Following these lines, in his early piece, came others disfigured by cloying touches of the kind too common in his love-scenes. Nor are like touches quite absent from the ode: but they are more than compensated by the exquisite freshness of the natural scenery where the mythic lovers are disclosed--"Mid hush"d, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed." What other poet has compressed into a single line so much of the true life and charm of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all his senses at once? Such felicity in compound epithets is by this time habitual with Keats, and of Spenser, with his "sea-shouldering whales," he is now in his own manner the equal. The "azure-lidded sleep" of the maiden in _St Agnes" Eve_ is matched in this ode by the "moss-lain Dryads" and the "soft-conched ear" of Psyche; though the last epithet perhaps jars on us a little with a sense of oddity, like the "cirque-couchant" snake in _Lamia_. For the rest, there is certainly something strained in the turn of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:--
"Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind."
Yet over such difficulties the true lover of poetry will find himself swiftly borne, until he pauses breathless and delighted at the threshold of the sanctuary prepared by the "gardener Fancy," his ear charmed by the glow and music of the verse, with its hurrying pace and artfully iterated vowels towards the close, his mind enthralled by the beauty of the invocation and the imagery.
Less glowing, but of finer conception and more rare poetic value, is the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. Instead of the long and unequal stanza of the _Psyche_, it is written in a regular stanza of five rhymes, the first two arranged in a quatrain, and the second three in a sestet; a plan to which Keats adhered in the rest of his odes, only varying the order of the sestet, and in one instance--the ode to Melancholy--expanding it into a septet. The sight, or the imagination, of a piece of ancient sculpture had set the poet"s mind at work, on the one hand conjuring up the scenes of ancient life and worship which lay behind and suggested the sculptured images; on the other, speculating on the abstract relations of plastic art to life. The opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which flash their own answer upon us out of the darkness of antiquity--interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,--"What men or G.o.ds are these, what maidens loth," &c. The second and third stanzas express with perfect poetic felicity and insight the vital differences between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even richer than the real. Then the questioning begins again, and yields the incomparable choice of pictures,--
"What little town by river or sea sh.o.r.e, Or mountain built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"
In the answering lines--
"And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e"er return,--"
in these lines there seems a dissonance, inasmuch as they speak of the arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own compensations. But it is a dissonance which the attentive reader can easily reconcile for himself: and none but an attentive reader will notice it. Finally, dropping the airy play of the mind backward and forward between the two spheres, the poet consigns the work of ancient skill to the future, to remain,--
"in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say"st, Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--"
thus proclaiming, in the last words, what amidst the gropings of reason and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of Keats"s temper--an immutable law.
It seems clear that no single extant work of antiquity can have supplied Keats with the suggestion for this poem. There exists, indeed, at Holland House an urn wrought with just such a scene of pastoral sacrifice as is described in his fourth stanza[58]: and of course no subject is commoner in Greek relief-sculpture than a Baccha.n.a.lian procession. But the two subjects do not, so far as I know, occur together on any single work of ancient art: and Keats probably imagined his urn by a combination of sculptures actually seen in the British Museum with others known to him only from engravings, and particularly from Piranesi"s etchings. Lord Holland"s urn is duly figured in the _Vasi e Candelabri_ of that admirable master. From the old Leigh Hunt days Keats had been fond of what he calls--
"the pleasant flow Of words at opening a portfolio:"
and in the scene of sacrifice in _Endymion_ (Book L, 136-163) we may perhaps already find a proof of familiarity with this particular print, as well as an antic.i.p.ation of the more masterly poetic rendering of the subject in the ode.
The ode _On Indolence_ stands midway, not necessarily in date of composition, but in scope and feeling, between the two Greek and the two personal odes, as I have above distinguished them. In it Keats again calls up the image of a marble urn, but not for its own sake, only to ill.u.s.trate the guise in which he feigns the allegoric presences of Love, Ambition, and Poetry to have appeared to him in a day-dream. This ode, less highly wrought and more unequal than the rest, contains the imaginative record of a pa.s.sing mood (mentioned also in his correspondence) when the wonted intensity of his emotional life was suspended under the spell of an agreeable physical languor. Well had it been for him had such moods come more frequently to give him rest. Most sensitive among the sons of men, the sources of joy and pain lay close together in his nature: and unsatisfied pa.s.sion kept both sources filled to bursting. One of the attributes he a.s.signs to his enchantress Lamia is a
"sciential brain To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain."
