

which in the _Musee Napoleon_ there actually exists a tracing by his

hand.[16] But this is a serene and ceremonial composition: for the

tumult and 'wild ecstasy' of his imagined frieze, the 'pipes and

timbrels,' the 'mad pursuit,' he will have had store of visions ready in

his mind, from the Bacchanal pictures of Poussin, no doubt also from

Bacchic vases like that fine one in the Townley collection at the

British Museum and the nearly allied Borghese vase: while for the

--heifer lowing at the skies

And all her silken flanks in garlands drest,

as well as for the thought of the pious morn and the little town

emptied of its folk that old deep impression received from Claude's

'Sacrifice to Apollo' will have been reinforced by others from works of

sculpture easy to guess at: most of all, naturally, from the sacrificial

processions in the Parthenon frieze.

[Illustration: PL XI

THE SOSIBIOS VASE

PROFILE AND FRIEZE: FROM ENGRAVINGS IN THE MUSEE NAPOLEON]

In the ode we read how the sculptured forms of such an imaginary

antique, visualized in full intensity before his mind's eye, have set

his thoughts to work, on the one hand asking himself what living, human

scenes of ancient custom and worship lay behind them, and on the other

hand speculating upon the abstract relations of plastic art to life. The

opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which flash

their own answer upon us--interrogatories which are at the same time

pictures,--'What men or gods are these, what maidens loth?' etc. The

second and third stanzas express with full felicity and insight the

differences between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of

reality by satiety and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains

in exchange permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined

experiences even richer than the real. The thought thrown by Leonardo da

Vinci into a single line--'Cosa bella mortal passa e non d'arte'--and

expanded by Wordsworth in his later days into the sonnet, 'Praised be

the art,' etc., finds here its most perfect utterance.

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Then the questioning begins again, and again conjures up a choice of

pictures,--

What little town by river or sea shore,

Or mountain built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?

In the answering lines of the sestet--

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return,--

in these lines we find that the poet's imagination has suddenly and

lightly shifted its ground, and chooses to view the arrest of life as

though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely,

like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a necessary

condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own

compensations. Finally, dropping such airy play of the mind backward and

forward between the two spheres, he consigns the work of ancient skill

to the future, to remain,--

in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--

thus re-asserting his old doctrine, 'What the imagination seizes as

beauty must be truth'; a doctrine which amidst the gropings of reason

and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of

Keats's temper--the one anchorage to which his soul can and needs must

cleave.

[Illustration: PL. XII

'What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy'

A. FROM THE TOWNLY VASE IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM

B. FROM THE BORGHESE VASE IN THE LOUVRE]

Let us turn now to the second pair--for as such I regard them--of odes

written in May-time, those _To a Nightingale_ and _On Melancholy_. Like

the _Ode on Indolence_, the nightingale ode begins with the confession

of a mood of 'drowsy numbness,' but this time one deeper and nearer to

pain and heartache. Then invoking the nightingale, the poet attributes

his mood not to envy of her song (perhaps, as Mr Bridges has suggested,

there may be here an under-reminiscence from William Browne[17]), but to

excess of happiness in it. Just as his Grecian urn was no single

specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the particular

nightingale he had heard singing in the Hampstead garden that Keats thus

invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some far-off

scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow her:

first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage--a spell which he

makes us realize in lines redolent, as are none others in our language,

of the southern richness and joy which he had never known save in

dreams. Then follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind's

tribulations which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid

of Bacchus,--Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts

her power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be,

listening to the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in

the darkness all the secrets of the season and the night. While thus

rapt he remembers how often the thought of death has seemed welcome to

him, and feels that it would be more richly welcome now than ever. The

nightingale would not cease to sing--and by this time, though he calls

her 'immortal bird,' what he has truly in mind is not the song-bird at

all, but the bird-song, thought of as though it were a thing

self-existing and apart, imperishable through the ages. So thinking, he

contrasts its permanence with the transitoriness of human life, meaning

the life of the generations of individual men and women who have

listened to it. This last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he

brings back those memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary

romance in the stanza closing with the words 'in faery lands forlorn':

and then, catching up his own last word, 'forlorn,' with an abrupt

change of mood and meaning, he returns to daily consciousness, and with

the fading away of his forest dream the poem closes.

