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"Where is the youth for deeds immortal born,
Who loved to whisper to the embattled corn,
And clustered woodbines, breathing o'er the stream,
Endymion's beauteous passion for a dream!
Why did he drop the harp from fingers cold,
And sleep so soon with demigods of old!
Oh, who so well could sing Love's joys and pains?
He lived in melody, as if his veins
Poured music; from his lips came words of fire,
The voice of Greece, the tones of Homer's lyre."
_Ebenezer Elliott._
We come now to one whose home and haunts on the earth were brief;
"Who sparkled, was exhaled, and went to heaven."
John Keats was one of those sweet and glorious spirits who descend, like
the angel messengers of old, to discharge some divine command, not to
dwell here. Pure, ethereal, glowing with the fervency of inward life,
the bodily vehicle appears but assumed for the occasion, and as a mist,
as a shadow, is ready to dissolve the instant that occasion is served.
They speak and pass away into the higher light from whence they came;
but their words remain--themselves life, and spirit, and power--like
the electric element in the veins of the earth, quickening and
vitalizing the souls of men to the end of time. They become part and
parcel of our nature; they are as essential to the aliment and the
progress of our intellectual being, as the light, the morning dew of
summer, the morning and the evening star, or any of those great
components of nature, the sky, the sea, or the mountain, from which we
draw the daily spirit of beauty; and live!--live, not as mere material
machines; not as animal existences--as brutes,
"Which graze the mountain top with faces prone,
And eyes intent upon the scanty herb
It yields them; or, recumbent on its brow,
Ruminate heedless of the scene outspread
Beneath, beyond, and stretching far away
From inland regions to the distant main"--_Cowper._
not mere men of the world, money-getting, house-building,
land-purchasing creatures, but souls of God and of eternity. "Man lives
not by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of
God," and which descends to earth by his prophets, whether of prose or
of poetry. It is by the mediation of such pure and seraphic
intelligences that our true psychological frame and constitution are
built up. For, created to take our places in the great future of the
universe, amid the spiritual revelation of all things spiritual, we must
be raised substantially from the mere germ of immortality within us into
"spirits of just men made perfect." We must be composed of the spiritual
elements of beauty, thought, sensation, and seizure of all intellectual
things, growing by the daily absorption of divine essences into
spiritual bodies, incorporate of love, of light, of lofty aspirations
and tenderest desires; of thoughts that comprehend the world, and hearts
that embrace it with a divine capacity of affection. As we walk on our
daily way, and along the muddiest paths of life, amid our own cares and
loneliness, we do not and can not walk unblessed. The shower of God's
benedictions falls on us; the sunshine of his ceaseless gifts surrounds
us. From his own appointed men, whether living or dead, "the
refreshments from his presence" reach us, melt into us, and sustain us.
Words spoken thousands of years ago steal, like the whisper of a breeze,
into our bosoms, and become bright guests there; music, full of deep
movings, heard but yesterday from the lips of the inspired, touches the
spring of happiness within us. The thoughts and sentiments of poets and
philosophers, "beautiful exceedingly," stand around us like the trees
and the flowers of our wayside; and from every point of heaven and earth
are reflected upon us the flowing waters, the cool forest shades, the
bright and glittering stars of that mind, which has been poured through
a myriad of vehicles and a host of ages down upon us here. The light,
and color, and warmth which mature our very corn and fruits, come from
the sun. They are no more inherent in this nether earth than our own
life is. All that we have and enjoy must come from other worlds to us.
Our material aliments are sustained by the strength and life issuing
from the infinite heavens; and thence too descend, in still more
ethereal actuality, all that our souls are made of.
Of the class of swift but resplendent messengers by whom these
ministrations are performed, neither ours nor any other history can
furnish a specimen more beautiful than John Keats. He was of feeling and
"imagination all compact." His nature was one pure mass of the living
light of poetry. On this world and its concerns he could take no hold,
and they could take none on him. The worldly and the worldly wise could
not comprehend him, could not sympathize with. To them his vivid orgasm
of the intellect was madness; his exuberance of celestial gifts was
extravagance; his unworldliness was effeminacy; his love of the
universal man, and not of gross distinctions of pride and party, was
treason. As of the highest and divinest of God's messengers to earth,
they cried, "Away with him; he is not fit to live;" and the body, that
mere mist-like, that mere shadow-like body, already failing before the
fervency of his spiritual functions, fell, "faded away, dissolved," and
disappeared before the bitter frost-wind of base criticism.
