Born, in London 31 Oct. 1795. At school at Enfield, at irregular periods between 1801 and 1810. His mother removed to Edmonton, 1806. Apprenticed to surgeon at Edmonton, 1810. To London 1814. Studied medicine at St. Thomas’s and Guy’s Hospitals. Appointed Dresser at Guy’s, March 1816. Licentiate of Apothecaries’ Hall, 25 July 1816. Contrib. to “The Examiner,” 1816–17. Friendship with Leigh Hunt and Haydon begun about this time. Abandoned medical career, 1817. Visit to Oxford, Sept. to Oct. 1817. Contrib. poems to “The Champion,” 1817; wrote dramatic criticism for it, Dec. 1817 to Jan. 1818. At this period resided mainly with his brothers at Hampstead. Walking tour with Charles Armitage Brown in Northern England and Scotland, June to Aug. 1818. Engaged to Fanny Brawne, Dec. 1818. One brother married and went to America, June 1818; the other died, Dec. 1818. Lived at Shanklin and Winchester successively during early part of 1819; settled in Westminster, Oct. 1819. Contrib. “Ode to a Nightingale” to “Annals of the Fine Arts,” 1819; “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” to “The Indicator,” 1820. Consumption set in, Feb. 1820. Sailed with Joseph Severn to Italy, Sept. 1820; arrived at Naples in Oct.; at Rome in Nov. Died, in Rome, 23 Feb. 1821. Buried in Old Protestant Cemetery there. Works: “Poems,” 1817; “Endymion,” 1818; “Lamia; Isabella; The Eve of St. Agnes,” 1820. Posthumous: “Life, Letters and Literary Remains,” ed. by R. Monckton Milnes, 1848; “Letters to Fanny Brawne,” ed. by H. Buxton Forman, 1878; “Letters,” ed. by H. Buxton Forman, 1895. Collected Works: ed. by H. Buxton Forman (4 vols.), 1883. Life: by Lord Houghton, revised edn. 1867; by W. M. Rossetti, 1887; by Sidney Colvin, 1887.

Personal

  He is gone. He died with the most perfect ease—he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, about four, the approaches of death came on. “Severn—I—lift me up. I am dying—I shall die easy. Don’t be frightened: be firm, and thank God it has come.” I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sunk into death, so quiet that I still thought he slept. I cannot say more now. I am broken down by four nights’ watching, no sleep since, and my poor Keats gone. Three days since the body was opened: the lungs were completely gone. The doctors could not imagine how he had lived these two months. I followed his dear body to the grave on Monday [February 26th], with many English…. The letters I placed in the coffin with my own hand.

  The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I have dedicated these unworthy verses was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful; and where canker-worms abound, what wonder if its young flower was blighted in the bud? The savage criticism on his “Endymion” which appeared in the “Quarterly Review” produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in a rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued; and the succeeding acknowledgments from more candid critics of the true greatness of his powers were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted.

	But now thy youngest, dearest one, has perish’d,
	The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew,
	Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherish’d,
	And fed with true love tears instead of dew;
	Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
	Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and last,
	The bloom whose petals, nipt before they blew
	Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste;
	The broken lily lies—the storm is overpast.

  I have just this moment heard of poor Keats’s death. We are unlucky in our butts. It would appear very cruel if any jokes now appeared on the pharmacopolical part of “Endymion.” And indeed when I heard that the poor devil was in a consumption, I was something sorry that I annoyed him at all of late. If I were able I should write a dirge over him, as a kind of amende honorable; but my Muse, I am afraid, does not run in the mournful. If you print my hymn strike out the hemistich concerning him, substituting anything you like—such as “Pale is the cheek of Leigh Hunt, the tea-drinking king of the Cockneys.” I hope I am in time, for it would annoy me if it appeared that we were attacking any one who had it not in his power to reply—particularly an old enemy after his death.

  Keats was a victim to personal abuse and the want of power to bear it…. He began life full of hope…. He expected the world to bow at once to his talents, as his friends had done…. Goaded by ridicule, he distrusted himself and flew to dissipation. For six weeks he was hardly ever sober…. He told me that he once covered his tongue and throat, as far as he could reach, with Cayenne pepper, in order to enjoy “the delicious coolness of claret in all its glory.”… He had great enthusiasm for me, and so had I for him, but he grew angry latterly because I shook my head at his proceedings. I told him, I begged of him to bend his genius to some definite object. I remonstrated on his absurd dissipation, but to no purpose. The last time I saw him was at Hampstead, lying on his back in a white bed, helpless, irritable, and hectic. He had a book, and enraged at his own feebleness, seemed as if he were going out of the world with a contempt for this, and no hopes of a better. He muttered as I stood by him that if he did not recover, he would “cut his throat.” I tried to calm him, but to no purpose…. Poor dear Keats!

	John Keats, who was kill’d off by one critique,
	Just as he really promised something great,
	If not intelligible, without Greek
	Contrived to talk about the gods of late
	Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
	Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate;
	’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
	Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.

  It was nevertheless on the same day, sitting on the bench in Well Walk at Hempstead, nearest the heath (the one against the wall), that he told me, with unaccustomed tears in his eyes, that his “heart was breaking.”

  One night at eleven o’clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible; it therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, “What is the matter? you are fevered.” “Yes, yes,” he answered, “I was on the outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled—but now I don’t feel it. Fevered!—of course, a little.” He mildly and instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my request that he should go to bed. I followed with the best immediate remedy in my power. I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, an I heard him say, “That is blood from my mouth.” I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet. “Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.” After regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said, “I know the colour of that blood—it is arterial blood—I cannot be deceived in that colour—that drop of blood is my death-warrant—I must die.”

	And Keats the real
	Adonis with the hymeneal
	Fresh vernal buds half sunk between
	His youthful curls, kissed straight and sheen
	In his Rome-grave, by Venus queen.

  Jean Paul says that some souls fall from heaven like flowers, but that ere the pure and fresh buds have had time to open, they are trodden in the dust of the earth, and lie soiled and crushed beneath the foul tread of some brutal hoof. It was the fate of John Keats to illustrate, in some respects, this truth. He experienced more than the ordinary share of the world’s hardness of heart, and had less than the ordinary share of sturdy strength to bear it. In him, an imagination and fancy of much natural capacity, were lodged in a frame too weak to sustain the shocks of life, and too sensitive for the development of high and sturdy thought. The great defect of his nature was a lack of force.

  He had a soul of noble integrity, and his common sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed his character was, in the best sense, manly…. With his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew than was John Keats. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one particle of dulness, or insipidity, or want of spirit…. In his letters he talks of suspecting everybody. It appeared not in his conversation. On the contrary, he was uniformly the apologist for poor frail human nature, and allowed for people’s faults more than any man I every knew, and especially for the faults of his friends. But if any act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he rose into sudden and animated indignation.

  Keats, when he died, had just completed his four-and-twentieth year. He was under the middle height; and his lower limbs were small in comparison with the upper, but neat and well-turned. His shoulders were very broad for his size; he had a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up; and eager power, checked and made patient by ill health. Every feature was at once strongly cut, and delicately alive. If there was any faulty expression it was in the mouth, which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. The face was rather long than otherwise; the upper lip projected a little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing; large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble action, or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled. In this there was ill health as well as imagination, for he did not like these betrayals of emotion; and he had great personal as well as moral courage. He once chastised a butcher, who had been insolent, by a regular stand-up fight. His hair, of a brown color, was fine, and hung in natural ringlets. The head 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. Keats was sensible of the disproportion above noticed, between his upper and lower extremities; and he would look at his hand, which was faded and swollen in the veins, and say that it was the hand of a man of fifty. He was a seven months’ child.

  He had that fine compactness of person which we regard as the promise of longevity, and no mind was ever more exultant in youthful feeling. I cannot summon a sufficient reason why in one short year he should have been thus cut off, “with all his imperfections on his head.”… Those bright falcon eyes, which I had known only in joyous intercourse, while revelling in books and Nature, or while he was reciting his own poetry, now beamed an unearthly brightness and a penetrating steadfastness that could not be looked at. It was not the fear of death,—on the contrary, he earnestly wished to die,—but it was the fear of lingering on and on, that now distressed him; and this was wholly on my account…. There were few Englishmen at Rome who knew Keats’s works, and I could scarcely persuade any one to make the effort to read them, such was the prejudice against him as a poet; but when his gravestone was placed, with his own expressive line, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” then a host started up, not of admirers, but of scoffers, and a silly jest was often repeated in my hearing, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water, and his works in milk and water;” and this I was condemned to hear for years repeated, as though it had been a pasquinade.

