of law. Perhaps there may be forces in earth and heaven which are not dreamed of in our philosophy. In ancient times the poet was inspired from above. In this skeptical age, one dare only affirm, lest a belief in divinity should provoke a smile, that Keats puzzles our science. Taine could not fit him into his scheme of Race, Surroundings and Epoch. He craftily ignored him altogether.

The English are zealous to discover in the genealogies of their great men evidences of superior birth. Lowell has had his laugh at Lord Houghton for forcing Keats into "the upper ranks of the middle class." The first biographer, indeed, was wise in his purpose; he knew his public. Even Rossetti, forty years later, clung to euphemism; the poet's father, he declares, was "a natural gentleman." At this date, however, we should cease this hunt for a lack-lustre halo and accept, without shrinking, the bold truth from Charles Cowden Clarke. The father, he tells us, was "a principal servant.'

Thomas Keats was born in the Land's End country. He came up to London; a proof of ambition. He worked faithfully and intelligently for John Jennings at the Swan and Hoop livery. He married the master's daughter; he acquired

control of the business. Here, in brief, is the story of the industrious apprentice. The fictions of Hannah More which served so long for the edification of youths can offer nothing more admirable.

Unfortunately, in the prime of life, a fall from a horse occasioned his death and made orphans of his four children. He had been a self-sufficient man. Those who knew him were impressed by his backbone and his reticence.

The mother, one must infer, was very ordinary. Her maternal instinct was strong, but her character was conspicuous for feminine frailties. She was prodigal, pleasure-loving, passionate. She lacked self-sufficiency and spiritual loyalty. In less than a year after the burial of her first husband, she took another. An ordinary woman; a creature of the senses.

The genius of Keats is inexplicable. Some of the personal traits, nevertheless, are clearly heirlooms from the parents. The self-sufficiency, the backbone came from the father; the prodigality, the craving for things of the senses descended from the mother. There was a fine possibility in this commingled inheritance; a possibility of central strength around which might play the caprices of passion.

An accident may have had much to do with the making of his peculiar temperament. The slow process of nature was forced in his birth. An imprudence of the joy-loving mother is said to have been the cause. The child was brought forth two months before the time, and the physiological result was an organism of high-strung nerves. The sensitiveness of Keats was due, in part, very probably, to this premature delivery. In the feverish haste of his entrance into the world there may have developed that hysteria which so frequently shook his poise and drove his emotions from laughter to tears.

One incident gives a vivid picture of his childhood. The mother, ill in bed under the doctor's injunction of quietness; the boy standing guard at the door of her room, sword in hand, a browneyed curly-headed midget, ready to repel any intruder. It is too bad that Haydon's version is different. At any rate the fact remains that family affection in Keats was intense.

III

SCHOOLDAYS

ENFIELD lies ten miles north of London. You may reach it by the John Gilpin route. The old school was at the town end, a red Georgian mansion with cherub faces and panels of flowers on the façade. It trained crews of some seventy boys under the discipline of Master Clarke and the fag system. The main building and the classroom were set in a garden. Beyond there was a vista of a pond, a patch of woodland, a sweep of green meadow with cattle, — poetic in the shifting light of sun, mist and moon. After the hubbub of play it was on this world of silence that young Keats fed his unsatisfied feelings. London - how stupid to call him a cockney never made any impression upon him.

He came to this school a litel clergeon in frocks. But he cared naught for his books and he sang no Alma redemptoris. He preferred the delight of battle with his peers. The diminutive

youngster was all energy; an unstable compound of daring, defiance, pugnacity, anger, tyranny, generosity, good-will, melancholy, brooding loneliness. He raged sometimes and his comrades had to hold him down. But he won leadership by "terrier courage" and he gained friends by magnanimity. He fought, shook hands cordially and loved best those who fought him. Often passion swept through him like a tropical gust and left him in misery. Grief brought paralysis to his energies; subdued him with mental tortures. When suffering, he shut his lips and hid himself, self-reliant yet helpless.

This temperament, though combative, is not martial. It is a prey to reaction. The mobile emotions, sometimes hysterical, are rather the evidence of imagination in the throes of blind beginnings. Usually they beget mere nerves; occasionally creative power.

Note the next phase. Puberty concentrated the chaos of energies into intellectual ambition. The fighting animal became a scholar. The intensity of his nature developed into a burning fever for knowledge; a lust for conquest in the kingdom of the mind. He rose early; he scanted his athletic exercises; he begrudged the time for meals. He took all the prizes in literature and