It was a dark and wretched time when Keats made his appearance among us.
War, and party, and peculation on the one side, and resentment and
discontent on the other; the necessity for the gainer maintaining his
craft at all costs, and the equal necessity for the loser dragging this
ruinous craft to the ground, had infused into literature an atrocious
spirit. From this foul spirit, genius, in every fresh incarnation,
suffered the most ruthless and inhuman assaults. The stronger possessor
of it stood; the weaker or more sensitive fell. Keats was one of the
latter. He had soul enough for any thing, but his _physique_ was feeble,
and sunk. It will be one of the "damned spots" which will forever cling,
not to the country, but to the age. But it is to the everlasting honor
of Leigh Hunt, that, himself a critic as well as a poet, he never dipped
his hand in the blood of the innocents. He never slew one of those
martyrs whose glorious tombs we now build with adamantine stones of
admiration, tempering the cement with the tears of our love. Himself
assailed, and shot at, and cruelly wounded by the archers, he not only
turned and manfully defended himself, but spread the shield of his heart
to protect those who were rising up to become formidable rivals in the
public regard. Will the country ever show to this generous man, and in
time, that warm-heartedness which he always showed to its sons of genius
in their unfolding hours? It is a glory that is peculiar, and peculiarly
beautiful, that amid that iron age of a murderous criticism, he was
forever found in close union and communion with the morning stars of
poetry. They truly "sang together." They seemed by an instinct of life
to flock to him, and by an instinct equally sure and unselfish, he felt
at once their claims, and with open hand and heart maintained them. It
was in the pages of the Examiner that, amid specimens of young poets, I
first made acquaintance with the magnificent sonnet of Keats on reading
Chapman's Homer, and with Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. From
that hour there could be no moment's question but that great men were
come among us; those men who, in fact, "turn the world upside down," and
by which turning upside down, the only process, the asps and scorpions
of malice are shook out of it, and all its strong-rooted fabrics of
prejudice and pride are toppled into the dust. Till death, the souls of
these men, who
"Learned in suffering what they taught in song,"
never ceased to maintain that brave union thus begun, but amid abuse,
misrepresentation, and the vilest onslaughts from the army of the
aliens, went on blessing the world with those emanations of splendid and
unshackled thought, which are now recognized as among the most precious
of the national property. Who in future days will not pray that he might
have been as one of these?
It is to the account by Leigh Hunt, in his "Byron and some of his
Cotemporaries," that we owe almost all that we know of the life and
haunts of Keats. From this we learn that "Mr. Keats's origin was of the
humblest description. He was born October 29, 1796, at a livery-stable
in Moorfields, of which his grandfather was proprietor. He never spoke
of it, perhaps out of a personal soreness which the world had
exasperated. After receiving the rudiments of a classical education at
Mr. Clarke's school at Enfield, he was bound apprentice to Mr. Hammond,
a surgeon, in Church-street, Edmonton; and his enemies having made a
jest even of this, he did not like to be reminded of it; at once
disdaining them for their meanness, and himself for being weak enough to
be moved by them. Mr. Clarke, Jun., his schoolmaster's son, a reader of
genuine discernment, had encouraged with great warmth the genius that
he saw in the young poet; and it was to Mr. Clarke I was indebted for my
acquaintance with him."
Mr. Hunt, in his warm-hearted way, lost no time in introducing his
poetry to the best judges of poetry, among them to Godwin, Hazlitt,
Basil Montagu, Charles Lamb, and others. He read to them, among others,
that fine sonnet already mentioned, which, as it is printed in a volume
now not much seen, can not too often be quoted:
"ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER.
"Much have I traveled in the land of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen,
Round many western islands have I been,
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold;
Oft of one wide expanse have I been told,
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet I did never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when, with eagle eyes,
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Looked at each other in a wild surprise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
The two poets became speedily familiar and almost inseparable. They
read, walked, and talked together continually; and Mr. Hunt gives us
various particulars of Keats's haunts at this period which are nowhere
else to be obtained. "The volume containing the above sonnet," he says,
"was published in 1817, when the author was in his twenty-first year.