  A lady, whose feminine acuteness of perception is only equalled by the vigour of her understanding, thus describes Keats as he appeared about this time (1818) at Hazlitt’s lectures:—“His eyes were large and blue, his hair auburn; he wore it divided down the centre, and it fell in rich masses on each side his face; his mouth was full, and less intellectual than his other features. His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness; it had the expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight. The shape of his face had not the squareness of a man’s, but more like some women’s faces I have seen—it was so wide over the forehead and so small at the chin. He seemed in perfect health, and with life offering all things that were precious to him.”

	The young Endymion sleeps Endymion’s sleep;
	The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told!
	The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold
	To the red rising moon, and loud and deep
	The nightingale is singing from the steep;
	It is midsummer, but the air is cold;
	Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold
	A shepherd’s pipe lies shattered near his sheep.

  In the early part of his school-life John gave no extraordinary indications of intellectual character; but it was remembered of him afterwards, that there was ever present a determined and steady spirit in all his undertakings: I never knew it misdirected in his required pursuit of study. He was a most orderly scholar…. Not the less beloved was he for having a highly pugnacious spirit, which, when roused, was one of the most picturesque exhibitions—off the stage—I ever saw. One of the transports of that marvellous actor, Edmund Kean—whom, by the way, he idolized—was its nearest resemblance; and the two were not very dissimilar in face and figure…. His passion at times was almost ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, laughing when John was in one of his moods, and was endeavoring to beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon the most trying occasions. He was not merely the “favorite of all,” like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him…. The character and expression of Keats’s features would arrest even the casual passenger in the street…. Reader, alter in your copy of the “Life of Keats,” vol. i., page 103, “eyes” light hazel, “hair” lightish brown and wavy.

  I confess there is something in the personality of Keats, some sort of semi-physical aroma wafted from it, which I cannot endure; and I fear these letters will be very redolent of this. What a curious thing is that undefinable flavour of personality—suggestion of physical quality, odour of the man in his unconscious and spontaneous self-determination, which attracts or repels so powerfully, and is the very root of love or dislike.

	So when I saw beside a Roman portal
	“In this house died John Keats”—for tears that sprung
	I could no further read. O bard immortal!
	Not for thy fame’s sake—but so young, so young;
	Such beauty vanished, spilled such heavenly wine,
	All quenched that power of deathless song divine!

  From this point (1819) forwards nothing but misery remains to be recorded of John Keats. The narrative becomes depressing to write and depressing to read. The sensation is like that of being confined in a dark vault at noonday. One knows indeed, that the sun of the poet’s genius is blazing outside, and that, on emerging from the vault, we shall be restored to light and warmth; but the atmosphere within is not the less dark and laden, nor the shades the less murky. In tedious wretchedness, racked and dogged with the pang of body and soul, exasperated and protesting, raging now, and now ground down into patience and acceptance, Keats gropes through the valley of the shadow of death.

	Ah, grave of graves! what pathos round it clings!
	To this sad bourne from coming age to age,
	While the tired earth endures its sufferings,
	Will wandering feet make worship’s pilgrimage!
	Thou, hoary Rome,
	In bosoming him hast higher glory won,
	Although for Pantheon
	Thou gav’st him naught, save that wherein the sun
	Beams morn by morn, an everlasting dome.

	The new Endymion thou, enamored so
	Of thy supernal themes, some goddess, proud
	And jealous, doomed thee to a deathless swoon,
	As he on myrtled Latmos long ago
	Wast doomed. I will not think thee in thy shroud,
	But sleeping quietly and waking soon.

  Unluckily Keats died, and his death was absurdly attributed to a pair of reviews which may have irritated him, and which were coarse and cruel even for that period of robust reviewing. But Keats knew very well the value of these critiques, and probably resented them not much more than a foot-ball player resents being “hacked” in the course of the game. He was very willing to see Byron and Wordsworth “trounced,” and as ready as Peter Corcoran in his friend’s poem to “take punishment” himself. The character of Keats was plucky, and his estimate of his own genius was perfectly sane. He knew that he was in the thick of a literary “scrimmage,” and he was not the man to flinch or to repine at the consequences.

  Although the legend as to the cause of the premature death of Keats has thus to be dismissed as an impassioned hallucination of Shelley’s, perpetuated by Byron’s epigrammatic version of it, those two articles on Keats’s “Endymion” on its first appearance,—the Blackwood article of August, 1818, and the Quarterly article of September, 1818,—retain an infamous kind of interest in English literary history, and cannot be allowed to be forgotten. The recollection of them suggests various reflections. They exemplify for us, in the first place, the horrible iniquity, the utter detestability, of the practice of carrying the rancour of party politics into the business of literary criticism. Almost avowedly, it was because young Keats was a friend of Leigh Hunt, and was supposed to share the political opinions of Hunt and a few other Londoners of prominent political notoriety at the time, that the two periodicals in question made their simultaneous onslaught on “Endymion.” They had vowed exterminating war against Hunt and his political associates, and were lying in wait for every new appearance in the field of a straggler from that camp; and what did it matter to them who emerged next, or in what guise? Keats had emerged,—in reality no party politician at all, but in very fibre of his nature a poet and that only,—Keats had emerged and they bludgeoned him!

  Of no other English poet has the popular idea been so wide of the mark; about no other English poet have so many clouds of misunderstanding gathered and hung to the lasting concealment of the man…. Above all English poets Keats has been the victim of his feeble brethren, who mitigate their own sense of baffled ambition with the remembrance of his woes at the hands of the Philistine reviewers, and of those sentimental hangers on at the court of poetry who mistake the king’s robe for the king’s majesty, and whose solemn genuflections are the very mockery of homage. Instead of the real Keats, virile, manly, courageous, well-poised, and full of noble ambitions, the world has fashioned for itself a weakly sentimental, sensuous maker of over-ripe verse, without large ideas of his art, and sensitive to the very death under the lash of a stupid and vulgar criticism. It was no small offence against the memory of this peculiarly rich and sane nature that these misconceptions were permitted to become traditions. Although Lord Houghton, Mr. Arnold, Professor Colvin, and other students and critics of Keats have done much to rescue his fame from the hands of those who have accomplished what blundering critics were unable to effect, there is still much to be done before the world, which takes its impressions, rapidly and at second hand, is set right concerning one of the most promising men of the age.

  Let us suppose he does not sleep, but wakes—wakes, and harkens to what sounds soever of earthly detraction or praise may reach him, throned among his fellow “inheritors of unfulfilled renown,” whose place is “far in the unapparent.” For he died full of thwarted aims and balked ambitions, his life a splendid fragment like his own “Hyperion;” and perhaps it is not wildly fanciful to think of the eager spirit of Adonais as taking some posthumous interest in the progress and consummation of his own terrestrial fame. He will have seen that fame gradually disentangled from minor accidents and incidents which at first did much to perplex it and hinder it from having free way; disentangled from “Cockney Schools,” real or imaginary; from irrelevant prejudices arising out of political and personal considerations; from warring theories of literary art. He will have seen his influence operating as a potent factor in the artistic evolution of the most eminent of present day poets. He will have seen the main and essential facts of his life laid before the world by a distinguished and genial dilettante, whose biography of him was not indeed a work of high talent, but was inspired by sympathy and directed by good taste. In a word, he will have seen almost everything come to pass which, living, he could have hoped for. Unfortunately, however, this is not all; would it were! He will have seen Haydon’s “Journal” go forth to posterity, perpetuating a slander which went unrebuked and undenied till yesterday. He will have seen the passionate letters to his somewhat mundane goddess catalogued in sale lists, and knocked down under the auctioneer’s hammer. He will have seen the effigy of his warm and palpitating heart held up to the stare of a world that with gaping mouth and craning neck presses forward into every sanctuary where there is a secret to be ravished and a veil to be rent in twain. He will have seen the yelping pack of scandal, never so joyous as when they can scent some fallen greatness, or run down any noble quarry. He will have seen the yet uncleaner creature, the thing of teeth and claws, that lives by scratching up the soil from over the bones of the buried and laying corruption bare. He will have seen the injudicious and uncritical worshipper. He will have seen the painstaking modern editor.

