"What need I tell of lovely lips and eyes, A clipsome waist, and bosom"s balmy rise?--"
"How charming, would he think, to see her here, How heightened then, and perfect would appear The two divinest things the world has got, A lovely woman in a rural spot."
When Keats and Sh.e.l.ley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a familiar lenity of style to variety of movement in this metre, Sh.e.l.ley, it need not be said, was in no danger of falling into any such underbred strain as this: but Keats at first falls, or is near falling, into it more than once.
Next as to the influence which Leigh Hunt involuntarily exercised on his friends" fortunes and their estimation by the world. We have seen how he found himself, in prison and for some time after his release, a kind of political hero on the liberal side, a part for which nature had by no means fitted him. This was in itself enough to mark him out as a special b.u.t.t for Tory vengeance: yet that vengeance would hardly have been so inveterate as it was but for other secondary causes. During his imprisonment Leigh Hunt had reprinted from the _Reflector_, with notes and additions, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse called the _Feast of the Poets_, which he had written about two years before. In it Apollo is represented as convoking the contemporary British poets, or pretenders to the poetical t.i.tle, to a session, or rather to a supper. Some of those who present themselves the G.o.d rejects with scorn, others he cordially welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. Moore and Campbell fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof, Coleridge and Wordsworth chidden and dismissed. The criticisms are not more short-sighted than those even of just and able men commonly are on their contemporaries. The bitterness of the "Lost Leader" feeling to which we have referred accounts for much of Hunt"s disparagement of the Lake writers, while in common with all liberals he was prejudiced against Scott as a conspicuous high Tory and friend to kings. But he quite acknowledged the genius, while he condemned the defection, and also what he thought the poetical perversities, of Wordsworth. His treatment of Scott, on the other hand, is idly flippant and patronising. Now it so happened that of the two champions who were soon after to wield, one the bludgeon, and the other the dagger, of Tory criticism in Edinburgh,--I mean Wilson and Lockhart,--Wilson was the cordial friend and admirer of Wordsworth, and Lockhart a man of many hatreds but one great devotion, and that devotion was to Scott. Hence a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem paradoxical rancour with which the gentle Hunt, and Keats as his friend and supposed follower, were by-and-bye to be persecuted in _Blackwood_.
To go back to the point at which Hunt and Keats first became known to each other. Cowden Clarke began by carrying up to Hunt, who had now moved from the Edgware Road to a cottage in the Vale of Health at Hampstead, a few of Keats"s poems in ma.n.u.script. Horace Smith was with Hunt when the young poet"s work was shown him. Both were eager in its praises, and in questions concerning the person and character of the author. Cowden Clarke at Hunt"s request brought Keats to call on him soon afterwards, and has left a vivid account of their pleasant welcome and conversation. The introduction seems to have taken place early in the spring of 1816[17].
Keats immediately afterwards became intimate in the Hampstead household; and for the next year or two Hunt"s was the strongest intellectual influence to which he was subject. So far as opinions were concerned, those of Keats had already, as we have seen, been partly formed in boyhood by Leigh Hunt"s writings in the _Examiner_. Hunt was a confirmed sceptic as to established creeds, and supplied their place with a private gospel of cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his own sunny temperament, and partly by the hopeful doctrines of eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural sympathy of generous youth for Hunt"s liberal and optimistic view of things, and he had a mind naturally unapt for dogma:--ready to entertain and appreciate any set of ideas according as his imagination recognised their beauty or power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth.
In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in common. Both alike were given to "luxuriating" somewhat effusively and fondly over the "deliciousness" of whatever they liked in art, books, or nature. To the every-day pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt brought in a lower degree the same alertness of perception, and acuteness of sensuous and imaginative enjoyment, which in Keats were intense beyond parallel. In his lighter and shallower way Hunt also felt with Keats the undying charm of cla.s.sic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about this time some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and some, less adequate, of Homer. The poets Hunt loved best were Ariosto and the other Italian masters of the chivalrous-fanciful epic style; and in English he was devoted to Keats"s own favourite Spenser.
