tion which is the only real learning by heart.' It is more to the purpose that during the years in which he was forming his mental habits, he was steadied by intellectual exercise while he was obeying instinctively the voice which was calling him more and more loudly.

The actual record of his poetry up to this date of the summer of 1816 is not extensive, but it is indicative of his growing power, of his taste in reading and observation, of his companionship, and most notably of his consciousness of the poetic spirit. Along with a few pieces like the lines To Some Ladies,' which show how little skill he had in making poetry a mere parlor maid, there are poems which show how he was struggling to do what other poets have done, as the lines 'To Hope' and the 'Ode' and 'Hymn to Apollo.' The lines To Hope,' with all their formal use of poetic conventions, have an interest from the attempt he makes at using the instrument he most highly valued in expressing his own moods and that youthful fervor which found a suburban Hampden in Leigh Hunt. His friendship with Hunt was in part founded on an admiration for the political hissing which Hunt and his friends kept up, and which was translated by his own independence of spirit into a valiant revolutionary sound, but more on an appreciation of Hunt's good taste in literature, his enjoyment of the Elizabethans and Milton, and his literary temper. Hunt was more of a public figure than Clarke or Reynolds, James Rice, Mathew, or any other of Keats's chosen companions, but the basis of Keats's friendship, apart from his brothers, was a community of literary taste more even than of literary production. It is a pleasure to get such glimpses as we do of this coterie exchanging books, revelling in their discovery of great authors who had been wrapped in the erecloth of an antique speech, and celebrating their own admiration of these bards that gild the lapses of time.' It was not the Examiner that filled Keats's mind, it was Spenser and Milton, Chapman and Chaucer, and when he came away from Hunt's cottage, 'brimful of the friendliness' he there had found, it was of Lycidas and Petrarch and Laura that he sang as he fared on foot in the cool bleak air. In his Epistle to George Felton Mathew,' it is poetry and the brotherhood which springs from poetry that prompt the expression of friendship, and there is no prettier tale in literary friendship than that which shows Keats and Clarke sitting up through the night reading Chapman's Homer, and Keats in the morning sending his friend the well-turned sonnet which has been the key that unlocks Chapman to many readers.

6

These early verses thus are full of Keats's personal history, for he was living in the land of fancy and was rejoicing in the companionship of lovers of that land; but they are also witnesses to the feeling which he had for nature. It is true the flinging of himself on the grass, after being pent up in the city, is to read some 'debonair and gentle tale of love and languishment,' and a fair summer's eve suggests thoughts of Milton's fate and Sydney's bier; nevertheless, these expressions occur in the constricted sonnet. When Keats allows himself freedom and the rush of spontaneous emotion, as in the lines I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,' the reflection of nature in mythology and poetry is merely incidental to the joyous

delight in nature itself, a delight so genuine that it almost covers from sight the half formal, half negligent beadroll of poetic subjects. Keats was born almost within sound of Bowbells, but his school days and early youth were spent in the rural environs of Enfield and Edmonton, and he escaped often from the city to Hampstead, not merely for companionship, but because there the nightingale sang, and there the walk in the woods or the stroll on the heath brought him face to face with the solitude which yielded indeed in his mind to pleasant converse, yet was, as he knew well, the direct road to converse with nature. Perhaps, in the lines, I stood tiptoe,' it is the close and loving observation of nature which first arrests one's attention, but a nearer scrutiny quickly reveals that imaginative rendering which lifts these lines far above the level of descriptive poetry. If in some of Wordsworth's sketches from nature written when he was of the same age one descries a profounder consciousness of human personality and a deeper sense of elemental relations, one is aware also of longer stretches of purely descriptive verse; with Keats there is an instant alchemy by which all sights and sounds are transmuted into the elements of a poetic world.

As this poem goes on it trembles into a half dreamy rapture of the poet away from all scenes into the world of visions, but it is in Sleep and Poetry,' written apparently at about the same time, that we discover a more precise witness to the poetic ideals now well formed in Keats's mind. The poet placed this piece last in his first printed volume, as if he intended to make it his personal apology. It is in part an impassioned plea for the freedom of imagination as against the artifices of the school of Pope, but even when thus half formally reciting his creed, Keats shows how little of the dogmatist there was in nature, how little even of the critic, by the careless wandering of his own poem, and the unconscious expression of his own delight in everything that is beautiful in nature or art; so that as he writes his eye takes in the walls of the room where he lies, and he falls to versifying its contents. He thrills with the consciousness of being a poet, and flushes over the prospect of what he may do, yet at present what he does is rather the overflow of a poetic nature than the studied product of an artist.