The poem with which it begins was suggested to him by a delightful
summer day, as he stood beside the gate that leads from the battery on
Hampstead Heath into a field by Caen Wood; and the last poem, the one on
Sleep and Poetry, was occasioned by his sleeping in one of the cottages
in the Vale of Health, the first one that fronts to the valley,
beginning from the same quarter. I mention these things, which now look
trivial, because his readers will not think them so twenty years hence.
It was in the beautiful lane running from the road between Hampstead and
Highgate to the foot of Highgate Hill, that, meeting me one day, he
first gave me the volume. If the admirer of Mr. Keats's poetry does not
know the lane in question, he ought to become acquainted with it, both
on his author's account and its own. It has been also paced by Mr. Lamb
and Mr. Hazlitt, and frequently, like the rest of the beautiful
neighborhood, by Mr. Coleridge; so that instead of Millfield Lane, which
is the name it is known by 'on earth,' it has sometimes been called
Poet's Lane, which is an appellation it richly deserves. It divides the
grounds of Lords Mansfield and Southampton, running through trees and
sloping meadows, and being rich in the botany for which this part of the
neighborhood of London has always been celebrated." Mr. Hunt was at this
time living at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health, and the house at which
it is said Keats wrote the beautiful poem on Sleep and Poetry was his.
There is another fact in this account that deserves attention, and that
is, the date of the publication of Keats's first small volume. This was
1817; in 1818 he published his Endymion; on the 26th of June, 1820, his
third volume, Lamia, and other Poems, was published; and on the 27th of
December of the same year he died at Rome. Thus the whole of his
poetical life, from the issue of his first small volume to his death,
was but about three years. During the greater part of that period he
felt his disease, consumption, was mortal. Yet what progress in the
development of his powers, and the maturing of his judgment and feeling
of art, was manifested in that short space and under those
circumstances! The first volume was a volume of immature fancies and
unsettled style, but with things which denoted the glorious dawn of a
short but illustrious day. The Endymion had much extravagance. It was a
poetical effervescence. The mind of the writer was haunted by crowds of
imaginations, and scenes of wonder, and dreams of beauty, chiefly from
the old mythological world, but mingled with the passion for living
nature, and the warmest feelings of youth. It brought forward the
deities of Greece, and invested them with the passions and tenderness of
men, and all the youthful glow which then reigned in the poet's heart.
The mind was boiling over from intense heat; but amid the luscious foam
rose streams of the richest wine of poetry which ever came from the
vintage of this world. The next volume, Lamia, Isabella, &c., showed how
the heady liquor had cleared itself, and become spirit bright and
strong. There was an aim, a settled plan and purpose in each
composition, and a steady power of judgment growing up amid all the
vivid impulses of the brain that still remained vivid as ever. The style
was wonderfully condensed, and the descriptive as well as conceptive
faculty had assumed a vigor and acumen which was not, and is not, and
probably never will be, surpassed by any other poet. For proofs to
justify these high terms, it is only necessary to open the little
volume, and open it almost any where. How powerful and tender is the
narrative of Isabella; how rich, and gorgeous, and chaste, and
well-weighed is the whole of St. Agnes's Eve; how full of the soul of
poetry is The Ode to the Nightingale. Perhaps there is no poet, living
or dead, except Shakspeare, who can pretend to any thing like the
felicity of epithet which characterizes Keats. One word or phrase is the
essence of a whole description or sentiment. It is like the dull
substance of the earth struck through by electric fires, and converted
into veins of gold and diamonds. For a piece of perfect and inventive
description, that passage from Lamia, where, Lycius gone to bid the
guests to his wedding, Lamia, in her uneasy excitement, employs herself
and her demon powers in adorning her palace, is unrivaled:
"It was the custom then to bring away
The bride from home at blushing shut of day,
Veiled, in a chariot, heralded along
By strewn flowers, torches, and a marriage-song,
With other pageants: but this fair unknown
Had not a friend. So being left alone--
Lycius was gone to summon all his kin--
And knowing surely she could never win
His foolish heart from its most pompousness,
She set herself, high-thoughted, how to dress
The misery in fit magnificence.