Throughout this ode Keats's genius is at its height. Imagination cannot

be more rich and satisfying, felicity of phrase and cadence cannot be

more absolute, than in the several contrasted stanzas calling for the

draft of southern vintage, picturing the frailty and wretchedness of

man's estate on earth, and conjecturing in the 'embalmed darkness' the

divers odours of spring. To praise the art of a passage like that in the

fourth stanza where with a light, lingering pause the mind is carried

instantaneously away from the miseries of the world into the heart of

the imagined forest,--to praise or comment on a stroke of art like this

is to throw doubt on the reader's power to perceive it for himself. Let

him be trusted to cherish and know the poem, as every lover of English

poetry should, 'to its depths,' and let us go on to the last product, as

I take it to be, of this spring month of inspiration, and that is the

_Ode on Melancholy_.

The music of the word--its hundred associations derived from the early

seventeenth-century poetry in which his soul was steeped--foremost among

them no doubt Milton's _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, with the

beautiful song from Fletcher's _Nice Valour_ which inspired them--his

recent familiarity with Burton's _Anatomy_, including those pithy

stanzas of alternate praise and repudiation which preface it--all these

things will have worked together with Keats's own haunting and deepest

mood throughout these days to set him composing on this theme,

Melancholy. He had dallied with an idea of doing so as far back as early

in March, when being kept from writing both by physical disinclination

and a temporary phase of self-criticism, he had written to Haydon, 'I

will not spoil my gloom by writing an ode to Darkness.' Now that in May

the springs of inspiration were again unlocked in him, such negative

purpose fails to hold, and he adds this ode to the rest, throwing into

it some of his most splendid imagery and diction. Its temper is nearly

akin on the one hand to some of the gloomier passages in his letters to

Miss Jeffrey of May 31 and June 9, and on the other to the tragic third

stanza of the nightingale ode. Its main purport is to proclaim the

spiritual nearness, the all but inseparableness, of joy and pain in

human experience when either is present in its intensity. One of the

attributes, it will be remembered, which he assigns to his enchantress

_Lamia_ is--

a sciential brain

To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain.

In no nature have the sources of the two lain deeper or closer together

than in his own, and it is from the fullness of impassioned experience

that he writes. The real melancholy, he insists, is not that which

belongs to things sad or direful in themselves. Having written two

stanzas piling up gruesome images of such things, and discarded on

reflection the former and more gruesome of the two, he lets the second

stand, and goes on, evoking contrasted images of opulent beauty, to show

how the true, the utter melancholy is that which is inextricably coupled

with every joy and resides at the heart of every pleasure: ending

magnificently--

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veiled Melancholy has her sovereign shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

One more ode remains, written in a different key and after a lapse of

some four months, during which Keats had been away in the country,

quieted by absence from the object of his passion and working diligently

at _Otho the Great_ and _Lamia._ This is the ode _To Autumn_. He was

alone at Winchester, rejoicing in perfect September weather and in a

mood more serene and contented than he had known for long or was ever to

know again. 'How beautiful the season is now,' he writes to Reynolds,

'how fine the air--a temperate sharpness about it. Really, without

joking, chaste weather--Dian skies. I never liked stubble fields so much

as now--aye, better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a

stubble plain looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm.

This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it.'

The vein in which he composed is one of simple objectivity, very

different from the passionate and complex phases of introspective

thought and feeling which inspired the spring odes. The result is the

most Greek thing, except the fragment _To Maia_, which Keats ever wrote.

It opens up no such far-reaching avenues to the mind and soul of the

reader as the odes _To a Grecian Urn_, _To a Nightingale_, or _To

Melancholy_, but in execution is more complete and faultless than any of

them. In the first stanza the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of

the time are expressed in words so transparent and direct that we almost

forget they are words at all, and nature herself and the season seem

speaking to us: while in the middle stanza the touches of literary art

and Greek personification have an exquisite congruity and ease. Keats

himself has hardly anywhere else written with so fine a subtlety of

nature-observation. Students of form will notice a slight deviation from

that of the spring odes, by which the second member of the stanza is now

a septet instead of a sestet, one of its rimes being repeated three

times instead of twice.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Had Keats been destined to know health and peace of mind, who can guess

how much more work in this vein and of this quality the world might have

owed to him?