Fanny Brawne

  Mr. Severn tells me that Mrs. and Miss Brawne felt the keenest regret that they had not followed him and Keats to Rome; and, indeed, I understand that there was some talk of a marriage taking place before the departure. Even twenty years after Keats’s death, when Mr. Severn returned to England, the bereaved lady was unable to receive him on account of the extreme painfulness of the associations connected with him.

  Her ways and presence at first irritated and after a little while completely fascinated him. From his first sarcastic account of her written to his brother, as well as from Severn’s mention of her likeness to the draped figure in Titian’s picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length silhouette of her that has been preserved, it is not difficult to realize her aspect and presence. A brisk and blooming very young beauty, of the far from uncommon English hawk blonde type, with aquiline nose and retreating forehead, sharp-cut nostril and gray-blue eye, a slight, shapely figure, rather short than tall, a taking smile, and good hair, carriage and complexion—such was Fanny Brawne externally, but of her character we have little means of judging. She was certainly high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident; as certainly, though kind and constant to her lover, in spite of prospects that before long grew dark, she did not fully realise what manner of man he was. Both his men and women friends, without thinking unkindly of her, were apparently of one opinion in holding her no mate for him either in heart or mind, and in regarding the attachment as unlucky.

  Though she was inexperienced and self-confident, she was constant and kind to her lover in spite of prospects which soon grew very dark. She never, however, fully realized what manner of man he was, though some of the things said by his friends, who did not approve of her or of his frenzy of passion for her, were most unkind and entirely unjustified. As I have been guilty in previous writings of repeating at least one such unkind remark, I most cheerfully acknowledge that better evidence has convinced me that she loved Keats dearly, and when he was dead tenderly cherished his memory.

  Fanny Brawne was a poor creature upon which to stake love and life, and Keats knew this to be true in the lucid intervals of his infatuation…. These terrible love-letters. Each is a drop of life-blood, and their leap from the anguished heart actually appalls us. No eyes but hers should ever have rested upon the pages. It was nothing short of vivisection for her to turn them over to public examination and judgment. And this was done, in effect, by her preservation of them, aware as she was, what use would be made of them when they escaped from her keeping. We cannot, and we do not care to, forgive her.

Love Letters

  The thirty-seven letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne I have read with great pain inasmuch as from them I now understand for the first time the sufferings and death of the Poet.—He did not confide to me this serious passion and it now seems to me but for this cause he might have lived many years—I can now understand his want of courage to speak as it was consuming him in body and mind…. Perhaps I view the work more painfully as I was not aware of such torment existing in the Poet’s mind and as I saw him struck down from health and vigour to sickness and death you will not wonder at my emotion now that I find the fatal cause.

  The character of the letters is such as obtains in similar productions, only it is intensified a thousand-fold. I know of nothing comparable with them in English literature—know nothing that is so unselfish, so longing, so adoring—nothing that is so mad, so pitiful, so utterly weak and wretched. John Keats was a great genius, but he had not one particle of common-sense—for himself. Few men of genius ever do have; it is only the Master Shakespeare and the Masters Milton and Wordsworth, who are able to cope with the world. Why, a boy might have told Keats that the way to woo and win a woman was not to bare his heart before her, as he did before Fanny Brawne, and not to let her know, as he did, that he was her captive. If he had had the least glimmer of common-sense, he never would have surrendered at discretion…. Miss Fanny Brawne made John Keats ridiculous in the eyes of his friends in his lifetime, and now she (through her representatives) makes him ridiculous in the eyes of the world. She (and they) have had fifty-seven years in which to think about it—she forty-four years as maid and wife; they thirteen years as her children. Why did she keep his letters all those years? What could she keep them for but to minister to her vanity, and to remind her that once upon a time a crazy young English poet was desperately in love with her, was her captive and her slave? What else could she keep them for? She revered the memory of Keats, did she? This is how she revered it!

	What! shall thy heart’s rich blood, poured out so deep,
	Be made a merchandise without redress,
	Nor any voice the world’s base deed confess
	Which prints and sells a poet’s love so cheap?
	My curse upon this prying, prurient age!
	And curst the eyes not closed in angry shame!
	For him whom English air and critic pen
	Twice baffled, ere his splendid, youthful gage
	Had measured half the heaven of love and fame,
	This shameless book has murdered once again!

  A man who writes love-letters in this strain is probably predestined, one may observe, to misfortune in his love-affairs; but that is nothing. The complete enervation of the writer is the real point for remark. We have the tone, or rather the entire want of tone, the abandonment of all reticence and all dignity, of the merely sensuous man, of the man who “is passion’s slave.” Nay, we have them in such wise that one is tempted to speak even as Blackwood or the Quarterly were in the old days wont to speak, one is tempted to say that Keats’s love-letter is the love-letter of a surgeon’s apprentice. It has in its relaxed self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up, without the training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our feelings, and upon the expression of them. It is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon’s apprentice which one might hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court. The sensuous man speaks in it, and the sensuous man of a badly bred and badly trained sort. That many who are themselves, also, badly bred and badly trained should enjoy it, and should even think it a beautiful and characteristic production of him whom they call their “lovely and beloved Keats,” does not make it better.

  While admitting that neither his love-letters nor the last piteous outcries of his wailing and shrieking agony would ever have been made public by merciful or respectful editors, we must also admit that, if they ought never to have been published, it is no less certain that they ought never to have been written; that a manful kind of man or even a manly sort of boy, in his love-making or in his suffering, will not howl and snivel after such a lamentable fashion.

  Keats seems to me, throughout his love-letters, unbalanced, wayward, and profuse; he exhibits great fervour of temperament, and abundant caressingness, without the inner depth of tenderness and regard. He lives in his mistress, for himself. As the letters pass further and further into the harsh black shadows of disease, he abandons all self-restraint, and lashes out right and left; he wills that his friends should have been disloyal to him, as the motive of his being disloyal to them. To make allowance for all this is possible, and even necessary; but to treat it as not needing that any allowance should be made would seem to me futile.

Endymion, 1818

  Knowing within myself the manner in which this Poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public. What manner I mean, will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished.

  Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticise. On the present occasion we shall anticipate the author’s complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his work. Not that we have been wanting in our duty—far from it—indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it; but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance, we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books of which this Poetic Romance consists. We should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation—namely, that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we have so painfully toiled, than we are with that of the three which we have not looked into. It is not that Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody),—it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius:—he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney poetry; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language…. Of the story we have been able to make out but little; it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion; but of this, as the scope of the work has altogether escaped us, we cannot speak with any degree of certainty; and must therefore content ourselves with giving some instances of its diction and versification.

  Warmly as I admire the poetry of Keats, I can imagine that an intelligent man might read the “Endymion” with care, yet think that it was not genuine poetry; that it showed a sheer misuse of abundant fancy and rhythmical power. For its range is narrow; like the artificial comedy it has a world of its own, and this world is more harmonious within itself, made up of light rich materials; but it is not deep enough or wide enough to furnish satisfaction for the general heart and mind.

  As reasonably, and as hopefully in regard to human sympathies, might a man undertake an epic poem upon the loves of two butterflies. The modes of existence in the two parties to the love-fable of the “Endymion,” their relations to each other and to us, their prospects finally, and the obstacles to the instant realisation of these prospects,—all these things are more vague and incomprehensible than the reveries of an oyster. Still, the unhappy subject, and its unhappy expansion, must be laid to the account of childish years and childish inexperience.

  Let any man of literary accomplishment, though without the habit of writing poetry, or even much taste for reading it, open “Endymion” at random, (to say nothing of the later and more perfect poems), and examine the characteristics of the page before him, and I shall be surprised if he does not feel that the whole range of literature hardly supplies a parallel phenomenon. As a psychological curiosity, perhaps Chatterton is more wonderful; but in him the immediate ability displayed is rather the full comprehension of and identification with the old model, than the effluence of creative genius. In Keats, on the contrary, the originality in the use of his scanty materials, his expansion of them to the proportions of his own imagination, and above all, his field of diction and expression extending so far beyond his knowledge of literature, is quite inexplicable by any of the ordinary processes of mental education. If his classical learning had been deeper, his seizure of the full spirit of Grecian beauty would have been less surprising; if his English reading had been more extensive, his inexhaustible vocabulary of picturesque and mimetic words could more easily be accounted for; but here is a surgeon’s apprentice, with the ordinary culture of the middle classes, rivalling in æsthetic perceptions of antique life and thought the most careful scholars of his time and country, and reproducing these impressions in a phraseology as complete and unconventional as if he had mastered the whole history and the frequent variations of the English tongue, and elaborated a mode of utterance commensurate with his vast ideas.

