malady; and, though there was as yet no distinct symptom of consumption in Keats, he was often flushed and feverish, and had his secret fears. He had many hours of sprightliness, however, when these fears would vanish, and he would be full of frolic and life. In allusion to this occasional excess of fun and animal spirits, his friends punned upon his name, shortening it from "John Keats" into "Junkets." Still, amid all-in his times of despondency, as well as in his seasons of hope Poetry was his ceaseless thought, and to be a Poet his one ambition. "O for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in Poesy! So I may do the deed That my own soul has to itself decreed!" Of what kind this intended deed was we have also some indication. Like all the fresher young poets of his time, Keats had imbibed, partly from constitutional predisposition, partly from conscious reasoning, that theory of Poetry which, for more than twenty years, Wordsworth had been disseminating by precept and by example through the literary mind of England. This theory, in its historical aspect, I will venture to call Pre-Drydenism. Its doctrine, historically, was that the age of true English Poetry was the period anterior to Dryden-the period of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Milton; and that, with a few exceptions, the subsequent period, from Dryden inclusively down to the time of Wordsworth's own appearance as a poet, had been a prosaic interregnum, during which what passed for poetry was either an inflated style of diction which custom had rendered pleasing, or, at best, shrewd sense and wit, or miscellaneous cogitation more or less weighty, put into metre. Take an example. Here are two stanzas from a well-known paraphrase of Scripture, still sung in churches over a large part of the kingdom. "In life's gay morn, when sprightly youth With vital ardour glows, And shines in all the fairest charms Deep on thy soul, before its powers Be thy Creator's glorious name How remorselessly Wordsworth would have torn this passage to pieces-as, indeed, he did a similar paraphrase of Scripture by Dr. Johnson ! "Life's gay morn!" " sprightly youth!" he would have said,meaningless expressions, used because it is considered poetical to stick an adjective before every noun, and "gay" and "sprightly" are adjectives conveniently in stock! Then, "sprightly youth with vital ardour glows"-what is this but slip-shod; and, besides, why tug the verb to the end of the phrase, and say "with vital ardour glows" instead of "glows with vital ardour," as you would do in natural speech? O, of course, the rhyme! Yes; but who asked you to rhyme at all, in the first place? and, in the next place, if you were bent on rhyming, and found "ardour" would not suit at the end of your precious line, that was your difficulty, not mine! What are you a poet for but to overcome such difficulties, or what right have you to extract the rhythms and rhymes that you want in your craft as a versifier by the mere torture of honest prose? And then, worse and worse, "Youth," already "glowing" with this "vital ardour," also, it seems, "shines," and (marvellous metaphor !) shines "with charms"-which "charms" (metaphor still more helpless!) are "the fairest charms disclosed by beauty!" And so on he would have gone, pointing out the flaws of meaning and of expression in the next stanza in the same stern manner. Pass, he would have said at last, from this poor jingle of words to the simple and beautiful text of which it is offered as a paraphrase: "Remem"ber now thy Creator in the days of "thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when "thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in "them." The defects he would have continued, seen on a small scale in the foregoing metrical version of this pas or where he and Shelley, sat when such and such a poem was recited, or the exact spot in a path through the fields where Coleridge took leave of him and Charles Lamb, to dawdle back to his home at Highgate, and where Lamb, while the departing skirts of the sage were still visible, stuttered out some pun about his personal appearance and his last metaphysical monologue. At the particular time of which we are now speaking, Leigh Hunt was living at Hampstead, where also lived Mr. Armitage Brown, a retired merchant of literary tastes, and others of whom it is not necessary to take note; and there, in the evenings, at the houses of such men, artists and others would drop in; and then, O ye future critics of Blackwood and the Quarterly, what wit there would be, what music, what portfolios of sketches and engravings, what white casts from the antique, what talk about poetry and literature! From that time, with scarcely an exception, Hampstead was the London home of Keats-first as a guest of Leigh Hunt, or a lodger near to him; and afterwards, and more permanently, as a guest of Mr. Armitage Brown. Indeed, just as Wordsworth and his associates were supposed to have constituted themselves into a school by retiring to Cumberland and Westmoreland, in order to be in closer relations to nature, as exhibited in that district of lake and mountain, so it might have been suggested maliciously of Keats, Hunt, and the rest of their set, that the difference between them and this elder school was, that what they called nature was nature as seen from Hampstead Heath. As the one set of poets had received from their Edinburgh critics the name of "the Lakists," so, to make the joke correspond, the others, instead of being called "the Cockney poets," might have been named the Hampstead Heath-ens. Keats signalized his accession to this peculiar literary group by publishing, in 1817, a little volume of poems, containing some of his sonnets and other pieces now appended to his longer and touched the attention of the public, though it served to show his power to his immediate friends. He was then twoand-twenty years of age; and his appearance was rather singular. Coleridge, who once shook hands with him, when he met him with Hunt in a lane near Highgate, describes him as "a loose, slack, not well-dressed youth." The descriptions of Hunt and others are more particular. He was considerably under middle height-his lower limbs being small, in comparison