Chapter 24

All the papers I possess—all the information I can render—whatever I can do to aid your kind and judiciously intended work—areat your service! But a word or two on the great subject of our correspondence. He was hunted in his youth, before he had strength to escape his ban-dogs. He had the greatest power of poetry in him, of any one since Shakespeare! He was the sincerest friend, the most lovable associate, the deepest listener to the griefs and disappointments of all around him ‘that ever lived in the tide of times.’ Your expressed intentions as to the Life are so clear and good; that I seem to have the weight of an undone work taken from me.

Haslam in like manner lends all the help he can, and from his office as a solicitor in Copthall Court writes somewhat dispiritedly about himself, and declares that this correspondence ‘has been a clean taking me back to a separate state of existence that I had more than thirty years ago, a state that has long appeared to me almost as a dream. The realities of life have intervened, but God be praised they have but been laid upon the surface—have but hidden, not effaced those happy happy days.’ He sends a number of letters from Severn, including those written on the voyage to Naples and quoted in full above. But as to letters from Keats himself says he has found none,—‘they probably were so well or intended to be so well taken care of, that every endeavour to lay my hands on them has proved unavailing.’ One wonders whether they may not be lurking yet, a forgotten bundle, in the dust of some unexplored corner of a safe in that same office. Severn was at this time living in London, and some correspondence passed between him and Milnes about the biography, Severn’s chief point being to insist that not the malice of the critics, but the ‘death-stricken’ marriage project, was the trouble preying upon Keats in his dying days, and that the outcries of his delirium ran constantly upon his unfulfilled love and unwritten poems together.

As to yet another of Keats’s closest friends, Benjamin Bailey, Milnes had somehow been misinformed, and believed and positively stated him to be dead. He had in fact risen to colonial preferment in the Church, and was alive and well as archdeacon of Colombo in Ceylon. Thence on the appearance of Milnes’s book he wrote todeclare his survival, and forwarded to the biographer, for use in future editions, those memoranda of old days spent in Keats’s company upon which I have above (in Chapter V) so fully drawn.

There are a few other points upon which Milnes’s information was less accurate than might have been expected. He assumes that thefiancéeof Keats’s tragic passion was identical with the rich-complexioned Charmian described in his autumn letters of 1819, and ignores the existence of Fanny Brawne and of her family. One would have supposed that he must have heard the real story both from Brown and from Dilke, whom Mrs Brawne had appointed trustee for her children, and who had not since lost sight of them. That kind lady herself met an unhappy fate, burned to death upon her own doorstep. Her daughter Fanny, ten years after her poet-lover’s death, married a Mr Lindo, who afterwards changed his name to Lindon, and of whom we know little except that he was at one time drawn into the meshes of Spanish politics and was afterwards one of the Commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Not long before her marriage, Mrs Lindon is recorded to have said of Keats that the kindest thing to his memory would be to let it die. Little wonder, perhaps, that she should have felt thus, when she remembered the tortured, the terrifying vehemence of his passion for herself and when, being probably incapable of independent literary judgment, she saw his name and work still made customary objects of critical derision. It is harder to forgive her when some time later we find her parting with her lover’s miniature, under pressure of some momentary money difficulty, to Dilke.

Neither does the biographer seem to have made any attempt to get into touch with Keats’s young sister, who had been married long before this to an accomplished Spanish man of letters, Señor Valentine Llanos. He also was at various times involved in the political troubles of his country. Of his and his wife’s children, one attained distinction as an artist and assumed the nameof Keats y Llanos. Keats had written to his sister once as a child gaily prophesying that they all, her brothers and herself, would live to have ‘tripple chins and stubby thumbs.’ She in fact fully attained the predicted length of days, and having lived to be well assured of the full and final triumph of her brother’s fame died less than thirty years ago at eighty-six. In mature life she had come into touch with one at least of her brother’s surviving familiars, that is with Severn at Rome, and with more than one of his admirers in a younger generation. Of these a good friend to her was Mr Buxton Forman, through whose initiative a Civil List pension was awarded her by Lord Beaconsfield. A subtle observer, the poet and humorist, Frederick Locker-Lampson, has left a rather disappointing though not unkindly impression of her as follows:—

Whilst I was in Rome Mr Severn introduced me to M. and Mme. Valentine de Llanos, a kindly couple. He was a Spaniard, lean, silent, dusky, and literary, the author ofDon EstebanandSandoval. She was fat, blonde, and lymphatic, and both were elderly.She was John Keats’s sister!I had a good deal of talk with her, or ratherather, for she was not very responsive. I was disappointed, for I remember that my sprightliness made her yawn; she seemed inert and had nothing to tell me of her wizard brother of whom she spoke as of a mystery—with a vague admiration but a genuine affection. She was simple and natural—I believe she is a very worthy woman.

Gaps and errors there thus were not a few in Monckton Milnes’s book when it appeared in two volumes in 1848. But it served its purpose admirably for the time being, and with some measure of revision for long afterwards. Distinguished in style and perfect in temper, the preface and introduction struck with full confidence the right note in challenging for Keats the character of ‘the Marcellus of the Empire of English song’; while the body of the book, giving to the world a considerable, though far from complete, series of those familiar letters, to his friends in which his genius shines almost as vividly as in his verse, established on full evidence the essentialmanliness of his character against the conception of him as a blighted weakling which both his friends and enemies had contrived to let prevail. Among the posthumous poems printed for the first time, the two longest,Othoand theCap and Bellswere not of his best, but masterpieces likeLa Belle DameandThe Eve of St Mark, with many miscellaneous things of high interest, were included. The reception of the book, though not, of course, unmixed, was in all quarters respectful, and the old tone of flippant contempt hardly made itself heard at all. I shall quote only one critical dictum on its appearance, and that is the letter in which the veteran Landor, in his highest style of urbanity and authority, acknowledged a copy sent him by the author:—

Dear Milnes,On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks’ absence, I find your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets, excepting Shakespeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of the poetical character—fire, fancy, and diversity.... There is an effluence of power and light pervading all his works, and a freshness such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.

Dear Milnes,

On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks’ absence, I find your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets, excepting Shakespeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of the poetical character—fire, fancy, and diversity.... There is an effluence of power and light pervading all his works, and a freshness such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.