The name of Spenser is often coupled with that of "Libertas," "the lov"d Libertas," meaning Leigh Hunt, in the verses written by Keats at this time. He attempts, in some of these verses, to embody the spirit of the _Faerie Queene_ in the metre of _Rimini_, and in others to express in the same form the pleasures of nature as he felt them in straying about the beautiful, then rural Hampstead woods and slopes. In the summer of 1816 he seems to have spent a good deal of his time at the Vale of Health, where a bed was made up for him in the library. In one poem he dilates at length on the a.s.sociations suggested by the busts and knick-knacks in the room; and the sonnet beginning, "Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there", records pleasantly his musings as he walked home from his friend"s house one night in winter. We find him presenting Hunt with a crown of ivy, and receiving a set of sonnets from him in return. Or they would challenge each other to the composition of rival pieces on a chosen theme.
Cowden Clarke, in describing one such occasion in December 1816, when they each wrote to time a sonnet _on the Gra.s.shopper and Cricket_, has left us a pleasant picture of their relations:--
"The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the first line:--
"The poetry of earth is never dead."
"Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth and eleventh lines:--
"On a lone winter morning, when the frost Hath wrought a silence"--
"Ah that"s perfect! Bravo Keats!" And then he went on in a dilatation on the dumbness of Nature during the season"s suspension and torpidity."
Through Leigh Hunt Keats was before long introduced to a number of congenial spirits. Among them he attached himself especially to one John Hamilton Reynolds, a poetic aspirant who, though a year younger than himself, had preceded him with his first literary venture. Reynolds was born at Shrewsbury, and his father settled afterwards in London, as writing-master at the Blue Coat School. He lacked health and energy, but has left the reputation of a brilliant playful wit, and the evidence of a charming character and no slight literary talent. He held a clerkship in an Insurance office, and lived in Little Britain with his family, including three sisters with whom Keats was also intimate, and the eldest of whom afterwards married Thomas Hood. His earliest poems show him inspired feelingly enough with the new romance and nature sentiment of the time. One, _Safie_, is an indifferent imitation of Byron in his then fashionable Oriental vein: much better work appears in a volume published in the year of Keats"s death, and partly prompted by the writer"s relations with him. In a lighter strain, Reynolds wrote a musical entertainment which was brought out in 1819 at what is now the Lyceum theatre, and about the same time offended Wordsworth with an antic.i.p.atory parody of _Peter Bell_, which Byron a.s.sumed to be the work of Moore. In 1820 he produced a spirited sketch in prose and verse purporting to relate, under the name _Peter Corcoran_, the fortunes of an amateur of the prize-ring; and a little later, in conjunction with Hood, the volume of anonymous _Odes and Addresses to Eminent Persons_ which Coleridge on its appearance declared confidently to be the work of Lamb. But Reynolds had early given up the hope of living by literature, and accepted the offer of an opening in business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell sonnet to the Muses in a copy of Shakspeare which he gave to Keats, and in 1821 he writes again,
"As time increases I give up drawling verse for drawing leases."
In point of fact Reynolds continued for years to contribute to the _London Magazine_ and other reviews, and to work occasionally in conjunction with Hood. But neither in literature nor law did he attain a position commensurate with the promise of his youth. Starting level, at the time of which we speak, with men who are now in the first rank of fame,--with Keats and Sh.e.l.ley,--he died in 1852 as Clerk of the County at Newport, Isle of Wight, and it is only in a.s.sociation with Keats that his name will live. Not only was he one of the warmest friends Keats had, entertaining from the first an enthusiastic admiration for his powers, as a sonnet written early in their acquaintance proves[18], but also one of the wisest, and by judicious advice more than once saved him from a mistake.
In connection with the name of Reynolds among Keats"s a.s.sociates must be mentioned that of his inseparable friend James Rice, a young solicitor of literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or worse in health, but always, in Keats"s words, "coming on his legs again like a cat"; ever cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and indefatigable in good offices to those about him: "dear n.o.ble generous James Rice," records Dilke,--"the best, and in his quaint way one of the wittiest and wisest men I ever knew." Besides Reynolds, another and more insignificant rhyming member of Hunt"s set, when Keats first joined it, was one Cornelius Webb, remembered now, if remembered at all, by _Blackwood"s_ derisory quotation of his lines on--
"Keats, The Muses" son of promise, and what feats He yet may do"--
as well as by a disparaging allusion in one of Keats"s own later letters.