In the fragmentary ode _On Melancholy_ (which has no proper beginning, its first stanza having been discarded) he treats the theme of Beaumont and of Milton in a manner entirely his own: expressing his experience of the habitual interchange and alternation of emotions of joy and pain with a characteristic easy magnificence of imagery and style:--
"Aye, in the very Temple of Delight Veil"d Melancholy has her sovereign shrine, Though known to none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst joy"s grape against his palate fine: His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung."
The same crossing and intermingling of opposite currents of feeling finds expression, together with unequalled touches of the poet"s feeling for nature and romance, in the _Ode to a Nightingale_. Just as his Grecian urn was no single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the particular nightingale he had heard singing in the Hampstead garden that he in his poem invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow her: first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage--a spell which he makes us realize in lines redolent of the southern richness and joy. Then follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind"s tribulations which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid of Bacchus,--Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts her power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be, listening to the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness, by that gift whereby his mind is a match for nature, all the secrets of the season and the night. In this joy he remembers how often the thought of death has seemed welcome to him, and thinks it would be more welcome now than ever. The nightingale would not cease her song--and here, by a breach of logic which is also, I think, a flaw in the poetry, he contrasts the transitoriness of human life, meaning the life of the individual, with the permanence of the song-bird"s life, meaning the life of the type. This last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary romance in the stanza closing with the words "in faery lands forlorn": and then, catching up his own last word, "forlorn," with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he returns to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest dream the poem closes. In this group of the odes it takes rank beside the _Grecian Urn_ in the other. Neither is strictly faultless, but such revealing imaginative insight and such conquering poetic charm, the touch that in striking so lightly strikes so deep, who does not prefer to faultlessness? Both odes are among the veriest glories of our poetry. Both are at the same time too long and too well known to quote. Let us therefore place here, as an example of this cla.s.s of Keats"s work, the ode _To Autumn_, which is the last he wrote, and contains the record of his quiet September days at Winchester. It opens out, indeed, no such far-reaching avenues of thought and feeling as the two last mentioned, but in execution is perhaps the completest of them all. In the first stanza the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of the time are expressed in words so transparent and direct that we almost forget they are words at all, and nature herself and the season seem speaking to us: while in the middle stanza the touches of literary art and Greek personification have an exquisite congruity and lightness.
"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss"d cottage trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel sh.e.l.ls With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o"er-brimm"d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap"d furrow sound asleep, Drows"d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cider-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-- While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies."
To pa.s.s from our poet"s work at this time in the several fields of romance, epic, ballad, and ode, to those in the field of drama, is to pa.s.s from a region of happy and a.s.sured conquest to one of failure, though of failure not unredeemed by auguries of future success, had any future been in store for him. At his age no man has ever been a master in the drama: even by the most powerful intuitive genius, neither human nature nor the difficulties of the art itself can be so early mastered. The manner in which Keats wrote his first play, merely supplying the words to a plot contrived as they went along by a friend of gifts radically inferior to his own, was moreover the least favourable that he could have attempted.
He brought to the task the mastery over poetic colour and diction which we have seen: he brought an impa.s.sioned sentiment of romance, and a mind prepared to enter by sympathy into the hearts of men and women: while Brown contributed his amateur stage-craft, such as it was. But these things were not enough. The power of sympathetic insight had not yet developed in Keats into one of dramatic creation: and the joint work of the friends is confused in order and sequence, and far from masterly in conception. Keats indeed makes the characters speak in lines flashing with all the hues of poetry. But in themselves they have the effect only of puppets inexpertly agitated: Otho, a puppet type of royal dignity and fatherly affection, Ludolph of febrile pa.s.sion and vacillation, Erminia of maidenly purity, Conrad and Auranthe of ambitious l.u.s.t and treachery. At least until the end of the fourth act these strictures hold good. From that point Keats worked alone, and the fifth act, probably in consequence, shows a great improvement. There is a real dramatic effect, of the violent kind affected by the old English drama, in the disclosure of the body of Auranthe, dead indeed, at the moment when Ludolph in his madness vainly imagines himself to have slain her: and some of the speeches in which his frenzy breaks forth remind us strikingly of Marlowe, not only by their pomp of poetry and allusion, but by the tumult of the soul and senses expressed in them. Of the second historical play, _King Stephen_, which Keats began by himself at Winchester, too little was written to afford matter for a safe judgment. The few scenes he finished are not only marked by his characteristic splendour and felicity of phrase: they are full of a spirit of heady action and the stir of battle: qualities which he had not shown in any previous work, and for which we might have doubted his capacity had not this fragment been preserved.