The book appeared just at the right moment, when the mounting enthusiasm of the young generation for the once derided poet was either gradually carrying the elders along with it or leaving them bewildered behind. Do readers remember how the simple soul of Colonel Newcome was perplexed by the talk of his son Clive and of Clive’s friends?—

He heard opinions that amazed and bewildered him: he heard that Byron was no great poet, though a very clever man ... that his favourite, Doctor Johnson, talked admirably, but did not write English; that young Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael; and that a young gentleman of Cambridge who had lately published two volumes of verses might take rank with the greatest poets of all. Doctor Johnson not write English! Lord Byron not one of the greatest poets of the world! Sir Walter a poet of the second order! Mr Pope attacked for inferiority and want of imagination; Mr Keats andthis young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge, the chief of modern poetic literature! What were these new dicta, which Mr. Warrington delivered with a puff of tobacco smoke; to which Mr. Honeyman blandly assented, and Clive listened with pleasure?

Thackeray’s sketch of Clive and his companions scarcely suggests, nor was it meant to suggest, the characteristics of the special group of young artists in whom, almost contemporaneously with the appearance of Milnes’s book, the enthusiasm for Keats had begun to burn at its whitest heat. I refer of course to the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Of the three leaders of that movement, Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti, it is hard to say which, in the late ‘forties and early ‘fifties, declared himself first or most ardent in Keats-worship.10Of Hunt’s exhibited pictures, one of the earliest showed the lovers in theEve of St Agnesstealing past the sprawling porter and the sleeping bloodhound into the night; and of Millais’s earliest, one is fromIsabella or the Pot of Basil, showing the merchant brothers and their sister and her lover at a meal in company (the well-known work, so queerly designed and executed with so much grip and character, now in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool). Rossetti had in these early days much less technical skill and training than either of his two associates. But from the first he was poet as well as painter, and instinctively and spiritually stood, we can well discern, much nearer to Keats than they did for all their enthusiasm.

Combining Italian blood and temperament with British upbringing, Rossetti added to his inherited and paternally inculcated knowledge and love of Dante a no less intense love and knowledge of English romance poetry, both that of the old ballads and that of the revival of 1800 and onwards. In boyhood and early youth waves of enthusiasm for different recent poets had swept over him one after another, first Shelley, then Keats, then Browning; but Keats, and next to Keats Coleridge,kept the strongest and deepest hold on him. When his first associates Hunt and Millais had parted from him on their several, widely divergent paths of public success and distinction, Rossetti became, in the comparative seclusion in which he chose to live, a powerful focus of romantic inspiration to younger men who came about him. He is reported to have urged upon William Morris that he should become a painter and not a poet, seeing that Keats had already done all there was to be done in poetry. Of all Keats’s poems, it wasLa belle dame sans MerciandThe Eve of St Markwhich most aroused the enthusiasm of Rossetti and his group. We have already seen how the latter fragment stands in our nineteenth-century poetry as a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between Chaucer and Morris. It was the task and destiny of Morris as a writer to give, by his abounding fertility and brooding delight in the telling of Greek and mediæval stories in verse, the most profuse and for the present perhaps the last expression to the pure romantic spirit in English narrative poetry: and to this effort Keats had given him the immediate impulse, though Chaucer was his ultimate great exemplar. Answering a congratulatory letter addressed to him by the veteran Cowden Clarke on the publication of the first volume of theEarthly Paradise, Morris speaks of ‘Keats for whom I have such a boundless admiration, and whom I venture to call one of my masters.’ I have quoted above (page 470) his emphatic later words to a like effect.

While the leaven was thus intensely working among a special group in England, an English poetess of quite other training and associations, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, paid inAurora Leigh(1857) her well-known tribute to Keats in lines that are neither good as poetry nor accurate as fact, but in their chaotic way none the less passionately felt and haunting:—

By Keats’s soul, the man who never steppedIn gradual progress like another man,But, turning grandly on his central self,Ensphered himself in twenty perfect yearsAnd died, not young, (the life of a long lifeDistilled to a mere drop, falling like a tearUpon the world’s cold cheek to make it burnFor ever;) by that strong accepted soul,I count it strange and hard to understandThat nearly all young poets should write old.

By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped

In gradual progress like another man,

But, turning grandly on his central self,

Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years

And died, not young, (the life of a long life

Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear

Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn

For ever;) by that strong accepted soul,

I count it strange and hard to understand

That nearly all young poets should write old.

Thus, between the effects of Monckton Milnes’s book and the enthusiasm of various groups of university men and poets and artists, the previously current contempt for Keats was from soon after the mid-century practically silenced and the battle for his fame, at least among the younger generation, won. He has counted for the last sixty years and more, alike in England and in America, as an uncontested great poet, whose works, collected or single, have been in demand in edition after edition. One of the earliest new issues was that edited in 1850 by Monckton Milnes, who continued nearly until the end, under his new style as Lord Houghton, to further by fresh editions and revisions the good work he had begun. Not only every professed critic and historian of our poetry, but nearly all our chief poets themselves, as Aubrey de Vere, James Russell Lowell, Matthew Arnold, Coventry Patmore, Swinburne, and latterly the present poet laureate, have been in various tones public commentators on Keats. All such comments have shed light upon his work in their degree. I can here only touch on a few special points and mention in their order a few of the contributions to the knowledge or appreciation of the poet which I think have helped the most.

One point to be remarked is that very few judges have seemed able to care equally for Keats and Shelley. A special devotion to Shelley, the poet who wedded himself in youth to a set of ready-made beliefs from Godwin, of which the chief was that all the miseries of the world were due to laws and institutions and could be cured by their abolition, who clothed these abstract beliefs in imagery of clouds and winds and ocean-streams, of meteor and rainbow and sunset and all things radiant and evanescent, and sang them to strains of music inimitablyswift and passionate, seems incompatible with complete delight in the work of that other young poet who could hold fast no dogma spiritual or social, but found truth wherever his imagination could divine or create living and concrete beauty, and who, as to the sorrows of the world, was convinced that they were inherent in its very fabric and being, and yearned for knowledge and wisdom to assuage them but died before he had attained clearness or found his way. As between these two, Tennyson’s final and calm opinion is quoted by his son as follows:—‘Keats would have become one of the very greatest of all poets had he lived. At the time of his death there was apparently no sign of exhaustion or having written himself out; his keen poetical instinct was in full process of development at the time. Each new effort was a steady advance on that which had gone before. With all Shelley’s splendid imagery and colour, I find a sort oftenuityin his poetry.’ FitzGerald was much stronger on the same side, counting Shelley, to use his own words, as not worth Keats’s little finger. Matthew Arnold, who has said some memorably fine and just things about Keats, belittles the poetry of Shelley and even paradoxically prefers the prose of his essays and letters to his verse. With ardent Shelley-worshippers on the other hand full appreciation of Keats is rare. Swinburne, for one, has done little for Keats’s memory by the torrent of hyperbolical adjectives of alternate praise and blame which he has poured upon it. Mr William Rossetti, for whom Shelley is ‘one of the ultimate glories of our race and planet,’ has in his monograph on Keats, as I think, been icily unjust to his subject. And I can remember my admirable friend and colleague, Mr Richard Garnett of the British Museum, taking me roundly to task for the opinion, which I still stoutly hold, that the letters of Keats, with all their every-day humanity and fun and gossip, are in their wonderful sudden gleams and intuitions more vitally the letters of a poet than Shelley’s. But such preferences between two such contrasted geniuses and creators of beauty are perhaps inevitable,and have at any rate not prevented the equal and brotherly association of the two in the memorial house—the house in which Keats died—lately acquired and consecrated to their joint fame by representative English and Americans at Rome.