He disappeared early from the circle, but not before he had caught enough of its spirit to write sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost be taken for the work of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his weak moments[19]. For some years afterwards Webb served as press-reader in the printing-office of Messrs Clowes, being charged especially with the revision of the _Quarterly_ proofs. Towards 1830--1840 he re-appeared in literature, as Cornelius "Webbe", author of the _Man about Town_ and other volumes of cheerful gossipping c.o.c.kney essays, to which the _Quarterly_ critics extended a patronizing notice.
An acquaintance more interesting to posterity which Keats made a few months later, at Leigh Hunt"s, was that of Sh.e.l.ley, his senior by only three years. During the harrowing period of Sh.e.l.ley"s life which followed the suicide of his first wife--when his principle of love a law to itself had in action entailed so dire a consequence, and his obedience to his own morality had brought him into such harsh collision with the world"s--the kindness and affection of Leigh Hunt were among his chief consolations. After his marriage with Mary G.o.dwin, he flitted often, alone or with his wife, between Great Marlow and Hampstead, where Keats met him early in the spring of 1817. "Keats," says Hunt, did not take to Sh.e.l.ley as kindly as Sh.e.l.ley did to him, and adds the comment: "Keats, being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a sort of natural enemy." "He was haughty, and had a fierce hatred of rank," says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his pride had not been aroused by antic.i.p.ation, Keats had a genius for friendship, but towards Sh.e.l.ley we find him in fact maintaining a tone of reserve, and even of something like moral and intellectual patronage: at first, no doubt, by way of defence against the possibility of social or material patronage on the other"s part: but he should soon have learnt better than to apprehend anything of the kind from one whose delicacy, according to all evidence, was as perfect and unmistakeable as his kindness. Of Sh.e.l.ley"s kindness Keats had in the sequel sufficient proof: in the meantime, until Sh.e.l.ley went abroad the following year, the two met often at Hunt"s without becoming really intimate. Pride and social sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy between them, and that Keats, with his strong vein of every-day humanity, sense, and humour, and his innate openness of mind, may well have been as much repelled as attracted by the unearthly ways and accents of Sh.e.l.ley, his pa.s.sionate negation of the world"s creeds and the world"s law, and his intense proselytizing ardour.
It was also at Hunt"s house that Keats for the first time met by pre-arrangement, in the beginning of November 1816, the painter Haydon, whose influence soon became hardly second to that of Hunt himself. Haydon was now thirty. He had lately been victorious in one of the two great objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory in the other. He had been mainly instrumental in getting the pre-eminence of the Elgin marbles among the works of the sculptor"s art acknowledged in the teeth of hostile cliques, and their acquisition for the nation secured. This is Haydon"s chief real t.i.tle to the regard of posterity. His other and life-long, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to take him at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence to add the crown of heroic painting to the other glories of his country. His indomitable high-flaming energy and industry, his strenuous self-reliance, his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the clamour of his self-a.s.sertion and of his fierce oppugnancy against the academic powers, even his unabashed claims for support on friends, patrons, and society at large, had won for him much convinced or half-convinced attention and encouragement, both in the world of art and letters and in that of dilettantism and fashion. His first two great pictures, "Dentatus" and "Macbeth", had been dubiously received; his last, the "Judgment of Solomon", with acclamation; he was now busy on one more ambitious than all, "Christ"s Entry into Jerusalem," and while as usual sunk deep in debt, was perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence--for he was in truth a man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of the gifts of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he possessed completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely exalted pitch of feeling and aspiration. "Never," wrote he about this time, "have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me.... They came over me, and shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked G.o.d."
But for all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of genius, the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties which it is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to Haydon: its vital gifts of choice and of creation, its magic power of working on the materials offered it by experience, its felicity of touch and insight, were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an occasional bold conception, or a touch of craftsmanship caught from greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid siege to immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of true heroic art but of rodomontade. Even in drawing from the Elgin marbles, Haydon fails almost wholly to express the beauties which he enthusiastically perceived, and loses every distinction and every subtlety of the original. Very much better is his account of them in words: as indeed Haydon"s chief intellectual power was as an observer, and his best instrument the pen. Readers of his journals and correspondence know with what fluent, effective, if often overcharged force and vividness of style he can relate an experience or touch off a character. But in this, the literary, form of expression also, as often as he flies higher, and tries to become imaginative and impressive, we find only the same self-satisfied void turgidity, and proof of a commonplace mind, as in his paintings.