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Thoughts suggested on the banks of Nith, near the poet's

residence_: the third poem in _Memorials of a Tour in Scotland_.

[2] First printed in Hunt's _Reflector_ and reprinted in the

two-volume edition of Lamb's works published in 1818.

[3] A copy of Fairfax's Tasso appears in the list of books left by

Keats at his death.

[4] This point has been made by Mr Buxton Forman, _Complete Works of

J.K._, ii. p. 41, footnote.

[5] I let this paragraph, somewhat officious and over-explanatory

though it now seems to me, stand as I wrote it thirty years ago, for

the sake of the pleasure I have since had in learning that the

identical passage was singled out by Charles Lamb, in a notice which

has only lately come to light, (see below, p. 471) as the pick of the

whole _Lamia_ volume.

[6] That published by Allen Awnmarsh, 5th ed. 1684, notes Woodhouse;

and a copy of the same is noted in the list of Keats's books.

[7] See article by H. Noble M'Cracken in _Philological Journal_ of

the Chicago University, 1908. The romance of _Floire and

Blancheflor_, which Boccaccio in the _Filocolo_ expands with

additions and inventions of his own, tells the story of a Moorish

prince in Spain and a Christian damsel, brought up together and

loving each other as children and thrown apart in maturity by adverse

influences and ill fortune. After many chivalric and fantastic

adventures both in West and East, of the kind usual in such romances,

judicial combats, captures by corsairs, warnings by a magic ring and

the like, Floire learns that Blancheflor is immured with other ladies

in an impregnable tower by the 'Admiral of Babylon,' who desires to

marry her. To Babylon Floire follows, cajoles the guardian of the

tower and one of her damsels to admit him to her chamber concealed in

a basket of roses: whence issuing, he and she are brought to one

another's arms in happiness; various other adventures ensuing before

they can be finally free and united. There exists a fragmentary

English medieval version of this romance, which might easily have

been known to Keats from the abstract and quotations given by George

Ellis in his _Specimens of Early English Metrical Romance_ (1806).

But unluckily neither this nor, apparently, any version of the

original French romance poem contains those incidents recounted in

the _Filocolo_ to which Keats's poem runs most closely parallel.

These we must accordingly suppose to be Boccaccio's own invention and

to have been known to Keats, directly or indirectly, from the

_Filocolo_ itself.

[8] In both the chapel monuments and the banquet-hall corbels there

may be a memory of the following passage from Cary's _Dante_ (quoted

by Mr Buxton Forman and Prof. de Selincourt):--

As to support incumbent floor or roof,

For corbel is a figure sometimes seen

That crumples up its knees into its breast;

With the feign'd posture, stirring ruth unfeign'd

In the beholder's fancy; so I saw

These fashion'd--.

[9] It may be noted that in the corresponding scene in the _Filocolo_

a single special colour effect is got by describing the room as lit

up by two great pendent self-luminous carbuncles.

[10] _Paradise Lost_, v. 341-347.

[11] Ed. 1860, pp. 269, 270.

[12] The final couplet of this stanza, as Keats wrote it after

several attempts, is weak. Madeline continues,--

Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,

For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to go.

In the alternative version, intended to leave no doubt of what had

happened, which he read to Woodhouse and Woodhouse disapproved,

Madeline's speech breaks off and the poet in his own name adds,--

See while she speaks his arms encroaching slow

Have zon'd her, heart to heart,--loud, loud, the dark winds blow.

[13] Keats, mentally placing his story in England and writing it at

Teignmouth, had at first turned this line otherwise,--'For o'er the

bleak Dartmoor I have a home for thee.'

[14] A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the death of

the beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the

exigencies of rime. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the

first: that of the beadsman in the lines,

But no--already had his death-bell rung;

The joys of all his life were said and sung;

that of Angela where she calls herself

A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,

Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll.