One great snare in judging of Keats is his variability of mood and opinion. The critic is apt to seize upon the expression of some one phase or attitude of mind that strikes him, and to theorize and draw conclusions from it as though it were permanent and dominant. The very excellence of what was best both in his poetry and himself is a second snare, tempting us to forget that after all he was but a lad, a genius and character not made but in the making. A third is the obvious and frankly avowed intensity of the sensuous elements in his nature. But the critic who casts these up against him should remember that it took the same capacity for sense-delights that inspired the rhapsodies on claret-drinking and nectarine-sucking in the letters, to inspire also, being spiritualized into imaginative emotion, the ‘blushful Hippocrene’ passage in the Nightingale ode or the feast of fruits, in all its pureness, of the revisedHyperion; and also that Keats, with his clear and sane self-consciousness, has rarely any doubt that the master bent within him was not his ‘exquisite sense of the luxurious’ but his love for the high things and thoughts which he calls ‘philosophy.’

It is a pity that the author of the one full and recent history of our poetry, the late Mr W.J. Courthope, should have been debarred from just appreciation of this poet alike by adopted dogma and by natural taste. Both led him to hold that the true power of poetry, the true test by which posterity must judge it, lies in the direct relations which it bears to the social and political activities of its period. That the re-awakening of the Western mind and imagination to nature and romance in the days of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars was a spiritual phenomenon not less important in human history than the wars themselves would havebeen a conception that his mind was incapable of entertaining. He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics. But of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a disillusion,—that the saving of the world from the grip of one great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in re-instating a number of ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less tyrannical. To that which lies behind and above politics and history, to the general destinies and tribulations of the race, he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only too acutely and tragically sensitive.

Turning to the chief real contributions to our appreciation and knowledge of Keats, I should give the first place to Matthew Arnold’s well-known essay11of 1880. With his cunning art in the minting and throwing into circulation of phrases that cannot be forgotten, Arnold balanced the weaknesses against the strength of Keats’s work and character, blaming the gushing admirers who injured his memory by their ‘pawing and fondness,’ insisting on the veins of ‘flint and iron’ in his nature, insisting on his clear-sightedness, his lucidity, his perception of the vital connexion of beauty with truth and of both with joy, declaring that ‘no one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness,’ and clenching all, with reference to Keats’s own saying, ‘I think I shall be among the English poets after my death,’ by the comment, ‘he is, he is with Shakespeare.11Almost simultaneously with MatthewArnold’s essay, there appeared the very thoughtful and original study of Mrs F.M. Owen, in which were laid the foundations of a true understanding ofEndymionas a parable of the experiences of a poet’s soul in its quest after Beauty.

The years 1883 and 1884 were great Keats years. In them there appeared the edition of the poems by the late W.T. Arnold, the first which contained a scholar’s investigations into the special sources of Keats’s poetic style and vocabulary: also the edition for the Golden Treasury Series by Francis Turner Palgrave, with a studiously collated text and a preface of more glowing and scarcely less just critical admiration than Matthew Arnold’s, only flawed, as I think, by a revival of that obsolete heresy of the ‘deadness’ of the Grecian mythology: and thirdly, the first issue of the late Mr Buxton Forman’s edition of the poetry and prose works together. All students know the results of this editor’s devoted and unremitting industry, maintained through a full quarter of a century, in the textual criticism of his author and in the publication and re-publication of editions containing every variant reading and every scrap of scattered prose or verse that could be recovered. To the same worker is due the unearthing and giving to the world of two groups of the poet’s letters which had been unknown to Monckton Milnes, the wholly admirable and delightful series addressed to his young sister, and the series, in great part distressing and deplorable, to Fanny Brawne. About 1887, I was myself able to put straight two matters that needed it by publishing the true text of the letters to America and by rectifying the current notion that the revisedHyperionhad been a first draft. Before long came the essay of Mr Robert Bridges, passing the whole of Keats’s poetry under review, and dealing out judgments in a terse authoritative style to which, as one poet estimating another, he was fully entitled, and which at all moments commands interest and respect if it sometimes challenges contradiction. On some matters, and especially on the relations of Keats’searly poetry to Wordsworth, Mr Bridges has thrown a light too clear and convincing to be questioned.

When in 1892 the late Mr William Sharp compiled hisLife of Joseph Severnfrom the vast, almost unmanageable mass of papers in the possession of the artist’s family (I had had them previously through my hands and can realize the difficulty of the task), he furnished valuable new material for our knowledge both of the life of Keats and of his after life in the opinions of men. Coming down to more recent years, we have the admirable editorial work of Professor de Sélincourt, as good, I think, as has been bestowed on any English poet, carrying out to the farthest point the researches initiated by W.T. Arnold, and illuminating the text throughout with the comments and illustrations of a keen scholar in classical and English literature. Nor can I leave unmentioned the several lectures by two successive Oxford professors of poetry, that of Mr A.C. Bradley on Keats’s letters and that of Mr. J.W. Mackail on his poetry. From these two minds, ripened in daily familiarity with the best literatures of the world, we have, after a hundred years, praise of Keats which almost makes Shelley’s seating of him among ‘Inheritors of unfulfilled renown’ seem like an irony,—praise more splendid than he would have hoped for had he lived to fulfil even the most daring of his ambitions. A special point in Mr Mackail’s work is to make clear how strong had been upon Keats the influence of theDivine Comedy, his pocket companion on his Scottish tour, and how inHyperion, written in the next months after his return, there appears here and there, amid the general Miltonic strain of the verse, a quality of thought and vision drawn straight from and almost matching Dante. Lastly, there has recently come from America a tribute of quite another kind, showing how for purposes of systematic study Keats has been thought worthy of an apparatus hitherto only bestowed on the great classics of literature: I refer to the elaborate and monumentalConcordanceto his poems lately issued from Cornell University.

