Chapter V: April-December 1817: Work on Endymion (1)

'Poems' fall flat--Reviews by Hunt and others--Change of
publishers--New friends: Bailey and Woodhouse--Begins _Endymion_ at
Carisbrooke--Moves to Margate--Hazlitt and Southey--Hunt and
Haydon--Ambition and self-doubt--Stays at Canterbury--Joins brothers
at Hampstead--Dilke and Brown--Visits Bailey at Oxford--Work on
_Endymion_--Bailey's testimony--Talk on Wordsworth--Letters from
Oxford--To his sister Fanny--To Jane and J.H. Reynolds--Return to
Hampstead--Friends at loggerheads--Stays at Burford
Bridge--Correspondence--Confessions--Speculations--Imagination and
truth--Composes various lyrics--'O love me truly'--'In drear-nighted
December'--Dryden and Swinburne--_Endymion_ finished--An Autumnal
close--Return to Hampstead.

Keats's first volume had been launched, to quote the words of Cowden Clarke, 'amid the cheers and fond anticipations of all his circle. Everyone of us expected (and not unreasonably) that it would create a sensation in the literary world.' The magniloquent Haydon words these expectations after his manner:--'I have read your _Sleep and Poetry_--it is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from their occupations and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that _will_ follow.' Sonnets poured in on the occasion, and not from intimates only. I have already quoted (p. 75) one which Reynolds, familiar with the contents of the forthcoming book, wrote a few days before its publication to welcome it and at the same time to congratulate Keats on his sonnet written in Clarke's copy of the _Floure and the Lefe_. Leigh Hunt, always delighted to repay compliment with compliment, replied effusively in kind to the sonnet in which Keats had dedicated the volume to him. Richard Woodhouse, of whom we shall soon hear more but who was as yet a stranger, in the closing lines of a sonnet addressed to Apollo, welcomed Keats as the last born son of that divinity and the herald of his return to lighten the poetic darkness of the land:--

Have these thy glories perish'd? or in scorn
Of thankless man hath thy race ceased to quire?
O no! thou hear'st! for lo! the beamed morn
Chases our night of song: and, from the lyre
Waking long dormant sounds, Keats, thy last born,
To the glad realm proclaims the coming of his sire.

Sonnets are not often addressed by publishers to their clients: but one has been found in the handwriting of Charles Ollier, and almost certainly composed by him, expressing admiration for Keats's work. The brothers Ollier, it will be remembered, were Shelley's publishers, and for a while also Leigh Hunt's and Lamb's, and Charles was the poetry-loving and enthusiastic brother of the two, and himself a writer of some accomplishment in prose and verse. But in point of fact, outside the immediate Leigh Hunt circle, the volume made extremely little impression, and the public was as far as possible from being roused from its occupations or made tremble. 'Alas!' continues Cowden Clarke, 'the book might have emerged in Timbuctoo with far stronger chance of fame and appreciation. The whole community as if by compact, seemed determined to know nothing about it.'

Clarke here somewhat exaggerates the facts. Leigh Hunt kept his own review of the volume back for some three months, very likely with the just idea that praise from him might prejudice Keats rather than serve him. At length it appeared, in three numbers of the _Examiner_ for June and July, the first number setting forth the aims and tendencies of the new movement in poetry with a conscious clearness such as to those taking part in a collective, three-parts instinctive effort of the kind comes usually in retrospect only and not in the thick of the struggle. In the second and third notices Hunt speaks of the old graces of poetry reappearing, warns 'this young writer of genius' against disproportionate detail and a too revolutionary handling of metre, and after quotation winds up by calling the volume 'a little luxuriant heap of

Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.'

Two at least of the established critical reviews noticed the book at length, Constable's _Scots and Edinburgh Magazine_, and the _Eclectic Review_, the chief organ of lettered nonconformity, owned and edited by the busy dissenting poet and bookseller Josiah Conder. Both criticisms are of the preaching and admonishing kind then almost universally in fashion. The Scottish reviewer recognizes in the new poet a not wholly unsuccessful disciple of Spenser, but warns him against 'the appalling doom which awaits the faults of mannerism or the ambition of a sickly refinement,' and with reference to his association with the person and ideas of Hazlitt and Hunt declares that 'if Mr Keats does not forthwith cast off the uncleanness of this school, he will never make his way to the truest strain of poetry in which, taking him by himself, it appears he might succeed.' The preachment of the _Eclectic_ is still more pompous and superior. There are mild words of praise for some of the sonnets, but none for that on Chapman's Homer. _Sleep and Poetry_, declares the critic, would seem to show of the writer that 'he is indeed far gone, beyond the reach of the efficacy of either praise or censure, in affectation and absurdity. Seriously, however, we regret that a young man of vivid imagination and fine talents should have fallen into so bad hands as to have been flattered into the resolution to publish verses, of which a few years hence he will be glad to escape from the remembrance.'