Take for instance, in relation to Keats himself, Haydon"s profound admonition to him as follows:--"G.o.d bless you, my dear Keats! do not despair; collect incident, study character, read Shakspere, and trust in Providence, and you will do, you must:" or the following precious expansion of an image in one of the poet"s sonnets on the Elgin marbles:--"I know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then pa.s.sing angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects of their seeking"--
But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his temperament, and not his essential commonness of mind and faculty, that impressed his a.s.sociates as they impressed himself. The most distinguished spirits of the time were among his friends. Some of them, like Wordsworth, held by him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others after a while. He was justly proud of his industry and strength of purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit of thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour and protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for deliverance from "pecuniary emergencies", and the like. "I always rose up from my knees," he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, "with a refreshed fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling that sent me streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of life." And he was p.r.o.ne to hold himself up as a model to his friends in both particulars, lecturing them on faith and conduct while he was living, it might be, on their bounty. Experience of these qualities partly alienated Keats from him in the long run. But at first sight Haydon had much to attract the spirits of ardent youth about him as a leader, and he and Keats were mutually delighted when they met. Each struck fire from the other, and they quickly became close friends and comrades. After an evening of high talk at the beginning of their acquaintance, on the 19th of November, 1816, the young poet wrote to Haydon as follows, joining his name with those of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt:--
"Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the following:--
Great spirits now on earth are sojourning: He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, Who on Helvellyn"s summit, wide awake, Catches his freshness from Archangel"s wing: He of the rose, the violet, the spring, The social smile, the chain for Freedom"s sake, And lo! whose steadfastness would never take A meaner sound than Raphael"s whispering.
And other spirits there are standing apart Upon the forehead of the age to come; These, these will give the world another heart, And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings in the human mart?
Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb."
Haydon was not unused to compliments of this kind. The three well-known sonnets of Wordsworth had been addressed to him a year or two before; and about the same time as Keats, John Hamilton Reynolds also wrote him a sonnet of enthusiastic sympathy and admiration. In his reply to Keats he proposed to hand on the above piece to Wordsworth--a proposal which "puts me," answers Keats, "out of breath--you know with what reverence I would send my well-wishes to him." Haydon suggested moreover what I cannot but think the needless and regrettable mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out the words after "workings" in the last line but one. The poet, however, accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision. Two other sonnets, which Keats wrote at this time, after visiting the Elgin marbles with his new friend, are indifferent poetically, but do credit to his sincerity in that he refuses to go into stock raptures on the subject, confessing his inability rightly to grasp or a.n.a.lyse the impressions he had received. By the spring of the following year his intimacy with Haydon was at its height, and we find the painter giving his young friend a standing invitation to his studio in Great Marlborough Street, declaring him dearer than a brother, and praying that their hearts may be buried together.
To complete the group of Keats"s friends in these days, we have to think of two or three others known to him otherwise than through Hunt, and not belonging to the Hunt circle. Among these were the family and friends of a Miss Georgiana Wylie, to whom George Keats was attached. She was the daughter of a navy officer, with wit, sentiment, and an attractive irregular cast of beauty, and Keats on his own account had a great liking for her. On Valentine"s day, 1816, we find him writing, for George to send her, the first draft of the lines beginning, "Hadst thou lived in days of old," afterwards amplified and published in his first volume[20]. Through the Wylies Keats became acquainted with a certain William Haslam, who was afterwards one of his own and his brothers" best friends, but whose character and person remain indistinct to us; and through Haslam with Joseph Severn, then a very young and struggling student of art. Severn was the son of an engraver, and to the despair of his father had determined to be himself a painter. He had a talent also for music, a strong love of literature, and doubtless something already of that social charm which Mr Ruskin describes in him when they first met five-and-twenty years later at Rome[21]. From the moment of their introduction Severn found in Keats his very ideal of the poetical character realized, and attached himself to him with an admiring affection.