And must not, it may be asked, all this labour spent upon Keats’s memory and remains, all this load of editing and re-editing and commentary and biography and scholiast-work laid upon a poet who declared that all poems ought to be understood without any comment,—must it not by this time have fairly smothered, or is it not at least in danger of smothering, Keats himself and his poetry? Naturally in the course of my own work I have asked myself this question with qualms, bethinking myself of Tennyson’s phrase about swamping the sacred poets with themselves. The answer is,—No, such a poet can carry any weight we may choose to lay upon him, and more: he can never be smothered, inasmuch as he has both given the world something it can nevermore cease to want and suggested the existence within him of a power, quenched before its time, to give it something much more and greater yet. If the result of all our commentaries should be to provoke a reaction among readers, and to make them crave for a naked text both of the poems and letters and insist upon being left alone with that and their own meditations upon it,—well, so much the better. Every reader of the English tongue that has the works of Keats often enough in his hands, with or without comment, will find his life enriched with much of the best that poetry can do for human life, with achievements, very near to perfection, of that faculty which is the essential organ of poetry,—to which all others, spiritual and intellectual, are in poetry subordinate,—the faculty of imagination transfusing the vital beauty and magic and secret rhythm of things into the other magic and beauty and rhythm of words. Over and above this, he will find himself living in the familiarity of a great and lovable spirit, dowered at birth with capacities for joy and misery more intense almost than any of which we have record, and retaining its lovableness to the last in spite of circumstances that gave misery too cruelly the upper hand.

But, again the objector may ask, is it so certain thatin the coming time the desire of readers for what Keats has to give them will survive without abatement? Have not the last three years been an utterly unprecedented, overwhelming and transforming experience for mankind? Will not the new world after the war be a new world indeed, on the one hand filled, nay, gorged, with recollections of doing and undergoing, of endurance and adventure, of daring and suffering and horror, of hellishness and heroism, beside which all the dreams of bygone romance must forever seem tame and vapid; and on the other hand straining with a hungry forecast towards a future of peace and justice such as mankind has not known before, which it will be its tremendous task to try and establish? Will not this world of so prodigiously intensified experiences and enlarged hopes and besetting anxieties require and produce new poets and a new poetry of its own that shall deal with the realities it has gone through and those it is striving for, and put away and cease to care for the old dreams and thrills and glamours of romance? Have we not in fact witnessed the first-fruits of this new tremendous stimulus in the cloud of young poets who have appeared—too many of them alas! only to perish—since the war began?

And again the answer is, No. However changed the world, work like that of Keats is not what it will ever let perish. The thrills and glamours which pass away are only those of the second-rate and the second-hand sort that come in and go out with literary fashion; not those which have sprung from and struck deep into the innermost places of the spirit. Doubtless there will arise and is arising a new poetry which will be very different from any phase of poetry produced by the romantic revolution and the generations that followed and nourished themselves on it. The new poetry may not be able fully to share Keats’s inspiring conviction of the sovereign, the transcendental truth of whatsoever ideas the imagination seizes as beauty. It may perhaps even abjure the direct search for beauty as its primary aim and impulse. But no matter: provided that itsorgan be the imagination, working with intensity on whatever themes the genius of the age may dictate, it cannot but achieve some phase, some incarnation, of beauty by the way. But gains like those which were made for the human spirit by the poetry of which Keats was one of the chief masters will never be lost again. Those who care for poetry at all must always care for those refreshing and inspiring draughts, as I have called them, from the innermost wells of antiquity, of nature, and of romance, those meditations of mingled joy and sorrow that search into the soul of things. Moreover they will never cease to interest themselves in the question,—If only this great spirit had survived, what would have been those unwritten poems of which he saw in the sky the cloudy symbols, of which he felt the pressure and prescience forcing the blood into his brain or bringing about his heart an awful warmth ‘like a load of immortality,’ and the perishing of which unborn within him was one of the two great haunting distresses of his dying days?

In letting speculation wander in this field, we are brought up by many problems as to what kind of manhood could have followed a youth like that of Keats, had he had better fortune and had the conditions and accidents of his life been such as to fortify his bodily constitution instead of sapping it. Youth, especially half-trained youth, is always subject to such storms and strains as those which Keats experienced with a violence proportionate to the fervour of his being. To the sane and sweet, the manly and courageous, elements in his character we have found his friends bear unanimous evidence, amply supported by the self-revelation of his letters. But self-revealed also we see the morbid, the corroding elements which lay beneath these, just as beneath his vigorous frame and gallant bearing there lay the bodily susceptibilities that with ill-luck enabled lung disease to fasten on and kill him. What must under any conditions have made life hard for him was the habitual inner contention and disquiet of his instinctsand emotions in regard to that most momentous of human matters, love. When he lets his mind dwell on the opposed extremes of human impulse and experience, from the vilest to the most exalted, which the word-of-all-work, love, is used to cover, he is more savagely perplexed and out of conceit with life than from any other cause or thought whatever.12The ruling power in himself, as he declares over and over again, was the abstract passion for beauty, the love of the principle of beauty in all things. But even in the poem specially designed to embody and celebrate that passion, inEndymion, we find his conception of realized and sexual human love to be mawkish and unworthy. When the actual experience befalls himself, he falls utterly and almost ignominiously a slave, at once enraptured and desperately resentful, to the jealous cravings which absorb and paralyse all his other faculties. Would ripened manhood or a happier experience have been able to bring health and peace to his spirit on this supremely vital matter and to turn him into a poet of love, love both human and transcendental, such as at the outset he had longed and striven to be?

Again, along with his admirable capacity for loyal devotion and sympathy in friendship, we find in him capacities of quite another kind, capacities for disillusionment and for seeing through and chafing at human and social shams and pretensions and absurdities; and we ask ourselves, would this strain in him, which we find expressed with a degree of pettish and premature cynicism, for instance in theCap and Bellsand in some of his later letters, have matured with time into a power either of virile satire or genial, reconciling comedy?