with the upper, to a degree that marred his whole proportion. His shoulders were very broad for his size; his face was strongly cut, yet delicately mobile, expressing an unusual combination of determination with sensibility-its worst feature being the mouth, which had a projecting upper lip, and altogether a savage pugilistic look. Nor did the look belie him. He had great personal courage, and once took the trouble to thrash a butcher for some insolent conduct in a regular stand-up fight. His hair was brown, and his eyes large, and of a dark, glowing blue. "His head," says Leigh Hunt, "was a puzzle for the phrenologists, being remarkably small in the skull a singularity which he had in common "with Byron and Shelley, whose hats I "could not get on." His voice, unlike Shelley's, was deep and grave. His entire expression was that of eager power; and, in contradiction of what was observed of him at an earlier period, he was now easily, though still apparently against his will, betrayed into signs of vehement emotion. "At the recital of a "noble action, or a beautiful thought," says Mr. Hunt, "his eyes would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled.” · On hearing of some unmanly conduct, he once burst out, "Why is there "not a human dust-hole into which to "tumble such fellows?" Evidently ill-health, as well as imaginative temperament, had to do with this inability to restrain tears and other signs of agitated feeling. His mother had died of consumption at a comparatively early age; his younger brother, Tom, was malady; and, though there was as yet no distinct symptom of consumption in Keats, he was often flushed and feverish, and had his secret fears. He had many hours of sprightliness, however, when these fears would vanish, and he would be full of frolic and life. In allusion to this occasional excess of fun and animal spirits, his friends punned upon his name, shortening it from "John Keats" into "Junkets." Still, amid all--in his times of despondency, as well as in his seasons of hope Poetry was his ceaseless thought, and to be a Poet his one ambition. "O for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in Poesy! So I may do the deed That my own soul has to itself decreed!" Of what kind this intended deed was we have also some indication. Like all Like all the fresher young poets of his time, Keats had imbibed, partly from constitutional predisposition, partly from conscious reasoning, that theory of Poetry which, for more than twenty years, Wordsworth had been disseminating by precept and by example through the literary mind of England. This theory, in its historical aspect, I will venture to call Pre-Drydenism. Its doctrine, historically, was that the age of true English Poetry was the period anterior to Dryden the period of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Milton; and that, with a few exceptions, the subsequent period, from Dryden inclusively down to the time of Wordsworth's own appearance as a poet, had been a prosaic interregnum, during which what passed for poetry was either an inflated style of diction which custom had rendered pleasing, or, at best, shrewd sense and wit, or miscellaneous cogitation more or less weighty, put into metre. Take an example. Here are two stanzas from a well-known paraphrase of Scripture, still sung in churches over a large part of the kingdom. "In life's gay morn, when sprightly youth With vital ardour glows, And shines in all the fairest charms Deep on thy soul, before its powers Be thy Creator's glorious name How remorselessly Wordsworth would have torn this passage to pieces-as, indeed, he did a similar paraphrase of Scripture by Dr. Johnson ! "Life's gay morn!" " sprightly youth!" he would have said, meaningless expressions, used because it is considered poetical to stick an adjective before every noun, and "gay" and "sprightly" are adjectives conveniently in stock! Then, "sprightly youth with vital ardour glows"-what is this but slip-shod; and, besides, why tug the verb to the end of the phrase, and say " with vital ardour glows" instead of "glows with vital ardour," as you would do in natural speech? O, of course, the rhyme! Yes; but who asked you to rhyme at all, in the first place? and, in the next place, if you were bent on rhyming, and found "ardour" would not suit at the end of your precious line, that was your difficulty, not mine! What are you a poet for but to overcome such difficulties, or what right have you to extract the rhythms and rhymes that you want in your craft as a versifier by the mere torture of honest prose? And then, worse and worse, "Youth," already "glowing" with this "vital ardour," also, it seems, "shines," and (marvellous metaphor!) shines "with charms"-which "charms" (metaphor still more helpless!) are "the fairest charms disclosed by beauty!" And so on he would have gone, pointing out the flaws of meaning and of expression in the next stanza in the same stern manner. Pass, he would have said at last, from this poor jingle of words to the simple and beautiful text of which it is offered as a paraphrase: "Remem"ber now thy Creator in the days of "thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when "thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in "them." The defects he would have continued, seen on a small scale in the foregoing metrical version of this pas whole course of English poetry after Milton with here and there, as in Thomson and Dyer, a remarkable exception. There was then no faithfulness to fact in description or in imagery from nature, ro natural speech in verse, nothing save more or less of intellectual vigour exhibited through an artificial form of diction, to which men had grown so accustomed that they had ceased to inspect it logically. Even men of real genius, such as Dryden himself and Pope, were in the bulk of their writings but splendid practitioners of a false style, which, when men had been educated to see its viciousness, would mar their fame as poets. I am not here discussing Wordsworth's theory; I am only stating it. Keats, I repeat, had adopted this theory, if not in all its particulars, at least in its essence. Thus, in one of his pieces, after speaking of the greatness of his favourite old Engish poets, he