written independently without judgment, I may write independently, and with judgment, hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself. In 'Endymion' I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and taken tea, and comfortable advice." He also wrote to his brother:-"This is a mere matter of the moment. I think I shall be among the English poets after my death. Even as a matter of present interest, the attempt to crush me in the Quarterly has only brought me more into notice. It does me not the least harm in society to make me appear little and ridiculous. I know when a man is superior to me, and give him all due respect; he will be the last to laugh at me." And again on his birthday :-" The only thing that can ever affect me personally for more than one short passing day, is any doubt about my powers for poetry: I seldom have any; and I look with hope to the nighing time when I shall have none."

* *

After reading these passages it is difficult to see in what spirit more wise or manly an author could receive unseemly and insolent criticism. When Lord Byron boasts that, after the article on his early poems, "instead of breaking a bloodvessel," he drank three bottles of claret and began an answer, "finding that there was nothing in it for which he could, lawfully, knock Jeffrey

MEMOIR OF JOHN KEATS.

39

on the head, in an honorable way," one is glad of the indignation that produced the "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," but the use which Keats made of the annoyance in elevating and purifying his self-judg ment is surely far more estimable. The letters show that no morbid feelings prevented him from most heartily enjoying his Scotch tour, where the sublimities of nature met him for the first time. He went to the country of Burns as on a pilgrimage, and notwithstanding that he was shown the cottage of Kirk Alloway "by a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew Burns, and who ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him," he says, "one of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a shrine: we need not think of his misery-that is all gone, bad luck to it! I shall look upon it hereafter with unmixed pleasure, as I do on my Stratford-on-Avon day with Bailey."

It gave some color to the belief of the mental injury inflicted on Keats by the reviewers, that after this time his spirits and health began to decline, and the short remainder of his life was exposed to continual troubles and anxieties. His brother Tom, whom he loved most devotedly, and who much resembled himself in temperament and appearance, died in the autumn, and shortly before this event he met the lady who inspired him with the profound passion which under other circumstances might have combined all his dreams of happiness, but which was destined to increase tenfold the bitterness of

his premature decay.* * Up to this period he had been singularly shy of women's society, and frequently expressed himself freely on the subject, as for instance :—

*

"I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women; at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. It is because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy, I thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I thought them ethereal, above men. I find them perhaps equal-great by comparison is very small. When among men, I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent. I can listen, and from every one I can learn. When I am among women, I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone. You must be charitable, and put all this perversity to my being disappointed since my boyhood."

But now his time had come. At a house where he was very intimate, he met a cousin of the family, a lady of East Indian connections, who had there found an asylum from some domestic discomfort. He first heard much in her praise, which did not interest him, then something in her dispraise, which took his fancy. He wrote: "She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at least, a Charmian: she has a rich Eastern look: she has fine eyes, and

* In Keats's copy of Shakspeare, the words Poor Tom, in "King Lear," are pathetically underlined.

fine manners. When she comes into the room, she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her: from habit she thinks that nothing particular. I always find myself more at ease with such a woman: the picture before me always gives me a life and animation, which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am, at such times, too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble: I forget myself entirely, because I live in her." He then protests that he is not in love with her, but that she kept him awake one night, "as a tune of Mozart's might do." He "won't cry to take the moon home with him in his pocket, nor fret to leave her behind him." And then reverting to his love to his brothers and sisters: "As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me."

Residing in the house of his friend Mr. Brown, and in daily intercourse with this lady, the path of life would have lain out before him brightly indeed, had it not soon appeared that his circumstances were such as to render their union very difficult, if not impossible. The radiant imagination and the redundant heart now came into fierce conflict with poverty and disease. Hope was there, with Genius his everlasting sustainer, and Fear never approached but as the companion of Necessity: but the intensity of passion helped to wear away a physical frame

originally feeble, and he might have lived longer if he had loved less.

Several of the Tales and Odes, which are contained in the volume of miscellaneous poetry, had been written by this time: the "Pot of Basil" before his Highland tour, and the "Eve of St. Agnes," and the Odes "To Psyche" and "On Melancholy," in the winter; "Lamia" and the "Ode to Autumn" in the advancing year. In most of these the Spenserian influence is still strongly predominant, augmented no doubt by the study of the Italian Poets, to which, during these months, Keats sedulously applied himself. The fragment of "Hyperion" which Lord Byron, with an exaggeration akin to his former depreciation, declared to "seem actually inspired by the Titans and as sublime as Eschylus," was written so sensibly under another inspiration as to be distasteful to its author. "I have given up Hyperion," he writes, "there were too many Miltonic inversions in it. Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's humor." In all these Poems, in their different styles, the progress in purity and grace of diction was manifest. The simplicity of language which had been inaugurated by Goldsmith and Cowper, formalized into a theory by Wordsworth, and by him and other writers both of the Lake and the London schools carried to extravagance, had been adapted by Keats to a class of subjects to which, according to literary taste and habit, it was especially inappropriate, and where it produced on many minds. almost the sensation of a classical burlesque. Such of