But in the mingling of his soul"s and body"s destinies it had been determined that neither this nor any other of his powers should be suffered to ripen farther upon earth.
CHAPTER VIII.
Return to Wentworth Place--Autumn occupations: The _Cap and Bells_: Recast of _Hyperion_--Growing despondency--Visit of George Keats to England--Attack of Illness in February--Rally in the Spring--Summer in Kentish Town--Publication of the _Lamia_ volume--Relapse--Ordered South--Voyage to Italy--Naples--Rome--Last Days and Death. [October 1819-Feb. 1821.]
We left Keats at Winchester, with _Otho_, _Lamia_, and the _Ode to Autumn_ just written, and with his mind set on trying to face life sanely, and take up arms like other men against his troubles, instead of letting imagination magnify and pa.s.sion exasperate them as heretofore. At his request Dilke took for him a lodging in his own neighbourhood in Westminster (25 College Street), and here Keats came on the 8th of October to take up his quarters. But alas! his blood proved traitor to his will: and the plan of life and literary work in London broke down at once on trial. The gain of health and composure which he thought he had made at Winchester proved illusory, or at least could only be maintained at a distance from the great perturbing cause. Two days after his return he went to Hampstead--"into the fire"--and in a moment the flames had seized him more fiercely than ever. It was the first time he had seen his mistress for four months. He found her kind, and from that hour was utterly pa.s.sion"s slave again. In the solitude of his London lodging he found that he could not work nor rest nor fix his thoughts. He must send her a line, he writes to f.a.n.n.y Brawne two days later, "and see if that will a.s.sist in dismissing you from my mind for ever so short a time. Upon my soul I can think of nothing else.... I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again--my life seems to stop there--I see no further. You have absorb"d me." A three days" visit at her mother"s house, followed by another of a day or two at the Dilkes", ended in his giving up all resistance to the spell. Within ten days, apparently, of his return from Winchester, he had settled again at Hampstead under Brown"s roof, next door to the home of his joy and torment. He writes with a true foreboding: "I shall be able to do nothing. I should like to cast the die for Love or Death.--I have no patience with anything else."
It was for death that the die was cast, and from the date of his return to Wentworth Place in October, 1819, begins the melancholy closing chapter of Keats"s history. Of the triple flame which was burning away his life, the flame of genius, of pa.s.sion, and of disease, while the last kept smouldering in secret, the second burnt every day more fiercely, and the first began from this time forth to sink. Not that he was idle during the ensuing season of autumn and early winter; but the work he did was marked both by infirmity of purpose and failure of power. For the present he determined not to publish _Lamia_, _Isabella_, and the other poems written since _Endymion_. He preferred to await the result of Brown"s attempt to get _Otho_ brought on the stage, thinking, no doubt justly, that a success in that field would help to win a candid hearing for his poetry. In the meantime the scoffs of the party critics had brought him so low in estimation that Brown in sending in the play thought it best to withhold his friend"s name. The great hope of the authors was that Kean would see an opportunity for himself in the part of Ludolph. In this they were not disappointed: the play was accepted: but Elliston, the manager, proposing to keep it back till the next season or the next but one, Keats and Brown objected to the delay, and about Christmas transferred the offer of their MS. to Covent Garden, where Macready, under Harris"s management, was at this time beginning to act the leading parts. It was after a while returned unopened, and with that the whole matter seems to have dropped.
In the meanwhile tragedy was still the goal towards which Keats bent his hopes. "One of my ambitions," he had written to Bailey from Winchester, "is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting." And now, in a letter to Mr Taylor of Nov. 17, he says that to write a few fine plays is still his greatest ambition, when he does feel ambitious, which is very seldom. The little dramatic skill he may as yet have, however badly it might show in a drama, would, he conceives, be sufficient for a poem; and what he wishes to do next is "to diffuse the colouring of _St Agnes" Eve_ throughout a poem in which character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery." Two or three such poems would be, he thinks, the best _gradus_ to the _Parna.s.sum altissimum_ of true dramatic writing. Meantime, he is for the moment engaged on a task of a different nature. "As the marvellous is the most enticing, and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers, I have been endeavouring to persuade myself to untether Fancy, and to let her manage for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all." The piece to which Keats here alludes is evidently the satirical fairy poem of the _Cap and Bells_, on which we know him to have been at this time busy. Writing of the autumn days immediately following their return to Wentworth Place, Brown says:--
"By chance our conversation turned on the idea of a comic faery poem in the Spenser stanza, and I was glad to encourage it. He had not composed many stanzas before he proceeded in it with spirit. It was to be published under the feigned authorship of "Lucy Vaughan Lloyd," and to bear the t.i.tle of the _Cap and Bells_, or, which he preferred, the _Jealousies_. This occupied his mornings pleasantly. He wrote it with the greatest facility; in one instance I remember having copied (for I copied as he wrote) as many as twelve stanzas before dinner[59]."