says— "Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand : His glories with a puling infant's force And did not know it! No, they went about, The name of one Boileau!" Keats, then, was a Pre-Drydenist in his notions of poetry, and in his own intentions as a poetic artist. But I will say more. Wordsworth had then which he had been struggling that a modified Pre-Drydenism was universally diffused through English literary society; and the so-called Cockney, or Hampstead-Heath, School, with which accident had associated Keats, were largely tinged with it. They did not, indeed, go all the length with Wordsworth in depreciating Dryden and Pope (as who could?); but a superior relish for the older poets was one of their avowed characteristics. But in this, I believe, Keats went beyond the rest of them. It may be perceived, I think, that, with all his esteem for Hunt and Shelley, both as kind personal friends and as poets, he had notions respecting himself which led him, even while in their society and accounted one of them, to fix his gaze with steadier reverence than they did on the distant veteran of Rydal Mount. To Wordsworth alone does he seem to have looked as, all in all, a sublimity among contemporary poets. So far, however, as Keats had yet been publicly heard of, it was only as one fledgling more in the brood of poets whose verses were praised in the Examiner. What he had yet published were but little studies in language and versification preparatory to something that could be called a poem. Such a poem he now resolved to write. Always drawn by a kind of mental affinity to the sensuous Mythology of the Greeks, he had chosen for his subject the legend of Endymion, the youthful lover of the moon-goddess Artemis. "A long poem,' he said, "is the test of invention; and it will be a test of my invention if I can make 4,000 lines out of this one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry." To accomplish his task, he left London in the spring of 1817, and took up his abode first in the Isle of Wight, then at Margate (at both of which places he revelled in the views of the sea as a newly-found pleasure), and then, successively, at Canterbury, Oxford, and other places inland. In the winter of 1817-18 he returned to Hampstead with the four books of his Endymion completed. The absence of this poem was written, was also the period during which many of those letters to his friends were written which have been edited by Mr. Monckton Milnes, in his Memoir of the poet. These letters have hardly received the attention they deserve. They are very remarkable letters. One can see, indeed, that they are the letters of an intellectual invalid, of a poor youth too conscious of "the endeavour of this present breath," watching incessantly his own morbid symptoms, and communicating them to his friends. There is also in them a somewhat unnatural straining after quaint and facetious conceits, as if he would not write common-place, but would force himself by the mere brief rumination of the moment into some minute originality or whim of fancy. On the whole, however, with the proper allowance, the letters may be read without any injury to the highest notion of him that may be formed from his compositions that were meant for publication; and there have not been many young poets of whose casual letters as much could be said. They abound in shrewd observations, in delicate and subtle criticisms, in fine touches of description, and in thoughts of a philosophical kind that are at once comprehensive and deep. Its "Endymion: A Poetic Romance," appeared in the beginning of 1818. reception was not wholly satisfactory. It made Keats's name more widely known; it procured him visits and invitations; and, when he attended Hazlitt's lectures, ladies to whom he was pointed out looked at him instead of listening to the lecturer. But Hunt, Shelley, and the rest, though they admired the poem, and thought some passages in it very wonderful, had many faults to find. The language in many parts was juvenile, not to say untasteful; such phrases as "honey-feel of bliss were too frequent; it was impossible for any understanding of a rational sort to reconcile itself to such a bewildering plenitude of luxuriant invention raised on such a mere nothing of a basis; and, waywardness in the sequence of the thoughts, arising from a passive dependence of the matter at every point on the mere suggestion of the rhyme! These and other such objections were heard on all hands. Worst of all, Wordsworth had no approbation to give. At Haydon's, one evening, when Wordsworth was present, Keats was induced to repeat to him the famous Hymn to Pan, which Shelley had praised as that in the whole poem which " gave "the surest sign of ultimate excellence." The iron-grey poet heard it to the end, and then only remarked that it was а pretty piece of paganism." And so, with no more encouragement than usually falls to the lot of a young man in such cases, Keats had to keep his own counsel, and look forward to other works, in which, choosing more solid subjects, he should exert his powers more compactly and impressively, and win, by better-disciplined strokes, the recognition which the world yields so slowly to forms of genius differing from those to which it has been accustomed. His was certainly a new faculty, which had to create and educate the taste by which it should itself be appreciated; and his hope, therefore, lay with the body of the growing youth of the land, whose perpetual privilege it is that they alone can receive and enjoy without criticising. No man was ever fully and heartily accepted, among his own sex, except by those younger than himself. Keats, there is no doubt, was prepared to wait and work on. The story of his having been killed by the savage article in the Quarterly is proved to have been wholly untrue. He had sense enough and pluck enough to get over that chagrin within the usual period of twenty-four hours, which, if there is any use for human spirits in the earth's rotation, ought to bring them as well as other things round again to the status quo. But other causes were at work, some of which are but dimly revealed by his biographer, but the chief of which was his hereditary malady of consumption. In the winter |