The touch of flippant realism which Keats had, again to Woodhouse's

distress, proposed to throw into his story at this point was as

follows. For the four last lines of the last stanza Keats had

proposed to write,--

Angela went off

Twitch'd with the palsy: and with face deform

The beadsman stiffen'd, 'twixt a sigh and laugh

Ta'en sudden from his beads by one weak little cough.

In printing the poem Keats, probably at the instance of Taylor and

Woodhouse, reverted to the earlier and better version.

[15] May the following be counted evidence to the same effect? The

old woman in _Apuleius_, chap. xxi, just as she is about to tell her

daughter the story of Cupid and Psyche, says, 'as the visions of the

day are accounted false and untrue, so the visions of the night do

often chance contrary.' Compare Keats at the end of the _Ode on

Indolence_:--

Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,

And for the day faint visions there is store.

[16] The _Musee Napoleon_ is a set of four volumes illustrating with

outline engravings the works of classic art collected by Napoleon

Bonaparte as spoils of war and brought to Paris. Keats's original

tracing from the Sosibios vase was in the collection of Sir Charles

Dilke and is reproduced on the frontispiece of the Clarendon Press

edition of Keats's poems, 1906. The subject has been much discussed,

but only from the point of view of the classical archaeologist, which

ignores the part played by paintings as well as antiques in

stimulating Keats's imagination. From that point of view the nearest

approach, as I hold, to a right solution is set out in a paper by

Paul Wolters, in _Archiv fuer das Studium der neueren Sprachen_, Band

xx, Heft 1/2: Braunschweig; though I think he is too positive in

ruling out Roman representations of the _Suovetaurilia_ such as the

fine urn at Holland House suggested as Keats's source by the late Mr

A. S. Murray and reproduced in _The Odes of Keats_, by A. C. Downer,

M.A. (Oxford, 1897).

[17]

Sweet Philomela (then he heard her sing)

I do not envy thy sweet carolling,

But do admire thee each even and morrow

Canst carelessly thus sing away thy sorrow.

CHAPTER XIV

WORK OF 1818, 1819.--II. THE FRAGMENTS AND EXPERIMENTS

Snatches expressive of moods--_Ode to Maia_--_Hyperion_: its scheme

and scale--Sources: Homer and Hesiod--Pierre

Ronsard--Miltonisms--Voices of the Titans--A match and no match for

Milton--A great beginning--Question as to sequel--Difficulties and a

suggestion--The scheme abandoned--_The Eve of St Mark_--Chaucer and

Morris--Judgement of Rossetti--Dissent of W. B. Scott--The

solution--Keats as dramatist--_Otho_ and _King Stephen_--_The Cap and

Bells_--Why a failure--Flashes of Beauty--Recast of _Hyperion_--Its

leading ideas--Their history in Keats's mind--Preamble: another feast

of fruits--The sanctuary--The admonition--The monitress--The attempt

breaks off.

Much of our clearest insight into Keats's mind and genius is gained from

the class of his fragments which do not represent any definite poetical

purpose or plan, and were never meant to be more than mere snatches and

momentary outpourings. Such, though they only express a passing mood,

are the lines in his letter to Reynolds of February 1818, translating

the early song of the thrush into a warning not to fret after knowledge.

Such is the contrasted passage of shifting, perplexed meditation on the

problems of life, and the failure of the imagination to solve them

alone, in the rimed epistle to the same friend six weeks later. Such,

very especially, is the cry declaring that the true poet is the soul

sympathetic with every form and mode of life and ready to merge its

identity in that of any and every sentient creature: compare the passage

in one of his letters where he tells how his own can enter into that of

a sparrow picking about the gravel:--

Where's the Poet? show him! show him,

Muses nine! that I may know him.

'Tis the man who with a man

Is an equal, be he King,

Or poorest of the beggar-clan,

Or any other wondrous thing

A man may be'twixt ape and Plato;

'Tis the man who with a bird,

Wren, or Eagle, finds his way to

All its instincts; he hath heard

The Lion's roaring, and can tell

What his horny throat expresseth,

And to him the Tiger's yell

Comes articulate and presseth

On his ear like mother-tongue.

Such again are the several passages in which he expressed a mood that

frequently beset him, that of being rapt in spirit too high above earth

to breathe, too far above his body not to feel an awful intoxication and

fear of coming madness:--