A still younger member of the Keats circle was Charles Wells, afterwards author of _Stories after Nature_, and of that singular and strongly imagined Biblical drama or "dramatic poem" of _Joseph and his Brethren_, which having fallen dead in its own day has been resuscitated by a group of poets and critics in ours. Wells had been a school companion of Tom Keats at Enfield, and was now living with his family in Featherstone buildings. He has been described by those who knew him as a st.u.r.dy, boisterous, blue-eyed and red-headed lad, distinguished in those days chiefly by an irrepressible spirit of fun and mischief. He was only about fifteen when he sent to John Keats the present of roses acknowledged in the sonnet beginning, "As late I rambled in the happy fields." A year or two later Keats quarrelled with him for a practical joke played on Tom Keats without due consideration for his state of health; and the _Stories after Nature_, published in 1822, are said to have been written in order to show Keats "that he too could do something."
Thus by his third winter in London our obscurely-born and half-schooled young medical student found himself fairly launched in a world of art, letters, and liberal aspirations, and living in familiar intimacy with some, and friendly acquaintance with others, of the brightest and most ardent spirits of the time. His youth, origin, and temperament alike saved him from anything but a healthy relation of equality with his younger, and deference towards his elder, companions. But the power and the charm of genius were already visibly upon him. Portraits both verbal and other exist in abundance, enabling us to realise his presence and the impression which he made. "The character and expression of his features," it is said, "would arrest even the casual pa.s.senger in the street." A small, handsome, ardent-looking youth--the stature little over five feet: the figure compact and well-turned, with the neck thrust eagerly forward, carrying a strong and shapely head set off by thickly cl.u.s.tering gold-brown hair: the features powerful, finished, and mobile: the mouth rich and wide, with an expression at once combative and sensitive in the extreme: the forehead not high, but broad and strong: the eyebrows n.o.bly arched, and eyes hazel-brown, liquid-flashing, visibly inspired--"an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." "Keats was the only man I ever met who seemed and looked conscious of a high calling, except Wordsworth." These words are Haydon"s, and to the same effect Leigh Hunt:--"the eyes mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a n.o.ble action or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled." It is noticeable that his friends, whenever they begin to describe his looks, go off in this way to tell of the feelings and the soul that shone through them. To return to Haydon:--"he was in his glory in the fields. The humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble; then his eyes flashed, his cheek glowed, and his mouth quivered."
In like manner George Keats:--"John"s eyes moistened, and his lip quivered, at the relation of any tale of generosity or benevolence or n.o.ble daring, or at sights of loveliness or distress;" and a shrewd and honoured survivor of those days, "herself of many poets the frequent theme and valued friend,"--need I name Mrs Procter?--has recorded the impression the same eyes have left upon her, as those of one who had been looking on some glorious sight[22].
In regard to his social qualities, Keats is said, and owns himself, to have been not always perfectly well-conditioned or at his ease in the company of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and unaffected. If the conversation did not interest him he was apt to draw apart, and sit by himself in the window, peering into vacancy; so that the window-seat came to be recognized as his place. His voice was rich and low, and when he joined in discussion, it was usually with an eager but gentle animation, while his occasional bursts of fiery indignation at wrong or meanness bore no undue air of a.s.sumption, and failed not to command respect. His powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are said to have been great, and never used unkindly.
Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have described, Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and trembling, pa.s.sion for the poetic life. His guardian, as we have said, of course was adverse: but his brothers, including George, the practical and sensible one of the family, were warmly with him, as his allusions and addresses to them both in prose and verse, and their own many transcripts from his compositions, show. In August 1816 we find him addressing from Margate a sonnet and a poetical Epistle in terms of the utmost affection and confidence to George. About the same time he gave up his lodgings in St Thomas"s Street to go and live with his brothers in the Poultry; and in November he composes another sonnet on their fraternal fire-side occupations. Poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air.