  “Endymion” bears us along in a whirl of imaginative creation; and the beauties with which it is lavishly strewn scarcely leave time for the thought that the construction wants perspicacity—a thought which will intrude at last.

  Luscious and luxuriant in intention—for I cannot suppose that Keats aimed at being exalted or ideal—the poem becomes mawkish in result: he said so himself, and we need not hesitate to repeat it. Affectations, conceits, and puerilities, abound, both in thought and in diction: however willing to be pleased, the reader is often disconcerted and provoked. The number of clever things said cleverly, of rich things richly, and of fine things finely, is however abundant and superabundant; and no one who peruses “Endymion” with a true sense for poetic endowment and handling can fail to see that it is peculiarly the work of a poet.

  “Endymion” discloses to the reader of to-day the strength and the weakness which Keats saw in it before the garish light of criticism fell upon it. It has the freshness of feeling and perception, the glow of imagination, the profusion and riot of imagery, the occasional overripeness, the occasional perfection of expression, the lack of sustained and cumulative power, which one would expect from so immature a mind: as a finished product it has very great blemishes; as the work of a young poet it overflows with promise. One wonders not so much at the brutality of the critics as at their stupidity.

Lamia, 1820

  Perhaps there is no poet, living or dead, except Shakspeare, who can pretend to anything like the felicity of epithet which characterizes Keats. One word or phrase is the essence of a whole description or sentiment. It is like the dull substance of the earth struck through by electric fires, and converted into veins of gold and diamonds. For a piece of perfect and inventive description, that passage from “Lamia,” where, Lycius gone to bid the guests to his wedding, Lamia, in her uneasy excitement, employs herself and her demon powers in adorning her palace, is unrivaled.

  Is, on the whole, the finest of his longer poems.

  No one can deny the truth of Keats’s own criticism on “Lamia” when he says, “I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way—give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation.” There is, perhaps, nothing in all his writing so vivid, or that so burns itself in upon the mind, as the picture of the serpent-woman awaiting the touch of Hermes to transform her, followed by the agonized process of the transformation itself…. This thrilling vividness of narration in particular points, and the fine melodious vigour of much of the verse, have caused some students to give “Lamia” almost the first, if not the first, place among Keats’s narrative poems. But surely for this it is in some parts too feverish and in others too unequal. It contains descriptions not entirely successful, as, for instance, that of the palace reared by Lamia’s magic, which will not bear comparison with other and earlier dream-palaces of the poet’s building.

The Eve of St. Agnes, 1820

  To the description before us, it would be a great injury either to add or diminish. It falls at once gorgeously and delicately upon us, like the colours of the painted glass. Nor is Madeline hurt by all her encrusting jewelry and rustling silks. Her gentle, unsophisticated heart is in the midst, and turns them into so many ministrants to her loveliness.

  The glory and charm of the poem is in the description of the fair maiden’s antique chamber, and of all that passes in that sweet and angel-guarded sanctuary: every part of which is touched with colours at once rich and delicate—and the whole chastened and harmonised, in the midst of its gorgeous distinctness, by a pervading grace and purity, that indicate not less clearly the exaltation than the refinement of the author’s fancy.

  The loose versification of many of his works has induced belief that he lacked energy proportionate to the vividness of his conceptions; but the opinion is wrong. Many of his sonnets possess a Miltonic vigour, and his “Eve of St. Agnes,” is as highly finished, almost, as the masterpieces of Pope.

  What a gorgeous gallery of poetic pictures that “Eve of St. Agnes” forms, and yet how slim the tissue that lies below! How thin the canvas on which the whole is painted! For vigorous sense, one deep-thoughted couplet of Dryden would make the whole kick the beam. And yet what can be more exquisite in their way than those pictures of the young poet! Even the old worn-out gods of Grecian mythology become life-like when he draws them. They revive in his hands, and become vital once more.

  “The Eve of St. Agnes,” aiming at no doubtful success, succeeds in evading all casual difficulty in the line of narrative; with no shadow of pretence to such interest as may be derived from stress of incident or depth of sentiment, it stands out among all other famous poems as a perfect and unsurpassable study in pure color and clear melody—a study in which the figure of Madeline brings back upon the mind’s eye, if not as moonlight recalls a sense of sunshine, the nuptial picture of Marlow’s Hero, and the sleeping presence of Shakespeare’s Imogen. Besides this poem should always be placed the less famous but not less precious “Eve of St. Mark,” a fragment unexcelled for the simple perfection of its perfect simplicity, exquisite alike in suggestion and in accomplishment.

  “The Eve of St. Agnes” is par excellence the poem of “glamour.” It means next to nothing; but means that little so exquisitely, and in so rapt a mood of musing or of trance, that it tells as an intellectual no less than a sensuous restorative. Perhaps no reader has ever risen from “The Eve of St. Agnes” dissatisfied. After a while he can question the grounds of his satisfaction, and may possibly find them wanting; but he has only to peruse the poem again, and the same spell is upon him.

  Pure and passionate, surprising by its fine excess of color and melody, sensuous in every line, yet free from the slightest taint of sensuality, is unforgettable and unsurpassable as the dream of first love.

Hyperion, 1820

  His fragment of “Hyperion” seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Æschylus.

  Keats’s new volume has arrived to us, and the fragment called “Hyperion” promises for him that he is destined to become one of the first writers of the age.

  Though there are passages of some force and grandeur, it is sufficiently obvious, from the specimen before us, that the subject is too far removed from all the sources of human interest, to be successfully treated by any modern author. Mr. Keats has unquestionably a very beautiful imagination, a perfect ear for harmony, and a great familiarity with the finest diction of English poetry; but he must learn not to misuse or misapply these advantages; and neither to waste the good gifts of nature and study on intractable themes, nor to luxuriate too recklessly on such as are more suitable.

  The very midsummer madness of affectation, of false vapoury sentiment, and of fantastic effeminacy, seemed to me combined in Keats’s “Endymion,” when I first saw it, near the close of 1821. The Italian poet Marino had been reputed the greatest master of gossamery affectation in Europe. But his conceits showed the palest of rosy blushes by the side of Keats’s bloody crimson. Naturally I was discouraged at the moment from looking further. But about a week later, by pure accident, my eye fell upon his “Hyperion.” The first feeling was that of incredulity that the two poems could, under change of circumstances or lapse of time, have emanated from the same mind. The “Endymion” trespasses so strongly against good sense and just feeling that, in order to secure its pardon, we need the whole weight of the imperishable “Hyperion;” which, as Mr. Gilfillan truly says, “is the greatest of poetical torsos.” The first belongs essentially to the vilest collection of waxwork filigree or gilt gingerbread, the other presents the majesty, the austere beauty, and the simplicity of a Grecian temple enriched with Grecian sculpture.

  One of the great disappointments in Literature is the coming upon the stars which show that the “Hyperion” of Keats is a fragment.

  As a story, “Endymion” deserves all that its worst enemies ever said of it. “Hyperion” shows a remarkable advance, but it is well that Keats left it a fragment, for it is plain that, with his effeminate notion of Apollo, he could never have invented any kind of action which would have interested the reader in learning how the old Titan Sun-God was turned out of his kingdom.

  But though Keats sees the Greek world from afar, he sees it truly. The Greek touch is not his, but in his own rich and decorated English way he writes with a sure insight into the vital meaning of Greek ideas…. With a few slips and inequalities, and one or two instances of verbal incorrectness, “Hyperion,” as far as it was written, is indeed one of the grandest poems in our language, and in its grandeur seems one of the easiest and most spontaneous.

  The opening promises well; we are conscious at once of a new musical blank verse, a music both sweet and strong, alive with imagination and tenderness. There and throughout the poem are passages in which Keats, without losing his own individuality, is as good as Milton, where Milton is as good as Virgil; and such passages rank with the best things that Keats ever did; but in other places he seems a little overshadowed by Milton, while definite passages of the “Paradise Lost” are recalled, and in some places the imitation seems frigid.

Odes

  I have come to that pass of admiration for him now, that I dare not read him, so discontented he makes me with my own work; but others must not leave unread, in considering the influence of trees upon the human soul, that marvellous ode to Psyche.