Excellent friend as Brown was to Keats, he was not the most judicious adviser in matters of literature, and the attempt made in the _Cap and Bells_ to mingle with the strain of fairy fancy a strain of worldly flippancy and satire was one essentially alien to Keats"s nature. As long as health and spirits lasted, he was often full, as we have seen, of pleasantry and nonsense: but his wit was essentially amiable[60], and he was far too tender-hearted ever to be a satirist. Moreover the spirit of poetry in him was too intense and serious to work hand-in-hand with the spirit of banter, as poetry and banter had gone hand-in-hand in some of the metrical romances of the Italian Renaissance, and again, with unprecedented dexterity and brilliance, in the early cantos of _Don Juan_. It was partly the influence of the facetious Brown, who was a great student of Pulci and Boiardo, partly that of his own recent Italian studies, and partly the dazzling example of Byron"s success, that now induced Keats to make an attempt in the same dual strain. Having already employed the measure most fit for such an attempt, the _ottava rima_ of the Italians, in his serious poem of _Isabella_, he now, by what seems an odd technical perversity, adopted for his comic poem the grave Spenserian stanza, with its sustained and involved rhymes and its long-drawn close.
Working thus in a vein not truly his own, and hampered moreover by his choice of metre, Keats nevertheless manages his transitions from grave to gay with a light hand, and the movement of the _Cap and Bells_ has much of his characteristic suppleness and grace. In other respects the poem is not a success. The story, which appears to have been one of his own and Brown"s invention, turned on the perverse loves of a fairy emperor and a fairy princess of the East. The two are unwillingly betrothed, each being meanwhile enamoured of a mortal. The eighty-eight stanzas, which were all that Keats wrote of the poem, only carry us as far as the flight of the emperor Elfinan for England, which takes place at the moment when his affianced bride alights from her aerial journey to his capital. Into the Elfinan part of the story Keats makes it clear that he meant somehow to weave in the same tale which had been in his mind when he began the fragment of _St Mark"s Eve_ at the beginning of the year,--the tale of an English Bertha living in a minster city and beguiled in some way through the reading of a magic book. With this and other purely fanciful elements of the story are mixed up satirical allusions to the events of the day.
It was in this year, 1819, that the quarrels between the Prince Regent and his wife were drawing to a head: the public mind was full of the subject: and the general sympathy was vehemently aroused on the side of the scandalous lady in opposition to her thrice scandalous husband. The references to these royal quarrels and intrigues in the _Cap and Bells_ are general rather than particular, although here and there individual names and characters are glanced at: as when "Esquire Biancopany" stands manifestly, as Mr Forman has pointed out, for Whitbread. But the social and personal satire of the piece is in truth aimless and weak enough. As Keats had not the heart, so neither had he the worldly experience, for this kind of work; and beside the blaze of the Byronic wit and devilry his raillery seems but child"s play. Where the fun is of the purely fanciful and fairy kind, he shows abundance of adroitness and invention, and in pa.s.sages not humorous is sometimes really himself, his imagination becoming vivid and alert, and his style taking on its own happy light and colour,--but seldom for more than a stanza or half-stanza at a time.
Besides his morning task in Brown"s company on the _Cap and Bells_, Keats had other work on hand during this November and December. "In the evenings," writes Brown, "at his own desire, he occupied a separate apartment, and was deeply engaged in re-modelling the fragment of _Hyperion_ into the form of a Vision." The result of this attempt, which has been preserved, is of a singular and pathetic interest in Keats"s history. We have seen how, in the previous August, he had grown discontented with the style and diction of _Hyperion_, as being too artificial and Miltonic. Now, in the decline of his powers, he took the poem up again[61], and began to re-write and greatly amplify it; partly, it would seem, through a mere relapse into his old fault of overloading, partly through a desire to give expression to thoughts and feelings which were pressing on his mind. His new plan was to relate the fall of the t.i.tans, not, as before, in direct narrative, but in the form of a vision revealed and interpreted to him by a G.o.ddess of the fallen race. The reader remembers how he had broken off his work on _Hyperion_ at the point where Mnemosyne is enkindling the brain of Apollo with the inspiration of her ancient wisdom. Following a clue which he had found in a Latin book of mythology he had lately bought[62], he now identifies this Greek Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, with the Roman Moneta; and (being possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome was not far from that of Saturn) makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess and guardian of Saturn"s temple. His vision takes him first into a grove or garden of delicious fruits, having eaten of which he sinks into a slumber, and awakes to find himself on the floor of a huge primeval temple. Presently a voice, the voice of Moneta, whose form he cannot yet see for the fumes of incense, summons him to climb the steps leading to an image beside which she is offering sacrifice. Obeying her with difficulty, he questions her concerning the mysteries of the place, and learns from her, among other knowledge, that he is standing in the temple of Saturn.