And once more, would that haunting, that irrepressible sense of the miseries of the world which we find breaking through from time to time amid the beautyof the odes, or the playfulness and affectionate confidences of the letters, or dictating that tragical return against himself and his achievements in the revisedHyperion,—could it and would it with experience have mellowed into such compassionate wisdom as might have made him one of the rare great healers and sages among the poets of the world?

Such speculations are as vain as they are inevitable. Let us indulge ourselves at any rate by remembering that it is the greatest among his successors who have held the most sanguine view as to the powers that were in him. Here are more words of Tennyson’s,—‘Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us. There is something magic and of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything which he wrote.’ Leaving with these words the question of what he might have done, and looking only at what he did, it is enough for any man’s glory. The days of the years of his life were few and evil, but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship shines eternally.

1Everyone knows Wordsworth’s beautiful sonnet of God-speed to him. Haydon went to call on the great man, who had always been kind to him, as he passed through London, and except for two unfortunately chosen words, is at his very best in this picture of their parting:—‘After a quarter of an hour I took my leave, and as I arose he got up, took his stick, with that sidelong look of his, and then burst forth that beautiful smile of heart and feeling, geniality of soul, manly courage and tenderness of mien, which neither painter nor sculptor has ever touched. It was the smile of a superior creature who would have gathered humanity under the shelter of its wings and while he was amused at its follies would have saved it from sorrow and sheltered it from pain.’ (Life of B. R. Haydon, ed. Taylor, ii, 321.)2John Sterling,Essays and Tales, ii, 53.3Carefully edited, it is believed by Cyrus Redding, formerly an employé of the house.4Noctes Ambrosianæ, ii, 146: fromBlackwoodfor December, 1828.5Quarterly Review, April 1833, page 81. The article was long supposed to be by Lockhart himself, but Mr Prothero has proved that it was by Croker.6In W. Smith’sStandard Library, exactly reprinted from the Galignani edition. America had in this matter been in advance of England, an edition of the poet’s works having appeared at Buffalo in 1834.7Essays and Tales, p. clxviii.8Notes on Gilfillan’s Literary Portraits: Collected Works, xi, 393. It is fair to add that twelve years later De Quincey went a good way in recantation of this outburst.9SeeByron’s Collected Works, Prose, iii, 46, note.10See particularly Chaps. iv and v of Holman Hunt’sPre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.11First published in T.H. Ward’sSelections from the English poets, and re-printed in the second series ofEssays in Criticism(1892). To this essay I possess a curious postscript in a note of Arnold’s written a few years later to myself. I had thought his treatment ofEndymiontoo slighting. His answer shows how fastidiousness could prevail in him over judgment. ‘If Keats,’ he writes, ‘had left nothing butEndymion, it would have alone shown his remarkable power and have been worth preserving on that account: but when he has left plenty which shows it much better I cannot but wishEndymionaway from his volume.’12See the bitter comment on a passage in Burton’sAnatomyquoted in Mr Buxton Forman’sComplete Works of J. K.iii, 268, where Keats runs his head against the problem with which Plato had tried to deal in his myth of the two Aphrodites, Pandêmos and Urania. ‘The word-of-all-work, love,’ is a phrase of George Eliot’s.

2John Sterling,Essays and Tales, ii, 53.

3Carefully edited, it is believed by Cyrus Redding, formerly an employé of the house.

4Noctes Ambrosianæ, ii, 146: fromBlackwoodfor December, 1828.

5Quarterly Review, April 1833, page 81. The article was long supposed to be by Lockhart himself, but Mr Prothero has proved that it was by Croker.

6In W. Smith’sStandard Library, exactly reprinted from the Galignani edition. America had in this matter been in advance of England, an edition of the poet’s works having appeared at Buffalo in 1834.

7Essays and Tales, p. clxviii.

8Notes on Gilfillan’s Literary Portraits: Collected Works, xi, 393. It is fair to add that twelve years later De Quincey went a good way in recantation of this outburst.

9SeeByron’s Collected Works, Prose, iii, 46, note.

10See particularly Chaps. iv and v of Holman Hunt’sPre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

11First published in T.H. Ward’sSelections from the English poets, and re-printed in the second series ofEssays in Criticism(1892). To this essay I possess a curious postscript in a note of Arnold’s written a few years later to myself. I had thought his treatment ofEndymiontoo slighting. His answer shows how fastidiousness could prevail in him over judgment. ‘If Keats,’ he writes, ‘had left nothing butEndymion, it would have alone shown his remarkable power and have been worth preserving on that account: but when he has left plenty which shows it much better I cannot but wishEndymionaway from his volume.’

12See the bitter comment on a passage in Burton’sAnatomyquoted in Mr Buxton Forman’sComplete Works of J. K.iii, 268, where Keats runs his head against the problem with which Plato had tried to deal in his myth of the two Aphrodites, Pandêmos and Urania. ‘The word-of-all-work, love,’ is a phrase of George Eliot’s.