Notices such as this could not help a new writer to fame or his book to sale. But before they appeared Keats and his brothers, or they for him, had begun to fret at the failure of the volume and to impute it, as authors and their friends will, to some mishandling by the publishers. George in John's absence wrote to the Olliers taking them to task pretty roundly, and received the often-quoted reply drafted, let us hope, not by the sonneteer but by James Ollier, his business brother, and alleging of the work that--

By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us
have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many
cases offered to take it back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule
which has, time after time, been showered upon it. In fact, it was
only on Saturday last that we were under the mortification of having
our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman, who
told us he considered it 'no better than a take in.'

Meanwhile Keats had found other publishers ready to take up his next work, and destined to become his staunch and generous friends. These were Messrs Taylor and Hessey of 93 Fleet Street. John Taylor, the chief partner, was a man of high character and considerable attainments, who had come up from Nottinghamshire to open a business in London ten years earlier. He was already noted as an authority on Junius and was to be a little later the editor as well as publisher of the _London Magazine_, and the good friend and frequent entertainer (in the back parlour of the publishing house in Fleet Street) of his most distinguished contributors. How and through whom Keats was introduced to his firm is not quite clear: probably through Benjamin Bailey, a new acquaintance whom we know to have been a friend of Taylor's. Bailey was an Oxford man five years older than Keats. He had been an undergraduate of Trinity and was now staying up at Magdalen Hall to read for orders. He was an ardent student of poetry and general literature as well as of theology, a devout worshipper of Milton, and scarcely less of Wordsworth, with whom he had some personal acquaintance. Of his appetite for books Keats wrote when they had come to know each other well: 'I should not like to be pages in your way; when in a tolerably hungry mood you have no mercy. Your teeth are the Rock Tarpeian down which you capsize epic poems like mad. I would not for forty shillings be Coleridge's Lays [i.e. _Lay Sermons_] in your way.' Bailey was intimate with John Hamilton Reynolds and his family, and at this time a suitor for the hand of his sister Marianne. In the course of the winter 1816-17 Reynolds had written to him enthusiastically of Keats's poetical promise and personal charm. When at the beginning of March Keats's volume came out, Bailey was much struck, and on a visit to London called to make the new poet's acquaintance. Though it was not until a few months later that this acquaintance ripened into close friendship, it may well have been Bailey who recommended Keats and Taylor to each other.

Relations of business or friendship with Taylor necessarily involved relations with Richard Woodhouse, a lettered and accomplished young solicitor of twenty-nine who was an intimate friend of Taylor's and at this time apparently the regular reader and adviser to the firm. Woodhouse was sprung from an old landed stock in Herefordshire, some of whose members were now in the wine-trade (his father, it seems, was owner or part owner of the White Hart at Bath). He had been educated at Eton but not at the university: his extant correspondence, as well as notes and version-books in his hand, show him to have been a good linguist in Spanish and Italian and a man of remarkably fine literary taste and judgment. He afterwards held a high position as a solicitor and was one of the founders of the Law Life Insurance Society.

These three new friendships, with Benjamin Bailey, John Taylor, and Richard Woodhouse, formed during the six weeks between the publication of his book (March 3) and the mid-April following, turned out to be among the most valuable of Keats's life, and were the best immediate results the issue of his first volume brought him. During this interval he and his brothers were lodging at 17 Cheapside, having left their old quarters in the Poultry. Some time in March it was decided, partly on Haydon's urging, that John should for the sake of quiet and self-improvement go and spend some time by himself in the country, and try to get to work upon his great meditated _Endymion_ poem. He writes as much to Reynolds, concluding with an adaptation from Falstaff expressive of anxiety for the health of some of those dear to him--probably his brother Tom and James Rice:--

My brothers are anxious that I should go by myself into the
country--they have always been extremely fond of me, and now that
Haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that I should be alone to
improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me
continually for a great good which I hope will follow. So I shall soon
be out of Town. You must soon bring all your present troubles to a
close, and so must I, but we must, like the Fox, prepare for a fresh
swarm of flies. Banish money--Banish sofas--Banish Wine--Banish Music;
but right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health--Banish
Health and banish all the world.