  If one may say a word obiter, out of the fulness of one’s heart—I am often inclined to think for all-in-all,—that is, for thoughts most mortally compacted, for words which come forth, each trembling and giving off light like a morning-star, and for the pure beauty of the spirit and strength and height of the spirit,—which, I say, for all-in-all, I am often inclined to think [“Ode on Melancholy”], reaches the highest height yet touched in the lyric line.

  The “Ode to a Nightingale,” one of the finest masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages.

  I make bold to name one of our shorter English lyrics that still seems to me, as it seemed to me ten years ago, the nearest to perfection, the one I would surrender last of all. What should this be save the “Ode to a Nightingale,” so faultless in its varied unity and in the cardinal qualities of language, melody, and tone? A strain that has a dying fall; music wedded to ethereal passion, to the yearning that floods all nature.

  The “Ode on a Grecian Urn” wonderfully enshrines the poet’s kinship with Greece, and with the spirit of her worship. There is all the Greek measure and moderation about it also; a calm and classic grace, with severe loveliness of outline. In form it is perfect. There is an exquisiteness of expression—not that which is often mistakenly so designated, but a translucence, as of silver air, or limpid water, that both reveals and glorifies all fair plants, or pebbles, or bathing lights.

  In the five odes there is naturally some diversity in the degrees of excellence…. Considered intellectually, we might form a kind of symphony out of them, and arrange it thus—1, “Grecian Urn;” 2, “Psyche;” 3, “Autumn;” 4, “Melancholy;” 5, “Nightingale;” and, if Keats had left us nothing else, we should have in this symphony an almost complete picture of his poetic mind, only omitting, or representing deficiently, that more instinctive sort of enjoyment which partakes of gaiety. Viewing all these wondrous odes together, the predominant quality which we trace in them is an extreme susceptibility to delight, close-linked with after thought—pleasure with pang—or that poignant sense of ultimates, a sense delicious and harrowing, which clasps the joy in sadness, and feasts upon the very sadness in joy. The emotion throughout is the emotion of beauty. Beauty intensely perceived, intensely loved, questioned of its secret like the sphinx, imperishable and eternal, yet haunted (as it were) by its own ghost, the mortal throes of the human soul. As no poet had more capacity for enjoyment than Keats, so none exceeded him in the luxury of sorrow. Few also exceeded him in the sense of the one moment irretrievable; but this conception in its fulness belongs to the region of morals yet more than of sensation, and the spirit of Keats was almost an alien in the region of morals.

	When the young poet wrought so unaware
	From purest Parian, washed by Grecian seas,
	And stained to amber softness by the breeze
	Of Attic shores, his Urn, antiquely fair,—
	And brimmed it at the sacred fountain, where
	The draughts he drew were sweet as Castaly’s,—
	Had he foreseen what souls would there appease
	Their purer thirsts, he had not known despair!
	About it long processions move and wind,
	Held by its grace,—a chalice choicely fit
	For Truth’s and Beauty’s perfect interfuse,
	Whose effluence the exhaling years shall find
	Unwasted: for the poet’s name is writ
	(Firmer than marble) in Olympian dews!

Sonnets

  “Nature’s Eremite:” like a solitary thing in Nature.—This beautiful Sonnet was the last word of a poet deserving the title “marvellous boy” in a much higher sense than Chatterton. If the fulfilment may ever safely be prophesied from the promise, England appears to have lost in Keats one whose gifts in Poetry have rarely been surpassed.

  Do you remember that last sonnet? Let us repeat it solemnly, and let the words wander down with the waters of the river to the sea…. How the star-sheen on the tremulous tide, and that white death-like “mask,” haunt the imagination! Had the poet, who felt the grass grow over him ere he was five-and-twenty, been crowned with a hundred summers, could he have done anything more consummate? I doubt it.

  Though Keats has never been and probably never will be a really popular poet, his influence on other poets and on poetic temperaments generally has been quite incalculable. Some of his sonnets are remarkable for their power and beauty, while others are indifferent and a few are poor. With all his love for the beauty of isolated poetic lines—music condensed into an epigram more concise than the Greeks ever uttered—as, for example, his own splendid verse,

There is a budding morrow in mid-night—

and with all that sense of verbal melody which he manifested so remarkably in his odes, it is strange that in his sonnets he should so often be at fault in true harmony.

  The sonnet on Chapman’s Homer stands alone in its perfection among boyish productions and high up among the great sonnets of the language.

  As well rounded and compact a poetic unit [“Chapman’s Homer”] as our literature can show.

General

  Sir,—We regret that your brother ever requested us to publish this book, or that our opinion of its talent should have led us to acquiesce in undertaking it. We are, however, much obliged to you for relieving us from the unpleasant necessity of declining any further connexion with it, which we must have done, as we think the curiosity is satisfied, and the sale has dropped. By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offered to take the book back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it. In fact, it was only on Saturday last that we were under the mortification of having our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman, who told us he considered it “no better than a take in.” These are unpleasant imputations for any one in business to labour under, but we should have borne them and concealed their existence from you had not the style of your note shewn us that such delicacy would be quite thrown away. We shall take means without delay for ascertaining the number of copies on hand, and you shall be informed accordingly. Your most, &c.

  To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr. John Keats. This young man appears to have received from nature talents of an excellent, perhaps even of a superior order—talents which, devoted to the purposes of any useful profession, must have rendered him a respectable if not an eminent citizen. His friends, we understand, destined him to the career of medicine, and he was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. But all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady to which we have alluded…. We venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture 50l. on anything he can write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to “plasters, pills, and ointment-boxes,” &c. But, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.

  His feelings are full, earnest and original, as those of the olden writers were and are; they are made for all time, not for the drawing-room and the moment. Mr. Keats always speaks of, and describes nature, with an awe and a humility, but with a deep and almost breathless affection.—He knows that Nature is better and older than he is, and he does not put himself on an equality with her. You do not see him, when you see her. The moon and the mountainous foliage of the woods, and the azure sky, and the ruined and magic temple; the rock, the desert, and the sea; the leaf of the forest, and the embossed foam off the most living ocean, are the spirits of his poetry; but he does not bring them in his own hand, or obtrude his person before you, when you are looking at them…. In the structure of his verse, and the sinewy quality of his thoughts, Mr. Keats greatly resembles old Chapman, the nervous translator of Homer. His mind has “thews and limbs like to its ancestors.” Mr. Gifford, who knows something of the old dramatists, ought to have paused before he sanctioned the abuse of a spirit kindred with them. If he could not feel, he ought to know better.

  No more Keats, I entreat:—flay him alive;—if some of you don’t, I must skin him myself. There is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the manikin.

  Mr. Keats, we understand, is still a very young man; and his whole works, indeed, bear evidence enough of the fact. They are full of extravagance and irregularity, rash attempts at originality, interminable wanderings, and excessive obscurity. They manifestly require, therefore, all the indulgence that can be claimed for a first attempt:—But we think it no less plain that they deserve it: For they are flushed all over with the rich lights of fancy; and so coloured and bestrewn with the flowers of poetry, that even while perplexed and bewildered in their labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the intoxication of their sweetness, or to shut our hearts to the enchantments they so lavishly present.

	… till the Future dares
	Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
	An echo and a light unto eternity!…
	He is made one with Nature: there is heard
	His voice in all her music, from the moan
	Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird;
	He is a presence to be felt and known
	In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
	Spreading itself where’er that Power may move
	Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
	Which wields the world with never wearied love,
	Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above….
	… burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
	The soul of Adonais, like a star,
	Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

  Mr. Keats is also dead. He gave the greatest promise of genius of any poet of his day. He displayed extreme tenderness, beauty, originality and delicacy of fancy; all he wanted was manly strength and fortitude to reject the temptations of singularity in sentiment and expression. Some of his shorter and later pieces are, however, as free from faults as they are full of beauties.

	Thy clear, strong tones will oft bring sudden bloom
	Of hope secure, to him who lonely cries,
	Wrestling with the young poet’s agonies,
	Neglect and scorn which seem a certain doom:
	Yes! the few words which, like great thunder-drops,
	Thy large heart down to earth shook doubtfully,
	Thrilled by the inward lightening of its might,
	Serene and pure, like gushing joy of light,
	Shall track the eternal chords of destiny
	After the moon-led pulse of ocean stops.

  Keats was born a poet of the most poetical kind. All his feelings came to him through a poetical medium, or were speedily coloured by it. He enjoyed a jest as heartily as any one, and sympathized with the lowliest commonplace; but the next minute his thoughts were in a garden of enchantment, with nymphs, and fauns and shapes of exalted humanity:

Elysian beauty, melancholy grace.