She did so; but 'tis doubtful how and whence
Came, and who were her subtle servitors.
About the halls, and to and from the doors,
There was a noise of wings, till in short space
The glaring banquet-room shone with wide-arched grace.
A haunting music, sole, perhaps, and lone
Supportress of the fairy roof, made moan
Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade.
Fresh carved cedar mimicking a glade
Of palm and plantain, sent from either side
High in the midst, in honor of the bride,
Two palms, and then two plantains, and so on;
From either side their stems branched one to one
All down the aisled place; and beneath all
There ran a stream of lamps straight on from wall to wall.
So canopied lay an untasted feast
Teeming with odors. Lamia, regal dress'd,
Silently paced about, and as she went,
In pale, contented, silent discontent,
Missioned her viewless servants to enrich
The fretted splendor of each nook and niche:
Between the tree-stems, marbled plain at first,
Came jasper panels; then anon there burst
Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees,
And with the larger wove in small intricacies.
Approving all, she faded at self-will,
And shut the chamber up, close, hushed, and still,
Complete and ready for the revels rude,
When dreadful guests would come to spoil her solitude."
The description of Lamia undergoing the metamorphosis by which she
escaped from the form of a serpent to that of a beautiful woman, is
marvelous for its power and precision of language.
"Left to herself, the serpent now began
To change: her elfin blood in madness ran,
Her mouth foamed, and the grass, therewith bespent,
Withered with dew so sweet and virulent.
Her eyes in torture fixed, and anguish drear,
Hot, glazed, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear,
Flashed phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear.
The colors all inflamed throughout her train,
She writhed about convulsed with scarlet pain:
A deep, volcanian yellow took the place
Of all her milder mooned body's grace;
And as the lava ravishes the mead,
Spoiled all her silver mail and golden brede;
Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks, and bars,
Eclipsed her crescents, and licked up her stars:
So that in moments few she was undress'd
Of all her sapphires, gems, and amethyst,
And rubious argent; of all these bereft,
Nothing but pain and ugliness was left.
Still shone her crown; that vanished, also she
Melted and disappeared as suddenly;
And in the air her new voice luting soft
Cried 'Lycius, gentle Lycius!' Borne aloft
With the bright mists about the mountains hoar
These words dissolved: Crete's forest heard no more."
The most magnificent trophy of his genius, however, is the fragment of
Hyperion. On this poem, which has something vast, colossal, and dreamy
about it, giving you a conception of the unfoldings of an almost
infinite scope of "the vision and the faculty divine" in this
extraordinary youth, he was employed when the progress of his complaint,
and the savage treatment of the critics, sunk his heart, and he
abandoned the task, and went forth to die. How touching, under the
circumstances, is the short preface affixed to this volume by the
publishers. "If any apology be thought necessary for the appearance of
the unfinished poem of HYPERION, the publishers beg to state that they
alone are responsible, as it was printed at their particular request,
and contrary to the wish of the author. The poem was intended to have
been of equal length with the ENDYMION, but the reception given to that
work discouraged the author from proceeding." Can a critic even read
the passage without some compunction? and who shall again repeat the
stale sophism that unkind criticism never extinguished genuine poetry?
Mr. Hunt says of Keats, that "he enjoyed the usual privileges of
greatness with all whom he knew, rendering it delightful to be obliged
by him, and an equal, but not a greater, to oblige. It was a pleasure to
his friends to have him in their houses, and he did not grudge it."
He was sometimes a regular inmate with Mr. Hunt at Kentish town, and
used to ramble about the sweet walks of Hampstead and Highgate to his
heart's content. "When Endymion was published, he was living at
Hampstead with his friend Charles Brown, who attended him most
affectionately through a long and severe illness, and with whom, to
their great mutual enjoyment, he had taken a journey into Scotland. The
lakes and mountains of the North delighted him exceedingly. He beheld
them with an epic eye. Afterward he went into the South, and luxuriated
in the Isle of Wight." He was, too, down in Devonshire. The preface to
his Endymion is dated from Teignmouth.