On the 14th of April Keats took the night mail for Southampton, whence he writes next day a lively letter to his brothers. By the 17th, having looked at Shanklin and decided against it, he was installed in a lodging at Carisbrooke. Writing to Reynolds he gives the reasons for his choice, mentioning at the same time that he is feeling rather nervous from want of sleep, and enclosing the admirable sonnet _On the Sea_ which he has just composed--

It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, etc.--

It was the intense haunting of the lines in the scene on Dover Cliff in _King Lear_ beginning 'Do you not hear the sea,' which moved him, he says, to this effort. He was reading and re-reading his Shakespeare with passion, and phrases from the plays come up continually in his letters, not only, as in the following extract, in the form of set quotations, but currently, as though they were part of his own mind and being. Having found in the lodging-house passage an engraved head of Shakespeare which pleased him and hung it up in his room (his landlady afterwards made him a present of it), he bethinks him of the approaching anniversary, April 23:--

I'll tell you what--on the 23d was Shakespeare born. Now if I should
receive a letter from you, and another from my Brothers on that day
'twould be a parlous good thing. Whenever you write say a word or two
on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you,
which must be continually happening, notwithstanding that we read the
same Play forty times--for instance, the following from the Tempest
never struck me so forcibly as at present,

Urchins
_Shall, for the vast of night that they may work_,
All exercise on thee--

How can I help bringing to your mind the line--

In the dark backward and abysm of time.

I find I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal Poetry--half the
day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has
made me a Leviathan I had become all in a Tremble from not having
written anything of late--the Sonnet over-leaf did me good. I slept
the better last night for it--this Morning, however, I am nearly as
bad again. Just now I opened Spenser, and the first Lines I saw were
these--

The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought,
And is with child of glorious great intent,
Can never rest until it forth have brought
Th' eternal brood of glory excellent.

'I shall forthwith begin my _Endymion_,' he adds, and looks forward to reading some of it out, when his correspondent comes to visit him, in a nook near the castle which he has already marked for the purpose.

But Haydon's prescription of solitude turned out the worst Keats could well have followed in the then state of his mind, fermenting with a thousand restless thoughts and inchoate imaginations and with the feverish conflict between ambition and self-distrust. The result at any rate was that he passed the time, to use his own words, 'in continual burning of thought, as an only resource,' and what with that and lack of proper food felt himself after a week or ten days 'not over capable in his upper stories' and in need of change and companionship. He made straight for his last year's lodging at Margate and got Tom to join him there. Thence in the second week of May he writes a long letter to Hunt and another to Haydon. To Hunt he criticizes some points in the last number of the _Examiner_, and especially, in his kind-hearted, well-conditioned way, deprecates a certain vicious allusion to grey hairs in an attack of Hazlitt upon Southey. Later on we shall have to tell of the critical savagery of _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_, now long since branded and proverbial. But it should be borne in mind, as it by no means always is, that the Tories were far from having the savagery to themselves. When Hazlitt, for one, chose to strike on the liberal side, he could match Gifford or Lockhart or Wilson or Maginn with their own weapons. To realize the controversial atmosphere of the time, here is a passage, and not the fiercest, from the Hazlitt article in which Keats found too venomous a sting. Southey's first love, rails Hazlitt, had been the Republic, his second was Legitimacy, 'her more fortunate and wealthy rival':--

He is becoming uxorious in his second matrimonial connection; and
though his false Duessa has turned out a very witch, a murderess, a
sorceress, perjured, and a harlot, drunk with insolence, mad with
power, a griping rapacious wretch, bloody, luxurious, wanton,
malicious, not sparing steel, or poison, or gold, to gain her
ends--bringing famine, pestilence, and death in her train--infecting
the air with her thoughts, killing the beholders with her looks,
claiming mankind as her property, and using them as her
slaves--driving every thing before her, and playing the devil wherever
she comes, Mr Southey sticks to her in spite of everything, and for
very shame lays his head in her lap, paddles with the palms of her
hands, inhales her hateful breath, leers in her eyes and whispers in
her ears, calls her little fondling names, Religion, Morality, and
Social Order, takes for his motto,

Be to her faults a little blind,
Be to her virtues very kind--

sticks close to his filthy bargain, and will not give her up, because
she keeps him, and he is down in her will. Faugh!

It is fair to note that the mistress thus depicted as Southey's is an allegorical being, while the Blackwood scurrilities were often directly personal.

After asking how Hunt's own new poem, _The Nymphs_, is getting on, Keats tells how he has been writing some of _Endymion_ every day the last fortnight, except travelling days, and how thoughts of the greatness of his ambition and the uncertainty of his powers have thrown him into a fit of gloom; hinting at such moods of bleak and blank despondency as we shall find now and again figuratively described in the text of _Endymion_ itself.