It might be said of him, that he never beheld an oak-tree without seeing the Dryad. His fame may now forgive the critics who disliked his politics, and did not understand his poetry. Repeated editions of him in England, France, and America, attest its triumphant survival of all obloquy; and there can be no doubt that he has taken a permanent station among the British Poets, of a very high, if not thoroughly mature, description.

  Had there been no such thing as literature, Keats would have dwindled into a cipher. Shelley, in the same event, would hardly have lost one plume from his crest. It is in relation to literature, and to the boundless questions as to the true and the false arising out of literature and poetry, that Keats challenges a fluctuating interest,—sometimes an interest of strong disgust, sometimes of deep admiration. There is not, I believe, a case on record throughout European Literature where feelings so repulsive of each other have centered in the same individual.

  By the by, beg, borrow, steal, or buy Keats’ “Letters and Poems;” most wonderful bits of Poems, written off hand at a sitting, most of them: I only wonder that they do not make a noise in the world.

	What was his record of himself, ere he
	Went from us? “Here lies one whose name was writ
	In water.” While the chilly shadows flit
	Of sweet St. Agnes’ Eve, while basil springs—
	His name, in every humble heart that sings,
	Shall be a fountain of love, verily.

	The song of a nightingale sent thro’ a slumbrous valley,
	Low-lidded with twilight, and tranced with the dolorous sound,
	Tranced with a tender enchantment; the yearning of passion
	That wins immortality even while panting delirious with death.

	Keats, the most Grecian of all, rejected the metre of Grecians;
	Poesy breath’d over him, breath’d constantly, tenderly, freshly.

  Every one of Keats’s poems was a sacrifice of vitality; a virtue went away from him into every one of them; even yet, as we turn the leaves, they seem to warm and thrill our fingers with the flush of his fine senses, and the flutter of his electrical nerves, and we do not wonder he felt that what he did was to be done swiftly…. Keats certainly had more of the penetrative and sympathetic imagination which belongs to the poet, of that imagination which identifies itself with the momentary object of its contemplation, than any man of these later days. It is not merely that he has studied the Elizabethans and caught their turn of thought, but that he really sees things with their sovereign eye, and feels them with their electrified senses. His imagination was his bliss and bane…. To me one of the most interesting aspects of Keats is that in him we have an example of the renaissance going on almost under our eyes, and that the intellectual ferment was in him kindled by a purely English leaven. He had properly no scholarship, any more than Shakespeare had, but like him he assimilated at a touch whatever could serve his purpose. His delicate senses absorbed culture at every pore.

	… The man who never stepp’d
	In gradual progress like another man,
	But, turning grandly on his central self,
	Enspher’d himself in twenty perfect years
	And died, not young,—(the life of a long life,
	Distill’d to a mere drop, falling like a tear
	Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn
	For ever).

  Keats drinks the beauty of nature violently; but has no more real sympathy with her than he has with a bottle of claret. His palate is fine; but he “bursts joy’s grape against it,” gets nothing but misery, and a bitter taste of dregs out of his desperate draught.

  Keats, both in verbal form and in the higher qualities of poetry, is constantly reminding us of the more imaginative works of Chaucer.

  Spenser’s manner is no more Homeric than is the manner of the one modern inheritor of Spenser’s beautiful gift; the poet, who evidently caught from Spenser his sweet and easy-slipping movement, and who has exquisitely employed it; a Spenserian genius, nay, a genius by natural endowment, richer probably than even Spenser; that light which shines so unexpected and without fellow in our century, an Elizabethan born too late, the early lost and admirably gifted Keats.

	While I sit in silence,
	Comes from mile on mile hence,
	From English Keats’s Roman grave, a voice that lightens toil.

  Wrote in a manner which carried the reader back to the time when those charming passages of lyrical enthusiasm were produced which we occasionally find in the plays of Shakespearean those of Beaumont and Fletcher, and in Milton’s “Comus.” The verses of Keats are occasionally disfigured, especially in his “Endymion,” by a flatness almost childish, but in the finer passages they clothe the thought in the richest imagery and in words each of which is a poem. Lowell has justly called Keats “over-languaged,” but there is scarce a word that we should be willing to part with in his “Ode to the Nightingale,” and that on a “Grecian Urn,” and the same thing may be said of the greater part of his “Hyperion.”

  Were it necessary, in this place, to characterize Keats as a writer, I should say that he was more intensely and exclusively poetical than any other. No one can read his poems (including “Endymion” and all others subsequently published) without feeling at once that he is communing with a great poet. There can be no mistake about his quality. It is above all doubt; and if, like Lucifer, he has not drawn after him a third part of the heavens, he has had a radiant train of followers, comprising (with the exception of the great name of Wordsworth) all who have since succeeded in distinguishing themselves in the same sphere of art.

	He hath quaffed
	Glory and Death in one immortal draught;
	Surely among the undying men of old
	Numbered art thou, great Heart.

Keats died at twenty-five, and yet, to men past sixty he is fresh, freshening.

	No one regards the poet’s quivering string,
	Since thine was hushed, who brought the myrtle here
	From perfect Arcadie, whose verse
	Young earth’s freshness could rehearse.
	*        *        *        *        *
	No eventide was thine,
	But like the young athlete from the bath,
	For one brief hour,
	You stood in the arena yet uncrowned,
	Doubtful, although beyond all venturers strong;
	Yes, strong to guide Hyperion’s coursers round
	The love-inscribèd zodiac of all time:
	Thou youth, who in the gardens Athenine,
	The noblest sage had leant upon with pride,
	And called thee Musagætes, and thy lyre
	Wreathed with the bay
	Of the god of day.

  The spirit of art was always vividly near and precious to Keats. He fashioned it exuberantly into a thousand shapes, now of gem-like exquisiteness, now mere sightly or showy trinkets; and of these the scrupulous taste will even pronounce the cheapest, and rightly pronounce them, to be trumpery. Still, there is the feeling of art, however provoking its masquerade; recognizable here as clearly as it is in the formative fine art, wrought by a cunning hand, in a period of great and overblown development and impending decadence—such as the late cinquecento or the earlier French rococo. Not indeed that, in Keats’s case, there is any taint of decadence—but on the contrary the wanton and tangled wilfulnesses of a beautiful precocity, and a beautiful immaturity. Clearer and clearer did the true and high promptings of art become to him as he advanced, and more immediate and certain his response to them. He might have said at the last with Nero “Qalis artifex pereo!”

	Yet later, lingering briefly among men,
	He dropt before the world’s feet those few flowers
	Whose color and odor brave all blight of years,
	And the rare radiance of whose bloom, since then,
	Pathos, their sweet attendant, ever dowers
	With the soft silver dews of pitying tears!

  His faults are numerous and glaring. The mythology which supplied him with his mise en scène is elementary and almost puerile. His stories are lacking in human interest. In fact, he does hardly anything but describe, and he describes with an exuberance which is unluckily not incompatible with the most painful monotony. The enthusiasm for nature which is the soul of his verse is certainly sincere, and yet Keats writes with effort. His naïveté is not feigned, but there is something in it of deliberation, and therefore of exaggeration. In short, there is affectation in him, and I cannot regard as wholly unjust the reproach of cockneyism which critics used to throw at this poet and his friends. Yet, with all these faults, Keats is very far from being an ordinary person; his posthumous popularity is very far from being inexplicable, and the influence which he still exercises is very far from being a mere matter of coterie and engouement. He has a special feeling, a feeling of extraordinary intensity, for nature and for beauty. It seems as though he saw woods, streams, fields for the first time, so full of novelty and of the marvellous is the spectacle to him. There is at once sensuousness and religion in his communion with the life of all things. There would seem to be a perfume which gets in his head, an intoxication to which he gives himself up, a ritual into whose mysteries he is trying to break, a baptism, a whelming in the eternal natura naturans. Wordsworth himself, as we shall see, can lay claim to a deeper understanding of nature: but it is easy to understand that his idyllic piety, his patriarchal philosophizing, must have at last seemed terribly groveling to a generation which had drunk the heady philtres of Keats’s descriptive poetry.

	O pang-dowered Poet, whose reverberant lips
	And heart-strung lyre awoke the Moon’s eclipse,—
	Thou whom the daisies glory in growing o’er,—
	Their fragrance clings around thy name, not writ
	But rumour’d in water, while the fame of it
	Along Time’s flood goes echoing evermore.