Then she withdraws the veils from her face, at sight of which he feels an irresistible desire to learn her thoughts; and thereupon finds himself conveyed in a trance by her side to the ancient scene of Saturn"s overthrow. "Deep in the shady sadness of a vale," &c.,--from this point Keats begins to weave into the new tissue of his _Vision_ the text of the original _Hyperion_; with alterations which are in almost all cases for the worse. Neither does the new portion of his work well match the old.
Side by side with impressive pa.s.sages, it contains others where both rhythm and diction flag, and in comparison depends for its beauty far more on single lines and pa.s.sages, and less on sustained effects. Keats has indeed imagined nothing richer or purer than the feast of fruits at the opening of the _Vision_, and of supernatural presences he has perhaps conjured up none of such melancholy beauty and awe as that of the priestess when she removes her veils. But the especial interest of the poem lies in the light which it throws on the inward distresses of his mind, and on the conception he had by this time come to entertain of the poet"s character and lot. When Moneta bids him mount the steps to her side, she warns him that if he fails to do so he is bound to perish utterly where he stands. In fact he all but dies before he reaches the stair, but reviving, ascends and learns from her the meaning of the ordeal:--
"None can usurp this height," returned that shade, "But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest.
All else who find a haven in the world, Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, If by a chance into this fane they come, Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half."
"Are there not thousands in the world," said I, Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade, "Who love their fellows even to the death, Who feel the giant agony of the world, And more, like slaves to poor humanity, Labour for mortal good? I sure should see Other men here, but I am here alone."
"Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries,"
Rejoin"d that voice; "they are no dreamers weak; They seek no wonder but the human face, No music but a happy-noted voice: They come not here, they have no thought to come; And thou art here, for thou art less than they.
What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself: think of the earth: What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?
What haven? Every creature hath its home, Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low-- The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.
Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shared, Such things as thou art are admitted oft Into like gardens thou didst pa.s.s erewhile, And suffer"d in these temples--"[63].
Tracing the process of Keats"s thought through this somewhat obscure imagery,--the poet, he means, is one who to indulge in dreams withdraws himself from the wholesome activities of ordinary men. At first he is lulled to sleep by the sweets of poetry (the fruits of the garden): awakening, he finds himself on the floor of a solemn temple, with Mnemosyne, the mother and inspirer of song, enthroned all but inaccessibly above him. If he is a trifler indifferent to the troubles of his fellow men, he is condemned to perish swiftly and be forgotten: he is suffered to approach the G.o.ddess, to commune with her and catch her inspiration, only on condition that he shares all those troubles and makes them his own. And even then, his portion is far harder and less honourable than that of common men. In the conception Keats here expresses of the human mission and responsibility of his art there is nothing new. Almost from the first dawning of his ambition, he had looked beyond the mere sweets of poetry towards--
"a n.o.bler life, Where I may find the agonies, the strife Of human hearts."
What is new is the bitterness with which he speaks of the poet"s lot even at its best.
"Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve,"
--through what a circle must the spirit of Keats, when this bitter cry broke from him, have travelled since the days, only three years before, when he was never tired of singing by antic.i.p.ation the joys and glories of the poetic life:--
"These are the living pleasures of the bard, But richer far posterity"s award.
What shall he murmur with his latest breath, When his proud eye looks through the film of death?"--
His present cry in its bitterness is in truth a cry not so much of the spirit as of the flesh, or rather of the spirit vanquished by the flesh.
The wasting of his vital powers by latent disease was turning all his sensations and emotions into pain--at once darkening the shadow of impending poverty, increasing the natural importunity of ill-boding instincts at his heart, and exasperating into agony the unsatisfied cravings of his pa.s.sion. In verses at this time addressed, though doubtless not shown, to his mistress, he exclaims once and again in tones like this:--
"Where shall I learn to get my peace again?"--