On Mr. Brown's leaving England a second time, "Mr. Keats," says Leigh
Hunt, "was too ill to accompany him, and came to reside with me, when
his last and best volume of poems appeared, containing Lamia, Isabella,
The Eve of St. Agnes, and the noble fragment of Hyperion. I remember
Charles Lamb's delight and admiration on reading this work; how pleased
he was with the designation of Mercury as 'the star of Lethe,' rising,
as it were, and glittering when he came upon that pale region; with the
fine, daring anticipation in that passage of the second poem,
'So the two brothers and _their murdered man_
Rode past fair Florence;'
and with the description, at once delicate and gorgeous, of Agnes
praying beneath the painted window."
This must have been immediately before the young poet quitted England
in the vain quest of health. There is a very affecting passage in Mr.
Hunt's brief memoir of him, which shows what was the state of mind of
this fine young poet at this crisis. The hunter had stricken him, death
was dealing with him, and the pain of affections unassured of a return
was helping his other enemies to pull him down. "Seeing him once," says
Mr. Hunt, "change countenance in a manner more alarming than usual, as
he stood silently eyeing the country out of the window, I pressed him to
let me know how he felt, in order that he might enable me to do what I
could for him; upon which he said that his feelings were almost more
than he could bear, and he feared for his senses. I proposed that we
should take a coach and ride about the country together, to vary, if
possible, the immediate impression, which was sometimes all that was
formidable, and would come to nothing. He acquiesced, and was restored
to himself. It was, nevertheless, on the same day, sitting on the bench
in Well Walk, at Hampstead, nearest the heath, that he told me, with
unaccustomed tears in his eyes, that 'his heart was breaking.' A doubt,
however, was upon him at that time, which he afterward had reason to
know was groundless; and during his residence at the last house that he
occupied before he went abroad, he was at times more than tranquil."
His house, it appears, was in Wentworth Place, Downshire Hill,
Hampstead, by Pond-street, and at the next door lived the young lady to
whom he was engaged. Mr. Hunt accompanied Keats and this young lady to
the place of embarkation in a coach, and saw them part. It was a most
trying moment. Neither of them entertained a hope to see each other
again in life, yet each endeavored to subdue the feelings of such a
moment to the retention of outward composure. Keats was accompanied on
his voyage by that excellent artist, Mr. Severn, and who, to quote again
the same competent authority, possessed all that could recommend him for
a companion: old acquaintanceship, great animal spirits, active
tenderness, and a mind capable of appreciating that of a poet. They
first went to Naples, and afterward to Rome, where they occupied the
same house, at the corner of the Piazza di Spagna. Mr. Severn made
several sketches of Keats, both on the voyage and at Rome, and, while
there, finished a portrait of him for Mr., now Lord Jeffery, who had
spoken handsomely of him in the Edinburgh Review. At Rome, on the 27th
of December, 1820, as already stated, John Keats died in the arms of his
friend, completely worn out and longing for release. How the
circumstance of this life-weariness reminds us of his longing for death
in his inimitable Ode to the Nightingale!
"Oh for a draught of vintage that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green;
Dance and Provençal song, and sunburned mirth!
Oh for a beaker full of the warm south,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth!
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim;
"Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret,
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs;
Where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies;
Where still to think is to be full of sorrow,
And leaden-eyed despairs:
Where beauty can not keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow."
"A little before he died, he said that 'he felt the daisies growing over
him.' But he made a still more touching remark respecting his epitaph.
'If any,' said he, 'were put over him, he wished it to consist of
nothing but these words: Here lies one whose name was writ in water;' so
little did he think of the more than promise he had given; of the fine
and lasting things he had added to the stock of poetry. The physicians
expressed their astonishment that he had held out so long; the lungs
turning out, on inspection, to have been almost obliterated. They said
he must have lived upon the mere strength of the spirit within him. He
was interred in the English burying-ground at Rome, near the monument of
Caius Cestius, where his friend and poetical mourner, Mr. Shelley, was
so shortly to join him."
Such is the brief but deeply interesting account of John Keats, drawn
mostly from the written narrative, and partly from the conversation of
his true friend and fellow-poet. It is not possible to close it in more
just or appropriate words than those of this admiring but discriminating
friend: "So much for the mortal life of as true a man of genius as these
latter times have seen; one of those who are too genuine and too
original to be properly appreciated at first, but whose time for
applause will infallibly arrive with the many, and has already begun in
all poetical quarters."