  Among the poets who appeared in the first two decades of this century, as among all poets, readers will choose their favourites according to their sympathies. But putting aside personal preferences, every one must allow that none of the poets of that time was more “radiant with genius,” and more rich in promise, than the short-lived Keats.

  In his first book there was little foretaste of anything greatly or even genuinely good; but between the marshy and sandy flats of sterile or futile verse there were undoubtedly some few purple patches of floral promise. The style was frequently detestable—a mixture of sham Spenserian and mock Wordsworthian, alternately florid and arid. His second book, “Endymion,” rises in its best passages to the highest level of Barnfield and of Lodge, the two previous poets with whom, had he published nothing more he might have probably have been classed; and this, among minor minstrels, is no unenviable place. His third book raised him at once to a foremost rank in the highest class of English poets. Never was any one of them but Shelley so little of a marvellous boy and so suddenly revealed as a marvellous man. Never has any poet suffered so much from the chaotic misarrangement of his poems in every collected edition. The rawest and the rankest rubbish of his fitful spring is bound up in one sheaf with the ripest ears, flung into one basket with the richest fruits, of his sudden and splendid summer.

  He would have been among the very greatest of us if he had lived. There is something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything he ever wrote.

  The sixth to come was like unto a drooping flower, or a spirit among men that went in and out none knew how. He, too, sang a song, whereof no man could say certainly whether it were his or the lark’s. He went forward with a wand in his hand, but no helmet was on his head, and over his heart no breast-plate. One blow from the true-men he received, and it went in about the third rib, near the heart, and for awhile he fainted; but presently recovering himself he stood up and turned his eyes wistfully to the path, and in a moment disappearing was lost in a thicket, and was seen again of none till he came forth at the top.

  The genius of Greek poetry was alien to the English mind until it revealed itself to the young imagination of Keats, who wore it in his heart of hearts, not because he was a scholar,—for a scholar he was not,—but because he was a Greek. There are a thousand faults in “Endymion,” but the unpardonable fault of falsehood is not one of them. It is true, everywhere true to the spirit of Greek pastoral poetry, of which it was the first, and is the last, example in English song. How thoroughly the genius of Keats was possessed with the beautiful mythology of Greece, and how rapidly it matured his wonderful genius, which in writing “Endymion” outgrew the lush luxuriance of manner which is the worst defect of that poem, we see in his Odes “To Psyche,” and “On a Grecian Urn,”—exquisite productions in the purest style of art,—and in the fragment of “Hyperion,” wherein magnificence of conception and severity of expression are alike conspicuous, and where, for the first time, the epical height of the Greeks is attained by an English poet. The secret of “Hyperion” and “Endymion” inhered in the temperament of Keats, who was a Greek, as one of his friends declared.

  As regards verbal expression, a close test of original power, he certainly outranks any poet since Shakspere.

  So far as the general reading public are concerned, Hunt was the discoverer of Keats, and not only his discoverer, but his faithful interpreter, pointing out lovingly, by means of his “sign-post criticism,” (as it has been called somewhat disparagingly by those who profess to need no guidance the along byways of literature), those magical facilities of insight and expression which even in his earliest and crudest work testified that here was a poet of the true royal line.

  By power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shakspearean spirit that has lived since Shakspeare.

  In no poetry is the personality of the writer more manifest than in his: in none does the ideal creation spring more evidently from introspection and self-consciousness. His character determined his method of composition, as his method of composition imposed a limitation on his genius. A certain morbidness of fancy—due, probably in great part, to physical causes—haunted him, which did not, indeed, like the imagination of Shelley, force him to take ideas for facts, but which, producing in him a kind of incessant love-longing, drove him to shun the realities of life, and to find an asylum in the regions of imagination.

	A fair-formed image of immortal youth
	Breasting the steep hillside of life’s endeavor;
	A white-robed herald of eternal truth
	Shouting a message from the gods forever.

  Probably the very finest lyric [“La Belle Dame san Merci”] in the English language.

  Keats, “the Elizabethan born out of due time,” as he has been called, kept himself indeed unspotted from the contagion of science. Yet his passion for nature moving though it did on lines traced by Spenser, has a far greater intensity, a far more fiery self-abandonment to the intoxication of earth, than would have been possible in the sixteenth century.

	Thou silent singer ’neath the grass,
	Still sing to me those sweeter songs unsung,
	“Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone,”
	Caressing thought with wonderments of phrase
	Such as thy springtide rapture knew to win.
	Ay, sing to me thy unborn summer songs,
	And the ripe autumn lays that might have been;
	Strong wine of fruit mature, whose flowers alone we know.

  It was on the trinity of truth, beauty, and pleasure that Keats built, and built lastingly.

  Probably no English poet who has used the Spenserian stanza, first assimilated so fully the spirit of Spenser, before using the stanza, as did Keats; and to this fact may be partly attributed his effective use of it as an organ for his imagination in its “lingering, loving, particularizing mood.”

  Not since Spenser had there been a purer gift of poetry among English-speaking peoples; not since Milton a line of nobler balance of sound, thought, and cadence. There is no magic of colour in written speech that is not mixed in the diction of “The Eve of Saint Agnes,”—a vision of beauty, deep, rich, and glowing as one of those dyed windows in which the heart of the Middle Ages still burns. While of the odes, so perfect in form, so ripe with thought, so informed and irradiated by the vision and the insight of the imagination, what remains to be said save that they furnish us with the tests and standards of poetry itself? They mark the complete identification of thought with form, of vision with faculty, of life with art.

  He was one of the greatest of English poets; he led a life in which there was no doubt a vast deal of keen and exquisite pleasure, but little or no happiness; thrown, for the most part, among a set of clever, small men, he towers above them, a man by no means clever but very great; though not unfortunate in the worst and bitterest sense of the word, though he had no struggles with immediate adversity and want, he yet suffered much; he lavished the strength of a tender and noble heart upon a rather commonplace young woman, who evidently had no suspicion that she was worshipped—she, ordinary little piece of pretty Eve’s flesh—by one of earth’s immortal sons. Among these clever, small men, Hunt, Reynolds, and the rest, by whom he was surrounded, and with whom in popular estimation he was scarce distinguishably merged, he held before his eyes a lofty and splendid ideal of excellence in the art which he had chosen, or which nature had chosen for him. He saw this ideal at first with blurred and faltering vision, but ever more clearly as his eyes were purged with the euphrasy and rue of human experience; he added to the store of the world’s beauty, he increased the sum of man’s happiness, and doing this was rewarded with contempt and ribald mockery, was condemned to read things written about himself which if uttered in oral intercourse would be recognised by everybody as gross insult and brutal outrage; spending himself in the service of man, his recompense was not seldom such scorn and contumely as might appropriately be reserved for an enemy of one’s species. Worn out by suffering and discouragement, and perhaps in part by the yet more shattering pangs of immoderate joy, he sinks in premature death.

  We honor in the lad who passed so long unobserved among the inhabitants of Hampstead, a poet, and nothing but a poet, but one of the very greatest poets that the modern world has seen…. Keats lives, as he modestly assured his friends would be the case, among the English poets. Nor among them, merely, but in the first rank of them—among the very few of whom we instinctively think whenever the characteristic versemen of our race are spoken of.

  I am inclined to think that Mr. Matthew Arnold, a critic with whose judgments I rarely find myself in dissent, makes a somewhat misleading remark when he insists that Keats’s master passion was not the passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet, but was an intellectual or spiritual passion. If the words sensuous and sentimental were intended in an opprobrious sense, the remark might be useful; but if they are used in the literal meaning, and then contrasted with intellectual and spiritual, their tendency is to withdraw the reader of Keats from the main characteristics of his poetry.

	Upon thy tomb ’t is graven, “Here lies one
	Whose name is writ in water.” Could there be
	A flight of Fancy fitlier feigned for thee,
	A fairer motto for her favorite son?
	For, as the wave, thy varying numbers run—
	Now crested proud in tidal majesty,
	Now tranquil as the twilight reverie
	Of some dim lake the white moon looks upon
	While teems the world with silence. Even there,
	In each Protean rainbow-tint that stains
	The breathing canvas of the atmosphere,
	We read an exhalation of thy strains.
	Thus, on the scroll of Nature, everywhere,
	Thy name, a deathless syllable, remains.

