THE DEVON MAID:

STANZAS

SENT IN A LETTER TO B. R. HAYDON.

I.

WHERE be ye going, you Devon Maid?

And what have ye there in the Basket?
Ye tight little fairy just fresh from the dairy,
Will ye give me some cream if I ask it?

2.

I love your Meads, and I love your flowers,
And I love your junkets mainly,

But 'hind the door I love kissing more,

O look not so disdainly.

In the letter of Saturday the 14th of March 1818, embodying the preceding verses headed "Teignmouth," this song also occurs after a prose break consisting merely of the words which Mr. Taylor printed as-"There's a bit of doggrel; you would like a bit of botheral." What Keats wrote was no such nonsense, but "Here's some doggrel for you-Perhaps you would like a bit of B-hrell"-which is more witty than elegant, and need scarcely be translated. The first line of the song is not of the most authentic Devonian diction, though have ye and Will ye are, essentially; but these forms are always pronounced by the indigenous Devon maid have 'e and will 'e. Ye in the first and third lines is bad Devonian: it should be You; but as u in Devonshire is pronounced as in tu (French) or übel (German) Keats may at first have taken You for Ye: indeed, in a letter to his brother Tom written from Dumfries in July 1818 (see Letters) he says—“ In

3.

I love your hills, and I love your dales,
And I love your flocks a-bleating-
But O, on the heather to lie together,
With both our hearts a-beating!

4.

I'll put your Basket all safe in a nook,
Your shawl I hang up on the willow,
And we will sigh in the daisy's eye
And kiss on a grass green pillow.

Devonshire they say, 'Well, where be ye going?'"'—an inaccuracy leading almost certainly to this conclusion. The late Dante Gabriel Rossetti pointed out in one of his letters to me that the first verse "is undoubtedly a reminiscence from one of the songs in Ælla beginning

'As Eleanor by the green lessell was sitting'

which again (as shown by Editors) is a reminiscence from a passage in Tom d'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy." The stanza of Chatterton referred to is as follows:

Mie husbande, Lorde Thomas, a forrester boulde,

As ever clove pynne, or the baskette,

Does no cherysauncys from Elynour houlde,

I have ytte as soone as I aske ytte.

The parallelism lends a strong literary interest to Keats's little jeu d'esprit, seeing that within five days of the time when The Devon Maid (as I have ventured to call the song) was written, he was inscribing Endymion "to the memory of the most English of poets except Shakspeare, Thomas Chatterton",-a dedication, by the bye, which Rossetti was very anxious to see retained: it will be found along with the cancelled Preface in Volume I (page 117). Lord Houghton omits stanza 2. The text of The Devon Maid has been restored, like that of Teignmouth, from the letter: there is no doubt about any one word; and I am at a loss to understand Mr. Taylor's changes, especially divinely for disdainly, which makes good sense and good rhyme, though a licentious form.

EPISTLE

ΤΟ

JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS.

DEAR Reynolds! as last night I lay in bed,

There came before my eyes that wonted thread
Of shapes, and shadows, and remembrances,
That every other minute vex and please :

Things all disjointed come from north and south,— 5
Two Witch's eyes above a Cherub's mouth,

Voltaire with casque and shield and habergeon,
And Alexander with his nightcap on;

Old Socrates a-tying his cravat,

And Hazlitt playing with Miss Edgeworth's cat ; 10

This epistle with a few lines of introduction in prose was written at Teignmouth, and is dated the 25th of March 1818 in the Life, Letters &c., where it first appeared. Keats says to his friend"In hopes of cheering you through a minute or two, I was determined, will he nill he, to send you some lines, so you will excuse the unconnected subject and careless verse. You know, I am sure, Claude's 'Enchanted Castle,' and I wish you may be pleased with my remembrance of it." Some thirty years ago this picture emerged from Lord Overstone's collection at Wickham Park, Bromley, and was exhibited at the British Institution. It was a favourite in Keats's circle: Hunt, in Imagination and Fancy, says of the "perilous seas in faery lands forlorn" passage in the Ode to a Nightingale," This beats Claude's Enchanted Castle, and the story of King Beder in the Arabian Nights."

And Junius Brutus, pretty well so so,
Making the best of's way towards Soho.

Few are there who escape these visitings,-
Perhaps one or two whose lives have patent wings,
And thro' whose curtains peeps no hellish nose,
No wild-boar tushes, and no Mermaid's toes;
But flowers bursting out with lusty pride,
And young Æolian harps personify'd;
Some Titian colours touch'd into real life,
The sacrifice goes on; the pontiff knife
Gleams in the Sun, the milk-white heifer lows,
The pipes go shrilly, the libation flows:

A white sail shows above the green-head cliff,
Moves round the point, and throws her anchor stiff;
The mariners join hymn with those on land.

You know the Enchanted Castle,-it doth stand

Upon a rock, on the border of a Lake,
Nested in trees, which all do seem to shake
From some old magic-like Urganda's Sword.
O Phœbus! that I had thy sacred word
To show this Castle, in fair dreaming wise,
Unto my friend, while sick and ill he lies!

You know it well enough, where it doth seem

A mossy place, a Merlin's Hall, a dream;
You know the clear Lake, and the little Isles,

15

20

25

30

35

The mountains blue, and cold near neighbour rills,

(11) The term pretty well so so was used by Keats's set to signify pretty well tipsy; and this sense is destroyed by the comma which has hitherto stood between pretty well and so so.

(14) The metre here probably implies the colloquial pronunciation praps for perhaps.

All which elsewhere are but half animate;

There do they look alive to love and hate,

To smiles and frowns; they seem a lifted mound
Above some giant, pulsing underground.

40

Part of the Building was a chosen See,
Built by a banish'd Santon of Chaldee ;
The other part, two thousand years from him,
Was built by Cuthbert de Saint Aldebrim ;

Then there's a little wing, far from the Sun,

45

Built by a Lapland Witch turn'd maudlin Nun;
And many other juts of aged stone

Founded with many a mason-devil's groan.

The doors all look as if they op'd themselves,
The windows as if latch'd by Fays and Elves,
And from them comes a silver flash of light,
As from the westward of a Summer's night;
Or like a beauteous woman's large blue eyes
Gone mad thro' olden songs and poesies.

50

See! what is coming from the distance dim! A golden Galley all in silken trim !

55

Three rows of oars are lightening, moment whiles,
Into the verd'rous bosoms of those isles;
Towards the shade, under the Castle wall,
It comes in silence,-now 'tis hidden all.
The Clarion sounds, and from a Postern-gate

60

(54) The late Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to me that he thought this line was a repetition of something elsewhere in Keats. Perhaps he had in his mind the lines from the poem on seeing Milton's hair

and

Will I, grey gone in passion,

And mad with glimpses of futurity !