The poems which precede Endymion' are many of them chiefly interesting for the hints they give thus of a nature which was gathering itself for a large leap. They are, as the reader will see, tentative excursions into the airy region, and they contain besides little witnesses to some of the important compelling influences which were forming Keats's mind. Thus the sonnets to Haydon illustrate Keats's recognition of Wordsworth, and also the great impression made upon him by the introduction which Haydon gave him to Greek art. They bear evidence, too, of his increasing study of Shakespeare and of his admiration for Milton, whose minor poems seem at this time to have exercised much influence over his style. Hunt's influence can be seen in the poems, but more indirectly than directly, for Hunt with his fine taste had done much to open the way to a return of lovers of poetry to the spacious days of Elizabeth. The poems are sometimes exercises, sometimes illuminations of a poetic mind, and they have a rare value to the student of poetry,

as they disclose the mingling of great poetic traditions with the bursts of a poetic nature which was itself to add to the stock of great English verse.

6

There was about a year's space between Keats's abandonment of his profession and his occupation upon a long and serious poem. The group in this volume entitled Early Poems' gives the product of that period. That is, the pieces from I stood tiptoe upon a little hill' to the end of the section may be referred to this time, and the first one may fairly be taken as a sort of prologue to his adoption of a poetical life. When he was writing these poems he was living much with his brothers, to whom he was warmly attached, and was in a circle of ardent friends, men and women. He was an animated talker, with bursts of indignation, and a J prey somewhat to moods of depression. His appearance has been described by many, and is thus summed up by Mr. Colvin : A small, handsome, ardent-looking youth the stature little over five feet; the figure compact and well turned, with the neck thrust eagerly forward, carrying a strong and shapely head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair; the features powerful, finished, and mobile; the mouth rich and wide, with an expression at once combative and sensitive in the extreme; the forehead not high, but broad and strong; the eyebrows nobly arched, and eyes hazel-brown, liquid-flashing, visibly inspired-"an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions."'

16

Keats was in London and its neighborhood during most of this year, but after the publication of his first volume of poems he went to the Isle of Wight and later to the seashore, and soon began to occupy himself with his serious labor of 'Endymion.' While he was working upon this poem he wrote but few verses. His letters, however, show him immersed in literature and the friendships which with him were so identified with literature, and kept, moreover, in a state of restlessness by what in homely phrase may be termed the growing pains of his poetic nature. 'I went to the Isle of Wight,' he writes to Leigh Hunt, May 10, 1817, thought so much about poetry, so long together, that I could not get to sleep at night; and, moreover, I know not how it was, I could not get wholesome food. By this means, in a week or so, I became not over capable in my upper stories, and set off pell mell for Margate, at least a hundred and fifty miles, because, forsooth, I fancied that I should like my old lodging here, and could contrive to do without trees. Another thing, I was too much in solitude and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only recourse. However, Tom is with me at present, and we are very comfortable. . . . These last two days I have felt more confident. I have asked myself so often why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is, how great things are to be gained by it, what a thing to be in the mouth of Fame, that at last the idea has grown so monstrously beyond my seeming power of attainment, that the other day I nearly consented with myself to drop into a Phaethon. Yet 't is a disgrace to fail, even in a huge attempt; and at this moment I drive the thought from me.' These lines were written when Keats was deep in 'Endymion,' and with others 1 Keats [Men of Letters Series]. By Sidney Colvin.

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they intimate with some clearness how seriously Keats took himself, as the saying is. Much reading of great poetry had set standards for him rather than furnished models. It is not difficult to trace Keats's indebtedness to other poets, so far as words and turns of expression go, yet his confessed imitations show almost as conclusively as his original verse how incapable he was of merely reproducing out of the quarries of other poetry his own fair buildings. His was a nature possessed of poetic power, yet fed more than usual by great poetry. That he should have gone by turns to ancient mythology and mediæval romance for his themes, and have treated both in a spirit of romance, was due to a large artistic endowment, which bade him see both nature and humanity as subjects for composition, furnishing images to be delighted in. He was conscious of poetic genius, and never more so than when reading great poetry. In the presence of Shakespeare and Spenser he could exclaim, 'I too am a poet,' and this was no mere excitement such as hurries lesser men into clever copying, but an exhilaration which sent his pulses bounding as his own conceptions rose fair to view. It was obedience to this strong impulse to produce a great work of art which led him to sketch Endymion' and try his powers upon an attack on the very citadel of poetic beauty. Fame waved a wreath before him, yet it was not Fame but Poetry that really urged him forward. It is not unfair to translate even a confession of desire for fame into an acknowledgment of conscious power.