APPENDIX

I.The Alexander fragment(page 33). Here is the text:—Whenne Alexandre the Conqueroure was wayfayringe in y^e londe of Inde, there mette hym a damoselle of marveillouse beautie slepynge uponne the herbys and flourys. He colde ne loke uponne her withouten grete plesance, and he was welle nighe loste in wondrement. Her forme was everyche whytte lyke y^e fayrest carvynge of Quene Cythere, onlie thatte y^t was swellyd and blushyd wyth warmthe and lyffe wythalle.Her forhed was as whytte as ys the snowe whyche y^e talle hed of a Norwegian pyne stelythe from y^e northerne wynde. One of her fayre hondes was yplaced thereonne, and thus whytte wyth whytte was ymyngld as y^e gode Arthure saythe, lyke whytest lylys yspredde on whyttest snowe; and her bryght eyne whenne she them oped, sparklyd lyke Hesperus through an evenynge cloude.Theye were yclosyd yn slepe, save that two slauntynge raies shotte to her mouthe, and were theyre bathyd yn sweetenesse, as whenne by chaunce y^e moone fyndeth a banke of violettes and droppethe thereonne y^e silverie dewe.The authoure was goynge onne withouthen descrybynge y^e ladye’s breste, whenne lo, a genyus appearyd—‘Cuthberte,’ sayeth he, ‘an thou canst not descrybe y^e ladye’s breste, and fynde a simile thereunto, I forbyde thee to proceede yn thy romaunt.’ Thys, I kennd fulle welle, far surpassyd my feble powres, and forthwythe I was fayne to droppe my quille.This queer youthful passage in a would-be Caxton or Wynkyn de Worde spelling seems scarcely worth taking trouble about, but I thought it worth while to try and trace what reading Keats must have been fresh from when he wrote it, and consulted both Prof. Israel Gollancz and Mr Henry Bradley, with the result stated briefly in the text. At first I had thought Keats must have drawn his idea from some one of the many versions of thegreat mediæval Alexander romance—especially considering that in all forms of that romance a flight into the skies and a trip under the sea are regular incidents, and might later have suggested the parallel incidents inEndymion. But neither in the version which Keats is most likely to have known, the EnglishAlisaunderas published in Weber’s collection of metrical romances, 1810, nor indeed, I believe, in any other, is there any incident closely parallel to this of the Indian maiden; although love and marriage generally come into the story towards the close. In the English version there is a beautiful Candace who declares her passion for the hero: he puts her off for the time being, but goes disguised as an ambassador to her court, where he is recognized and imprisoned. Among things derived from the main mediæval cycle, the nearest approach to such an idea as Keats was working on is to be found in theOrlando Innamoratoof Boiardo, book ii, canto i, stanzas 6, 21-29; but here the beauty is a lady of Egypt whom Boiardo calls Elidonia. His description of the great painted hall of the giant Agramante at Biserta, adorned with pictures of the life and deeds of Alexander, closes with the following:—In somma, ogni sua guerra ivi è dipintaCon gran richezza e bella a riguardare.Poscia che fu la terra da lui vinta,A due grifon nel ciel si fè portare,Col scudo in braccia e con la spada cinta;Poi dentro un vetro si cala nel mare,E vede le balene e ogni gran pesceE campa e ancor quivi di fuor n’esce.Da poi che vinto egli ha ben ogni cosa,Vedesi lui che vinto è dall’ amore,Perchè Elidonia, quella graziosa,Co’ suoi begli occhi gli ha passato il core—And then ensues the history of their loves and of the hero’s death.But Keats in his hospital days knew no Italian, and could only have heard of such a passage in Boiardo through Leigh Hunt. So I think the derivation of his fragment from any of the regular Alexander romances must be given up, and the source indicated in the text be accepted, namely the popularfabliauof theLai d’Aristote(probably in Way’s rimed version), where the thing happens exactly as Keats tells it, and whence the idea of the sudden encounter with an Indian maiden probably lingered in hismind till he revived it inEndymion. As for the sources of the attempt at voluptuous description, it is a little surprising to find Milton’s ‘tallest pine hewn on Norwegian hills’ remembered in such a connexion: other things are an easily recognizable farrago fromCymbeline,—‘Cytherea,How bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily,And whiter than the sheets!’fromVenus and Adonis,—‘A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow;’‘Teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white;’fromLucrece,——‘the morning’s silver-melting dew;’fromTwelfth Night,—‘like the sweet soundThat breathes upon a bank of violets;’and so forth. Prof. Gollancz suggests that ‘Cuthberte’ as the name of the author is a reminiscence from the ‘Cuddie’ of Spenser’sShepheard’s Calendar, and that the ‘good Arthure’ may also be some kind of Spenserian reference: but I suspect ‘Arthure’ here to be a mis-transcription (we have no autograph) for ‘authoure.’II.Verses written by Brown and Keats after visiting Beauly Abbey(p. 295).—The text, of which there exist two separate transcripts, is as follows. I have printed in italics the lines which Keats, as he told Woodhouse, contributed to the joint work.On Some Skulls in Beauly Abbey, near InvernessI shed no tears;Deep thought or awful vision, I had noneBy thousand petty fancies I was crossed.Wordsworth.And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by.Shakspeare.1In silent barren Synod metWithin these roofless walls, where yetThe shafted arch and carved fretCling to the RuinThe Brethren’s Skulls mourn, dewy wet,Their Creed’s undoing.2The mitred ones of Nice and TrentWere not so tongue-tied,—no, they wentHot to their Councils, scarce contentWith OrthodoxyBut ye, poor tongueless things, were meantTo speak by proxy.3Your Chronicles no more existSince Knox, the RevolutionistDestroy’d the work of every fistThat scrawl’d black letterWell! I’m a CraniologistAnd may do better.4This skull-cap won the cowl from slothOr discontent, perhaps from bothAnd yet one day, against his oathHe tried escapingFor men, tho’ idle may be lothTo live on gaping.5A Toper this! he plied his glassMore strictly than he said the MassAnd lov’d to see a tempting lassCome to ConfessionLetting her absolution passO’er fresh transgression.6This crawl’d thro’ life in feeblenessBoasting he never knew excessCursing those crimes he scarce could guessOr feel but faintlyWith prayer that Heaven would cease to blessMen so unsaintly.7Here’s a true Churchman! he’d affectMuch charity and ne’r neglectTo pray for Mercy on th’ electBut thought no evilIn sending Heathen, Turk and ScotAll to the Devil!8Poor Skull! Thy fingers set ablaze,With silver saint in golden rays,The Holy Missal, thou didst craze‘Mid bead and spangleWhile others passed their idle daysIn coil and wrangle.9Long time this sconce a helmet wore,But sickness smites the conscience sore,He broke his sword and hither boreHis gear and plunderTook to the cowl—then rav’d and sworeAt his damn’d blunder!10This lily-coloured skull with allThe teeth complete, so white and smallBelonged to one whose early pallA lover shaded.He died ere Superstition’s gallHis heart invaded.11Ha! here is ‘undivulged crime!’Despair forbad his soul to climbBeyond this world, this mortal timeOf fever’d badnessUntil this Monkish PantomimeDazzled his madness!12A younger brother this! a manAspiring as a Tartar KhanBut, curb’d and baffl’d he beganThe trade of frighteningIt smack’d of power! and how he ranTo deal Heaven’s lightning!13This idiot-skull belonged to one,A buried miser’s only sonWho, penitent ere he’d begunTo taste of pleasureAnd hoping Heaven’s dread wrath to shunGave Hell his treasure.14Here is the forehead of an ApeA robber’s mask—and near the napeThat bone—fie on’t, bears just the shapeOf carnal passionAh! he was one for theft and rapeIn Monkish fashion!15This was the Porter!—he could singOr dance, or play—do anythingAnd what the Friars bade him bringThey ne’er were balked of;Matters not worth rememberingAnd seldom talk’d of.16Enough! why need I further pore?This corner holds at least a score,And yonder twice as many moreOf Reverend Brothers,’Tis the same story o’er and o’erThey’re like the others!