I have asked myself so often why I should be a poet more than other
men, seeing how great a thing it is,... that at last the idea has
grown so monstrously beyond my seeming power of attainment that the
other day I nearly consented with myself to drop into a Phaeton ... I
see nothing but continual uphill journeying. Now is there anything
more unpleasant than to be so journeying and to miss the goal at last?
But I intend to whistle all those cogitations into the sea, where I
hope they will breed storms enough to block up all exit from Russia.
Does Shelley go on telling strange stories of the deaths of kings?[1]
Tell him there are strange stories of the deaths of poets. Some have
died before they were conceived.

The same evening Keats begins to answer a letter of encouragement and advice he had just had from Haydon. This is the letter of Haydon's from which I have already quoted the passage about the efficacy of prayer as Haydon had experienced it. Perfectly sincere and genuinely moved, he can never for a minute continuously steer clear of rant and fustian and self-praise at another's expense.

Never despair, he goes on, while the path is open to you. By habitual
exercise you will have habitual intercourse and constant
companionship; and at every want turn to the Great Star of your hopes
with a delightful confidence that will never be disappointed. I love
you like my own brother: Beware, for God's sake, of the delusions and
sophistications that are ripping up the talents and morality of our
friend.[2] He will go out of the world the victim of his own weakness
and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of his
enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to
support injured by his own neglect of character. I wish you would come
up to town for a day or two that I may put your head in my picture. I
have rubbed in Wordsworth's, and advanced the whole. God bless you, my
dear Keats! do not despair; collect incident, study character, read
Shakespeare, and trust in Providence, and you will do, you must.

Keats in answer quotes the opening speech of the King in _Love's Labour's Lost_,--

Let Fame, that all pant after in their lives
Live registered upon our brazen tombs, etc.,

saying that he could not bear to think he had not the right to couple his own name with Haydon's in such a forecast, and acknowledging the occasional moods of depression which have put him into such a state of mind as to read over his own lines and hate them, though he has picked up heart again when he found some from Pope's Homer which Tom read out to him seem 'like Mice' to his own. He takes encouragement also from the notion that has visited him lately of some good genius--can it be Shakespeare?--presiding over him. Continuing the next day, he is downhearted again at hearing from George of money difficulties actual and prospective. 'You tell me never to despair--I wish it was as easy for me to deserve the saying--truth is I have a horrid morbidity of Temperament which has shown itself at intervals it is I have no doubt the greatest Enemy and stumbling block I have to fear--I may even say it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment.' Then referring to Haydon's warning in regard to Hunt, he goes half way in agreement and declares he would die rather than be deceived about his own achievements as Hunt is. 'There is no greater sin after the seven deadly,' he says, 'than to flatter oneself into the idea of being a great poet: the comfort is, such a crime must bring its own penalty, and if one is a self-deluder indeed accounts must one day be balanced.'

In the same week, moved no doubt by the difficulties George had mentioned about touching the funds due from their grandmother's estate, Keats writes to Taylor and Hessey, in a lively and familiar strain showing the terms of confidence on which he already stood with them, asking them to advance him an instalment of the agreed price for _Endymion_. He mentions in this letter that he is tired of Margate (he had already to another correspondent called it a 'treeless affair') and means to move to Canterbury. At this point there occurs an unlucky gap in Keats's correspondence. We know that he and Tom went to Canterbury from Margate as planned, but we do not know exactly when, nor how long he stayed there, nor what work he did (except that he was certainly going on with the first book of _Endymion_), nor what impressions he received. It was his first visit to a cathedral city, and few in the world, none in England, are more fitted to impress. Chichester and Winchester he came afterwards to know, Winchester well and with affection; but it was with thoughts of Canterbury in his mind that he planned, some two years later, first a serious and then a frivolous verse romance having an English cathedral town for scene (_The Eve of St Mark_, _The Cap and Bells_). The heroine of both was to have been a maiden of Canterbury called Bertha; not, of course, the historic Frankish princess Bertha, daughter of Haribert and wife of Ethelbert king of Kent, who converted her husband and prepared his people for Christianity before the landing of Saint Augustin, and who sleeps in the ancient church of Saint Martin outside the walls: not she, but some damsel of the city, named after her in later days, whom Keats had heard or read of or invented,--I would fain know which; but I have found no external evidence of his studies or doings during this spring stay at Canterbury, and his correspondence is, as I have said, a blank.