'Endymion' was published in the spring of 1818, and Keats's own attitude toward his work at this time is well expressed in the sonnet When I have fears that I may cease to be,' and in that written on sitting down to read King Lear once again. The very completion of his task set free new fancies, and there is a spontaneity in his occasional verse and in his letters which witnesses to a rapid maturing of power and a firmness of tread. The interesting letter to Reynolds of February 3, 1818, which contains a spirited criticism of Wordsworth and holds the Robin Hood verses, is quick with gay strength, and shows the poet alert and sane. The publication of Endymion' was an important event to Keats and his circle. His earlier volume, the verses which he had since written and shown, and his own personality, had raised great expectations among his near friends and the few who could discern poetry without waiting for the poet to be famous; and now he was staking all, as it were, upon this single throw. The book was coarsely and roughly handled by the two leading reviews of the day, Blackwood's and the Quarterly. Criticism in those days was far from impersonal. A poet was condemned or praised, not for his work, but for his politics, the friends he associated with, his religion, and anything in his private life which might be known to the reviewer. Keats knew the worthlessness of much of this criticism, but he felt nevertheless keenly the hostility of what, rightly or wrongly, was looked upon as the supreme court in the republic of letters.

Under other circumstances he might have felt this even more keenly, and there appears to be evidence that he recurred afterward with bitterness to the attitude of the reviews; but just at this time other matters filled his mind. His brother,

George Keats, with his wife, went to America to try fortune in the new world, and Keats immediately afterward took a long walking tour in the north with his friend Brown. His letters and the few poems of travel he wrote show how ardently he threw himself into this acquaintance with a new phase of nature. But he was to pass through experiences which entered more profoundly into life. In December of the same year, 1818, his brother Tom died. He had been his constant companion and nurse, and was with him at his death. Then, when his whole nature was deeply stirred, he came to know and ardently to love a girl who by turns fascinated and repelled him, until he was completely enthralled, without apparently finding in her the repose which his restless nature needed.

Keats's first mention of Fanny Brawne scarcely prepares one for the inroads made upon him by this personage during the rest of his short life. He went to live with his friend Brown after Tom's death, and Mrs. Brawne became his nextdoor neighbor. 'She is a very nice woman,' he writes, and her daughter senior is I think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange. We have a little tiff now and then - and she behaves a little better, or I must have sheered off.' The passion which he conceived for Miss Brawne rapidly mounted into a dominant place, and it is one of the marks of Keats's deeper nature, not disclosed to his friends, intimate as he was with them, that for the two years which intervened before he left England a dying man, he carried this passion as a sort of vulture gnawing at his vitals, concealed for the most part, though not wholly. Some overt expression it found, as in the 'Ode to Fanny,' the Lines to Fanny,' and the verses addressed to the same person beginning:

'I cry your pity-mercy-love, ay love,'

and it may be traced, with little doubt, in those poems which emphasize his moods, such as the Ode to Melancholy' and the sonnet beginning:

and that also beginning:—

'Why did I laugh to-night?'

'The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone.'

The letters contain infrequent allusions, except of course the posthumously published letters to the lady herself.

But

But with this overmastering passion to reckon with, the student of Keats can scarcely avoid regarding it as strongly influencing the poet's career during his remaining days. The turbulent experience of death and love acted upon a physical organism predisposed to decay, and soon it was apparent that Keats was himself invaded by the disease of consumption, which had wasted his brother Tom. before this ravaging of his powers set in, that is, during the first half of 1819, when he was at once deepened by sorrow and excited by love, he wrote that great group of poems which begins with 'The Eve of St. Agnes' and closes with Lamia.' If one takes as in some respects the high-water mark of his genius the mystic La Belle Dame sans merci,' it is not perhaps too speculative a judgment which sees the keenest anguish of a passionate soul transmuted into terms of impersonal