I.The Alexander fragment(page 33). Here is the text:—

Whenne Alexandre the Conqueroure was wayfayringe in y^e londe of Inde, there mette hym a damoselle of marveillouse beautie slepynge uponne the herbys and flourys. He colde ne loke uponne her withouten grete plesance, and he was welle nighe loste in wondrement. Her forme was everyche whytte lyke y^e fayrest carvynge of Quene Cythere, onlie thatte y^t was swellyd and blushyd wyth warmthe and lyffe wythalle.

Her forhed was as whytte as ys the snowe whyche y^e talle hed of a Norwegian pyne stelythe from y^e northerne wynde. One of her fayre hondes was yplaced thereonne, and thus whytte wyth whytte was ymyngld as y^e gode Arthure saythe, lyke whytest lylys yspredde on whyttest snowe; and her bryght eyne whenne she them oped, sparklyd lyke Hesperus through an evenynge cloude.

Theye were yclosyd yn slepe, save that two slauntynge raies shotte to her mouthe, and were theyre bathyd yn sweetenesse, as whenne by chaunce y^e moone fyndeth a banke of violettes and droppethe thereonne y^e silverie dewe.

The authoure was goynge onne withouthen descrybynge y^e ladye’s breste, whenne lo, a genyus appearyd—‘Cuthberte,’ sayeth he, ‘an thou canst not descrybe y^e ladye’s breste, and fynde a simile thereunto, I forbyde thee to proceede yn thy romaunt.’ Thys, I kennd fulle welle, far surpassyd my feble powres, and forthwythe I was fayne to droppe my quille.

This queer youthful passage in a would-be Caxton or Wynkyn de Worde spelling seems scarcely worth taking trouble about, but I thought it worth while to try and trace what reading Keats must have been fresh from when he wrote it, and consulted both Prof. Israel Gollancz and Mr Henry Bradley, with the result stated briefly in the text. At first I had thought Keats must have drawn his idea from some one of the many versions of thegreat mediæval Alexander romance—especially considering that in all forms of that romance a flight into the skies and a trip under the sea are regular incidents, and might later have suggested the parallel incidents inEndymion. But neither in the version which Keats is most likely to have known, the EnglishAlisaunderas published in Weber’s collection of metrical romances, 1810, nor indeed, I believe, in any other, is there any incident closely parallel to this of the Indian maiden; although love and marriage generally come into the story towards the close. In the English version there is a beautiful Candace who declares her passion for the hero: he puts her off for the time being, but goes disguised as an ambassador to her court, where he is recognized and imprisoned. Among things derived from the main mediæval cycle, the nearest approach to such an idea as Keats was working on is to be found in theOrlando Innamoratoof Boiardo, book ii, canto i, stanzas 6, 21-29; but here the beauty is a lady of Egypt whom Boiardo calls Elidonia. His description of the great painted hall of the giant Agramante at Biserta, adorned with pictures of the life and deeds of Alexander, closes with the following:—

In somma, ogni sua guerra ivi è dipintaCon gran richezza e bella a riguardare.Poscia che fu la terra da lui vinta,A due grifon nel ciel si fè portare,Col scudo in braccia e con la spada cinta;Poi dentro un vetro si cala nel mare,E vede le balene e ogni gran pesceE campa e ancor quivi di fuor n’esce.Da poi che vinto egli ha ben ogni cosa,Vedesi lui che vinto è dall’ amore,Perchè Elidonia, quella graziosa,Co’ suoi begli occhi gli ha passato il core—

In somma, ogni sua guerra ivi è dipinta

Con gran richezza e bella a riguardare.

Poscia che fu la terra da lui vinta,

A due grifon nel ciel si fè portare,

Col scudo in braccia e con la spada cinta;

Poi dentro un vetro si cala nel mare,

E vede le balene e ogni gran pesce

E campa e ancor quivi di fuor n’esce.

Da poi che vinto egli ha ben ogni cosa,

Vedesi lui che vinto è dall’ amore,

Perchè Elidonia, quella graziosa,

Co’ suoi begli occhi gli ha passato il core—

And then ensues the history of their loves and of the hero’s death.

But Keats in his hospital days knew no Italian, and could only have heard of such a passage in Boiardo through Leigh Hunt. So I think the derivation of his fragment from any of the regular Alexander romances must be given up, and the source indicated in the text be accepted, namely the popularfabliauof theLai d’Aristote(probably in Way’s rimed version), where the thing happens exactly as Keats tells it, and whence the idea of the sudden encounter with an Indian maiden probably lingered in hismind till he revived it inEndymion. As for the sources of the attempt at voluptuous description, it is a little surprising to find Milton’s ‘tallest pine hewn on Norwegian hills’ remembered in such a connexion: other things are an easily recognizable farrago fromCymbeline,—

‘Cytherea,How bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily,And whiter than the sheets!’

‘Cytherea,

How bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily,

And whiter than the sheets!’

fromVenus and Adonis,—

‘A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow;’‘Teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white;’

‘A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow;’

‘Teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white;’

fromLucrece,—

—‘the morning’s silver-melting dew;’

fromTwelfth Night,

—‘like the sweet soundThat breathes upon a bank of violets;’

—‘like the sweet sound

That breathes upon a bank of violets;’

and so forth. Prof. Gollancz suggests that ‘Cuthberte’ as the name of the author is a reminiscence from the ‘Cuddie’ of Spenser’sShepheard’s Calendar, and that the ‘good Arthure’ may also be some kind of Spenserian reference: but I suspect ‘Arthure’ here to be a mis-transcription (we have no autograph) for ‘authoure.’

II.Verses written by Brown and Keats after visiting Beauly Abbey(p. 295).—The text, of which there exist two separate transcripts, is as follows. I have printed in italics the lines which Keats, as he told Woodhouse, contributed to the joint work.

On Some Skulls in Beauly Abbey, near Inverness

I shed no tears;Deep thought or awful vision, I had noneBy thousand petty fancies I was crossed.Wordsworth.

