LXII. To BENJAMIN BAILEY. Teignmouth, My dear Bailey, When a poor devil is drowning, it is said he comes thrice to the surface ere he makes his final sink; if, however, even at the third rise, he can manage to catch hold of a piece of weed or rock, he stands a fair chance, as I hope I do now, of being saved. I have sunk twice in our correspondence, have risen twice, and have been too idle, or something worse, to extricate myself. I have sunk the third time, and just now risen again at this two of the clock P.M., and saved myself from utter perdition by beginning this, all drenched as I am, and fresh from the water. And I would rather endure the present inconvenience of a wet jacket than you should keep a laced one in store for me. Why did I not stop at Oxford in my way? How can you ask such a question? Why did I not promise to do so? Did I not, in a letter to you, make a promise to do so? Then how can you be so unreasonable as to ask me why I did not? If this letter really belongs to September 1818, the date under which Lord Houghton gives it, it must be placed somewhere between the 1st and the 21st; and supposing Tom to have gone to Devonshire by himself, the passage referring to a letter from him gives rise to no difficulty. It is even possible that John had taken him down to Teignmouth after the 1st and left him for a few days. I presume the reference to a promise to stop at Oxford on his way may be to the passage at page 160 of this volume, "If I do not [go any journey], you shall see me soon, if not on my return, or I'll quarter myself on you next winter." 1 This is the thing-(for I have been rubbing up my invention; trying several sleights: I first polished a cold, felt it in my fingers, tried it on the table, but could not pocket it: I tried chilblains, rheumatism, gout, tight boots, -nothing of that sort would do, so this is, as I was going to say, the thing)-I had a letter from Tom, saying how much better he had got, and thinking he had better stop. I went down to prevent his coming up. Will not this do? Turn it which way you like-it is selvaged all round. I have used it, these three last days, to keep out the abominable Devonshire weather. By the by, you may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em; the primroses' are out, but then you are in; the cliffs are of a fine deep colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them. The women like your London people in a sort of negative way-because the native men are the poorest creatures in England-because government never have thought it worth while to send a recruiting party among them. When I think of Wordsworth's Sonnet, "Vanguard of Liberty! ye men of Kent!" the degenerated race about me are pulvis Ipecac. simplex—a strong dose. Were I a corsair, I'd make a descent on the south coast of Devon; if I did not run the chance of having cowardice imputed to me. As for the men, they'd run away into the Methodist meeting-houses; and the women would be glad of it. Had England been If it were quite clear that this was meant literally of the moment, it would bear strongly against the correctness of the date; but in the absence of the original letter it would be over rash to accept as testimony what may very well have been meant in a general sense. a large Devonshire, we should not have won the Battle of Waterloo. There are knotted oaks, there are lusty rivulets, there are meadows such as are not elsewhere, but there are no thews and sinews. "Moore's Almanack" is here a curiosity: arms, neck, and shoulders may at least be seen there, and the ladies read it as some outof-the-way romance. Such a quelling power have these thoughts over me that I fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. I fancy the flowers, all precocious, have an Acrasian spell about them; I feel able to beat off the Devonshire waves like soap-froth. I think it well, for the honour of Britain, that Julius Cæsar did not first land in this county. A Devonshirer, standing on his native hills, is not a distinct object; he does not show against the light; a wolf or two would dispossess him. I like, I love England-I like its living men-give me a long brown plain for my money, so I may meet with some of Edmund Ironside's descendants; give me a barren mould, so I may meet with some shadowing of Alfred in the shape of a gipsey, a huntsman, or a shepherd. Scenery is fine, but human nature is finer; the sward is richer for the tread of a real nervous English foot; the eagle's nest is finer, for the mountaineer having looked into it. Are these facts or prejudices? Whatever they be, for them I shall never be able to relish entirely any Devonshire scenery. Homer is fine, Achilles is fine, Diomed is fine, Shakspeare is fine-Hamlet is fine, Lear is fine but dwindled Englishmen are not fine. Where, too, the women are so passable, and have such English names, such as Ophelia, Cordelia, &c., that they should have such paramours, or rather imparamours! As for them, I cannot, in thought, help wishing, as did the cruel emperor, that they had but one head, and I might cut it off, to deliver them from any horrible courtesy they may do their undeserving countrymen. I wonder I meet with no born monsters. O! Devonshire, last night I thought the moon had dwindled in heaven. I have never had your Sermon from Wordsworth, but Mr. Dilke lent it me. You know my ideas about Religion. I do not think myself more in the right than other people, and that nothing in this world is proveable. I wish I could enter into all your feelings on the subject, merely for one short ten minutes, and give you a page or two to your liking. I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack o' Lanthorn to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance. As tradesmen say every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer-being in itself a nothing. Ethereal things may at least be thus real, divided under three heads-things real, things semi-real, and nothings: things real, such as existences of sun, moon, and stars, and passages of Shakspeare; things semi-real, such as love, the clouds, &c., which require a greeting of the spirit to make them wholly exist; and nothings, which are made great and dignified by an ardent pursuit-which, by the by, stamp the Burgundymark on the bottles of our minds, insomuch as they are able to "consecrate whate'er they look upon." I have written a sonnet here of a somewhat collateral nature. So don't imagine it an "apropos des bottes." 1 1 Aye, this may be carried-but what am I talking of? It is an old maxim of mine, and of course must be well known, that every point of thought is the centre of an intellectual world. The two uppermost thoughts in a For the sonnet, The Human Seasons, see Volume II, pages 247-8. man's mind are the two poles of his world; he revolves on them, and every thing is southward or northward to him through their means. We take but three steps from feathers to iron. Now, my dear fellow, I must, once for all, tell you I have not one idea of the truth of any of my speculations: I shall never be a reasoner, because I care not to be in the right, when retired from bickering and in a proper philosophical temper. So you must not stare, if, in any future letter, I endeavour to prove that Apollo, as he had catgut strings to his lyre, used a cat's paw as a pecten—and, further, from said pecten's reiterated and continual teazing, came the term hen-pecked. My brother Tom desires to be remembered to you; he has just this moment had a spitting of blood, poor fellow! Remember me to Gleig1 and Whitehead. Your affectionate friend John Keats ! In the Life, Letters &c. (1848), Grey: in the Life and Letters (1867), Greig; but I presume there is no doubt that the reference is to the Rev. George Robert Gleig. See page 94 of this volume. |