It was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read: a time of literary excitement, expectancy, and discussion, such as England has not known since. In such an atmosphere Keats soon found himself induced to try his fortune and his powers with the rest. The encouragement of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. It was Leigh Hunt who first brought him before the world in print, publishing without comment, in the _Examiner_ for the 5th of May, 1816, his sonnet beginning, "O Solitude! if I with thee must dwell," and on the 1st of December in the same year the sonnet on Chapman"s Homer. This Hunt accompanied by some prefatory remarks on the poetical promise of its author, a.s.sociating with his name those of Sh.e.l.ley and Reynolds. It was by the praise of Hunt in this paper, says Mr Stephens, that Keats"s fate was sealed. But already the still more ardent encouragement of Haydon, if more was wanted, had come to add fuel to the fire. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three brothers, and in the convivial gatherings of their friends, it was determined that John Keats should put forth a volume of his poems. A sympathetic firm of publishers was found in the Olliers. The volume was printed, and the last proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be furnished at once. Keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet _To Leigh Hunt Esqr._, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion:--
"Glory and Loveliness have pa.s.s"d away; For if we wander out in early morn, No wreathed incense do we see upborne Into the East to meet the smiling day: No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay, In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn The shrine of Flora in her early May.
But there are left delights as high as these, And I shall ever bless my destiny, That in a time when under pleasant trees Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, A leafy luxury, seeing I could please, With these poor offerings, a man like thee."
With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old pagan world, and of grat.i.tude for present friendship, the young poet"s first venture was sent forth in the month of March 1817.
CHAPTER III.
The _Poems_ of 1817.
The note of Keats"s early volume is accurately struck in the motto from Spenser which he prefixed to it:--
"What more felicity can fall to creature Than to enjoy delight with liberty?"
The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered. And the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: delight in the beauty of nature and the vividness of sensation, delight in the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of friendship and affection, in antic.i.p.ations of the future, and in the exercise of the art itself which expresses and communicates all these joys.
We have already glanced, in connection with the occasions which gave rise to them, at a few of the miscellaneous boyish pieces in various metres which are included in the volume, as well as at some of the sonnets. The remaining and much the chief portion of the book consists of half a dozen poems in the rhymed decasyllabic couplet. These had all been written during the period between November 1815 and April 1817, under the combined influence of the older English poets and of Leigh Hunt. The former influence shows itself everywhere in the substance and spirit of the poems, but less, for the present, in their form and style. Keats had by this time thrown off the eighteenth-century stiffness which clung to his earliest efforts, but he had not yet adopted, as he was about to do, a vocabulary and diction of his own full of licences caught from the Elizabethans and from Milton. The chief verbal echoes of Spenser to be found in his first volume are a line quoted from him entire in the epistle to G. F. Mathew, and the use of the archaic "teen" in the stanzas professedly Spenserian. We can indeed trace Keats"s familiarity with Chapman, and especially with one poem of Chapman"s, his translation of the Homeric _Hymn to Pan_, in a predilection for a particular form of abstract descriptive substantive:--
"the pillowy silkiness that rests Full in the speculation of the stars:"--
"Or the quaint mossiness of aged roots:"--
"Ere I can have explored its widenesses."[23]
The only other distinguishing marks of Keats"s diction in this first volume consist, I think, in the use of the Miltonic "sphery," and of an unmeaning coinage of his own, "boundly," with a habit--for which Milton, Spenser, and among the moderns Leigh Hunt all alike furnished him the example--of turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns at his convenience. For the rest, Keats writes in the ordinary English of his day, with much more feeling for beauty of language than for correctness, and as yet without any formed or a.s.sured poetic style. Single lines and pa.s.sages declare, indeed, abundantly his vital poetic faculty and instinct. But they are mixed up with much that only ill.u.s.trates his crudity of taste, and the tendency he at this time shared with Leigh Hunt to mistake the air of chatty, trivial gusto for an air of poetic ease and grace.
In the matter of metre, we can see Keats in these poems making a succession of experiments for varying the regularity of the heroic couplet. In the colloquial _Epistles_, addressed severally to G. F.
Mathew, to his brother George, and to Cowden Clarke, he contents himself with the use of frequent disyllabic rhymes, and an occasional _enjambement_ or "overflow." In the _Specimen of an Induction to a Poem_, and in the fragment of the poem itself, ent.i.tled _Calidore_ (a name borrowed from the hero of Spenser"s sixth book,) as well as in the unnamed piece beginning "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill," which opens the volume, he further modifies the measure by shortening now and then the second line of the couplet, with a lyric beat that may have been caught either from Spenser"s nuptial odes or Milton"s _Lycidas_,--
"Open afresh your round of starry folds, Ye ardent marigolds."