I shed no tears;

Deep thought or awful vision, I had none

By thousand petty fancies I was crossed.

Wordsworth.

And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by.Shakspeare.

And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by.

Shakspeare.

1In silent barren Synod metWithin these roofless walls, where yetThe shafted arch and carved fretCling to the RuinThe Brethren’s Skulls mourn, dewy wet,Their Creed’s undoing.2The mitred ones of Nice and TrentWere not so tongue-tied,—no, they wentHot to their Councils, scarce contentWith OrthodoxyBut ye, poor tongueless things, were meantTo speak by proxy.3Your Chronicles no more existSince Knox, the RevolutionistDestroy’d the work of every fistThat scrawl’d black letterWell! I’m a CraniologistAnd may do better.4This skull-cap won the cowl from slothOr discontent, perhaps from bothAnd yet one day, against his oathHe tried escapingFor men, tho’ idle may be lothTo live on gaping.5A Toper this! he plied his glassMore strictly than he said the MassAnd lov’d to see a tempting lassCome to ConfessionLetting her absolution passO’er fresh transgression.6This crawl’d thro’ life in feeblenessBoasting he never knew excessCursing those crimes he scarce could guessOr feel but faintlyWith prayer that Heaven would cease to blessMen so unsaintly.7Here’s a true Churchman! he’d affectMuch charity and ne’r neglectTo pray for Mercy on th’ electBut thought no evilIn sending Heathen, Turk and ScotAll to the Devil!8Poor Skull! Thy fingers set ablaze,With silver saint in golden rays,The Holy Missal, thou didst craze‘Mid bead and spangleWhile others passed their idle daysIn coil and wrangle.9Long time this sconce a helmet wore,But sickness smites the conscience sore,He broke his sword and hither boreHis gear and plunderTook to the cowl—then rav’d and sworeAt his damn’d blunder!10This lily-coloured skull with allThe teeth complete, so white and smallBelonged to one whose early pallA lover shaded.He died ere Superstition’s gallHis heart invaded.11Ha! here is ‘undivulged crime!’Despair forbad his soul to climbBeyond this world, this mortal timeOf fever’d badnessUntil this Monkish PantomimeDazzled his madness!12A younger brother this! a manAspiring as a Tartar KhanBut, curb’d and baffl’d he beganThe trade of frighteningIt smack’d of power! and how he ranTo deal Heaven’s lightning!13This idiot-skull belonged to one,A buried miser’s only sonWho, penitent ere he’d begunTo taste of pleasureAnd hoping Heaven’s dread wrath to shunGave Hell his treasure.14Here is the forehead of an ApeA robber’s mask—and near the napeThat bone—fie on’t, bears just the shapeOf carnal passionAh! he was one for theft and rapeIn Monkish fashion!15This was the Porter!—he could singOr dance, or play—do anythingAnd what the Friars bade him bringThey ne’er were balked of;Matters not worth rememberingAnd seldom talk’d of.16Enough! why need I further pore?This corner holds at least a score,And yonder twice as many moreOf Reverend Brothers,’Tis the same story o’er and o’erThey’re like the others!

In silent barren Synod met

Within these roofless walls, where yet

The shafted arch and carved fret

Cling to the Ruin

The Brethren’s Skulls mourn, dewy wet,

Their Creed’s undoing.

The mitred ones of Nice and Trent

Were not so tongue-tied,—no, they went

Hot to their Councils, scarce content

With Orthodoxy

But ye, poor tongueless things, were meant

To speak by proxy.

Your Chronicles no more exist

Since Knox, the Revolutionist

Destroy’d the work of every fist

That scrawl’d black letter

Well! I’m a Craniologist

And may do better.

This skull-cap won the cowl from sloth

Or discontent, perhaps from both

And yet one day, against his oath

He tried escaping

For men, tho’ idle may be loth

To live on gaping.

A Toper this! he plied his glass

More strictly than he said the Mass

And lov’d to see a tempting lass

Come to Confession

Letting her absolution pass

O’er fresh transgression.

This crawl’d thro’ life in feebleness

Boasting he never knew excess

Cursing those crimes he scarce could guess

Or feel but faintly

With prayer that Heaven would cease to bless

Men so unsaintly.

Here’s a true Churchman! he’d affect

Much charity and ne’r neglect

To pray for Mercy on th’ elect

But thought no evil

In sending Heathen, Turk and Scot

All to the Devil!

Poor Skull! Thy fingers set ablaze,

With silver saint in golden rays,

The Holy Missal, thou didst craze

‘Mid bead and spangle

While others passed their idle days

In coil and wrangle.

Long time this sconce a helmet wore,

But sickness smites the conscience sore,

He broke his sword and hither bore

His gear and plunder

Took to the cowl—then rav’d and swore

At his damn’d blunder!

This lily-coloured skull with all

The teeth complete, so white and small

Belonged to one whose early pall

A lover shaded.

He died ere Superstition’s gall

His heart invaded.

Ha! here is ‘undivulged crime!’

Despair forbad his soul to climb

Beyond this world, this mortal time

Of fever’d badness

Until this Monkish Pantomime

Dazzled his madness!

A younger brother this! a man

Aspiring as a Tartar Khan

But, curb’d and baffl’d he began

The trade of frightening

It smack’d of power! and how he ran

To deal Heaven’s lightning!

This idiot-skull belonged to one,

A buried miser’s only son

Who, penitent ere he’d begun

To taste of pleasure

And hoping Heaven’s dread wrath to shun

Gave Hell his treasure.

Here is the forehead of an Ape

A robber’s mask—and near the nape

That bone—fie on’t, bears just the shape

Of carnal passion

Ah! he was one for theft and rape

In Monkish fashion!

This was the Porter!—he could sing

Or dance, or play—do anything

And what the Friars bade him bring

They ne’er were balked of;

Matters not worth remembering

And seldom talk’d of.

Enough! why need I further pore?

This corner holds at least a score,

And yonder twice as many more

Of Reverend Brothers,

’Tis the same story o’er and o’er

They’re like the others!

III.List of Books in Keats’s Library compiled by Richard Woodhouse.—This list, of great interest to all students of Keats, is in the possession of Mr J.P. Morgan, to whom I am much indebted for allowing it to be transcribed for my use. I give itverbatim, without attempting (though it would be an attractive bibliographical exercise) to identify particular editions.

Names of friends to whom Keats had either given or lent certain works.

INDEX

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