  In spite of this earnestness and philosophy, it is certainly true that Keats’ mind was of a luxurious habit; and it must have been partly due to this temperament that he showed so little severity towards himself in the castigation of his poems, though that was, as I said before, chiefly caused by the prolific activity of his imagination, which was always providing him with fresh material to work on. In this respect he is above all poets an example of what is meant by inspiration: the mood which all artists require, covet, and find most rare was the common mood with him; and I should say that being amply supplied with this, what as an artist he most lacked was self-restraint and self-castigation,—which was indeed foreign to his luxurious temperament, unselfish and devoted to his art as he was,—the presence of which was most needful to watch, choose, and reject the images which crowded on him as he thought or wrote.

  One would like to know whether a first reading in the letters of Keats does not generally produce something akin to a severe mental shock. It is a sensation which presently becomes agreeable, being in that respect like a plunge into cold water, but it is undeniably a shock. Most readers of Keats, knowing him, as he should be known, by his poetry, have not the remotest conception of him as he shows himself in his letters. Hence they are unprepared for this splendid exhibition of virile intellectual health. Not that they think of him as morbid,—his poetry surely could not make this impression,—but rather that the popular conception of him is, after all these years, a legendary Keats, the poet who was killed by reviewers, the Keats of Shelley’s preface to the Adonais, the Keats whose story is written large in the world’s book of Pity and of Death. When the readers are confronted with a fair portrait of the real man, it makes them rub their eyes. Nay, more, it embarrasses them. To find themselves guilty of having pitied one who stood in small need of pity is mortifying. In plain terms, they have systematically bestowed (or have attempted to bestow) alms on a man whose income at its least was bigger than any his patrons could boast. Small wonder that now and then you find a reader, with large capacity for the sentimental, who looks back with terror to his first dip into the letters.

  The perfection of Keats’s art, the sureness of success with which he translated into words, feelings that but for him those who underwent them would have abandoned as inexpressible, make rather startling the suggestion that there was anything to which he was inadequate because for it “he was not ripe.” Indeed it is the very ripeness of Keats’s art at its best that distinguishes it above the work of so many generations of his elders, and makes it so astonishing as the work of a youth, so far is it removed, in its security and ease of mastery, from the struggles for expression of immaturity, from the mere glibness of precocity. It is the sense rather of overripeness than of unripeness that it gives of a sensibility hectic and excessive.

  Setting aside his rapid progress, Keats is the best illustration of the natural development of a poet. Beginning and ending his intemperate period with the too ample verge and room, the trailing fringe and sampler-like embroidery of “Endymion,” he was soon writing the most perfect odes in the language; he elaborated in a few months a style, the like of which greater men have failed to achieve even in half a century of uninterrupted work.

  He gave to that end the best that he had to give, freely, generously, joyously pouring himself into the ministry of his art. He did not dream for a moment that the gift was perfect. Flattery could not blind him to the limitations and defects of his early work. He was his own best and clearest critic. But he knew that so far as it went his poetic inspiration was true. He had faithfully followed the light of a pure and elevating joy in the opulent, manifold beauty of nature, and in the eloquent significance of old-world legends, and he believed that it had already led him to a place among the poets whose verse would bring delight, in far-off years, to the sons and daughters of mankind…. The poetry of Keats, small in bulk and slight in body as it seems at first sight to be, endures, and will endure, in English literature, because it is the embodiment of the spirit of immortal youth.

  His landscape seems to me of quite equal importance with the human side of his work; it was, indeed, the region in which he felt that his art, as yet unqualified through youthful inexperience to deal powerfully with human character and interests, attained the highest mastery. Keats, sharing with Shelley an intense appreciation of Nature, has a music in his verse more solemn, if less aerial. He neither views the landscape through the colours of personal feeling like Byron, nor with Wordsworth thinks of it as allied with human sympathy, or as penetrated by spiritual life, nor, with Shelley, wearies us with a crude pantheism. Hence his pictures are more powerfully true to actuality; he grasps the scene more vividly, emblazons it more richly: the object, seen in thought, has the salience, the relief, of Nature; the melody never pausing, and the word the “inevitable” word. Hence, what Arnold named his “fascinating felicity.”

  Nothing is more interesting, even in the endless and delightful task of literary comparison, than to contrast the work of Shelley and Keats, so alike and yet so different. A little longer space of work, much greater advantages of means and education, and a happier though less blameless experience of passion, enabled Shelley to produce a much larger body of work than Keats has to his name, even when this is swollen by what Mr. Palgrave has justly stigmatised as “the incomplete and inferior work” withheld by Keats himself, but made public by the cruel kindness of admirers. And this difference in bulk probably coincides with a difference in the volume of genius of the two writers. Further, while it is not at all improbable that if Shelley had lived he would have gone on writing better and better, the same probability is, I think, to be more sparingly predicated of Keats.

  Short as was the life of John Keats, and small as was the actual bulk of his production, there is no one of his contemporaries who holds more distinctly or securely his place as the legitimate successor of the greatest among the English poets before him and as the necessary precursor of those who have followed…. He had in common with the poets of Greece and of England at its greatest time a certain enchanting directness and simplicity of expression: while from both he differed in his comparative indifference to humanity. Keats shared with the Greeks that pagan sensuousness which revels in the delights of the senses untroubled by moral meaning or responsibility; like the Elizabethans he possessed the perception and appreciation of natural beauty entirely apart from its ministry to man; while from both he differed—and in so far fell below both—by the capability to rest upon a passionate satisfaction in sensuous beauty for its own sake and as an end sufficient in itself…. There is no stronger link between the poetry of the Elizabethan time and that of the Victorian school than John Keats; and the more closely this statement is examined the more suggestive and the more accurate in substantial effect it is found to be.

  I might cite page on page from Keats, and yet hold your attention; there is something so beguiling in his witching words; and his pictures are finished—with only one or two or three dashes of his pencil.

  Nearly all people who read poetry have a favoritism for Keats; he is in many respects the popular hero of English literature. He was young, and chivalrously devoted to his art; he has a mastery of expression almost unparalleled; he is neither obscure nor polemic; and he has had from the first a most fecundating influence on other minds: in Hood, in Tennyson, in Rossetti and Matthew Arnold, in Lanier and Lowell, in Yeats and Watson, one feels the breath and touch of Keats like an incantation…. Now, what is the outstanding extraneous feature of Keats’s poetry? It is perhaps the musical and sculptural effect which he can make with words: a necromancy which he exercises with hardly a rival, even “among the greatest;” and among these he justly hoped to stand. Observe that a facility of this sort cannot be a natural endowment, since we must still, as Sir Philip Sidney bewails, “be put to school to learn our mother-tongue;” and that it implies ascetic diligence in the artist compassing it. Moreover, Keats’s craftsmanship is no menace to him. It is true that he carries, in general, no such hindering burden of thought along his lyre as Donne, Dryden, Wordsworth, Browning; but neither, once having learned his strength, does he ever fall into the mere teasing ecstasy of symbolic sound, as Shelley does often, as Swinburne does more often than not. Keats, unlike Shelley or a cherub, is not all wing; he “stands foursquare” when he wills, or moves like the men of the Parthenon frieze, with a health and joyous gravity entirely carnal.

  It is enough for me that we find in Keats some odes of exquisite passion and charm, a delight in glow and colour that touches us like a canvas by Giorgione, a few short lyrics which stand in the everlasting lyrical triumphs of our tongue, a promise of command over the melody of verse, a power of painting in winged words which (if he had lived another twenty or thirty years) might have placed him well in the rank of poets somewhere below Milton and Shakespeare. Might have done this, if only promise were always followed by performance; if we could be sure that the nature of Keats as a man, his brain, and hold on truths and realities, equalled his mastery over language; if we did not too often feel (even in his best and latest work) that the instrument wherefrom he wrung forth such luscious music, seemed endowed with magic gifts to dash itself free from the hands and consciousness of him who held it.

  “The Cap and Bells” is a melancholy example of what a great poet can produce who is consumed by a hopeless passion and wasted by disease…. In his first sonnet on Fame, Keats, in a saner mood, puts by the temptation which would withdraw him from the high serenity of conscious worth. In the second, wherein he seems almost to be seeing Fanny Brawne, mocking behind the figure of Fame, he shows a more scornful attitude. There is little doubt that notwithstanding his close companionship with poets living and dead Keats never could long escape from the allurements of this “wayward girl,” yet it may surely be said that his escape was most complete when he was fulfilling the highest law of his nature and creating those images of beauty which have given him Fame while he sleeps.