Some time in June he returned and the three brothers were together again: not now in City lodgings but in new quarters to which they had migrated in Well Walk, Hampstead. Their landlord was one Bentley the postman, with whom they seem to have got on well except that Keats occasionally complains of the 'young carrots,' his children, now for making a 'horrid row,' now for smelling of damp worsted stockings. The lack of letters continues through these first summer months at Hampstead. The only exception is a laughingly apologetic appeal to his new publishers for a further advance of money, dated June 10th and ending with the words,--'I am sure you are confident of my responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me.' For the rest, indirect evidence allows us to picture Keats in these months as working regularly at _Endymion_, having now reached the second book, and as living socially, not without a certain amount of convivial claret-drinking and racket, in the company of his brothers and of his friends and theirs. Leigh Hunt was still close by in the Vale of Health, and both in his circle and in Haydon's London studio Keats was as welcome as ever. Reynolds and Rice were still his close intimates, and Reynolds's sisters in Lamb's Conduit Street almost like sisters of his own. He was scarcely less at home in the family of his sister-in-law that was to be, Georgiana Wylie. The faithful Severn and the faithful Haslam came up eagerly whenever they could to join the Hampstead party. An acquaintance he had already formed at Hunt's with the Charles Dilkes and their friend Charles Brown, who lived as next-door neighbours at Wentworth Place, a double block of houses of their own building in a garden at the foot of the Heath, now ripened into friendship: that with Dilke rapidly, that with Brown, a Scotsman who by his own account held cannily aloof from Keats at first for fear of being thought to push, more slowly.

Charles Wentworth Dilke, by profession a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, by predilection a keen and painstaking literary critic and antiquary, had been stimulated by the charm of Lamb's famous volume of _Specimens_ to work at the old English dramatic poets, and had recently (being now twenty-seven) brought out a set of volumes in continuation of Dodsley's _Old Plays_. In matters political and social he was something of a radical doctrinaire and 'Godwin-perfectibility man' (the label is Keats's), loving decision and positiveness in all things and being therein the very opposite of Keats, who by rooted instinct as well as choice allowed his mind to cherish uncertainties and to be a thoroughfare for all thoughts (the phrase is again his own). There were many but always friendly discussions between Keats and Dilke, and their mutual regard never failed. Charles Brown, Dilke's contemporary, schoolfellow, and close friend, was a man of Scottish descent born in Lambeth, who had in early youth joined a business set up by an elder brother in Petersburg. The business quickly failing, he had returned to London and after some years of struggle inherited a modest competence from another brother. A lively, cultivated, moderately successful amateur in literature, journalism, and drama, he was in person bald and spectacled, and portly beyond his years though active and robust; in habits much of a trencher-man ('a huge eater' according to the abstemious Trelawny) and something of a _viveur_ within his means; exactly strict in money matters, but otherwise far from a precisian in life or conversation; an ardent friend and genial companion, though cherishing some fixed unreasonable aversions: in a word, a truly Scottish blend of glowing warm-heartedness and 'thrawn' prejudice, of frank joviality and cautious dealing.

It was in these same weeks of June or July 1817, soon after the beginning of the Oxford vacation, that Benjamin Bailey again came to town and sought after and learned to delight in Keats's company. He meant to go back and read at Oxford for the latter part of the vacation, and invited Keats to spend some weeks with him there. Keats accepted, and the visit, lasting from soon after mid August until the end of September, proved a happiness alike to host and guest. At this point our dearth of documents ceases. Bailey's memoranda, though not put on paper till thirty years later, are vivid and informing, and Keats's own correspondence during the visit is fairly full. I will take Bailey's recollections first, and give them in his own words, seeing that they paint the writer almost as well as his subject; omitting only passages that seem to drag or interrupt. First comes the impression Keats made on him at the time of their introduction in the spring, and then his account of the days they spent together in Oxford.

I was delighted with the naturalness and simplicity of his character,
and was at once drawn to him by his winning and indeed affectionate
manner towards those with whom he was himself pleased. Nor was his
personal appearance the least charm of a first acquaintance with the
young poet. He bore, along with the strong impress of genius, much
beauty of feature and countenance. His hair was beautiful--a fine
brown, rather than auburn, I think, and if you placed your hand upon
his head, the silken curls felt like the rich plumage of a bird. The
eye was full and fine, and softened into tenderness, or beamed with a
fiery brightness, according to the current of his thoughts and
conversation. Indeed the form of his head was like that of a fine
Greek statue:--and he realized to my mind the youthful Apollo, more
than any head of a living man whom I have known.

At the commencement of the long vacation I was again in London, on my
way to another part of the country: and it was my intention to return
to Oxford early in the vacation for the purpose of reading. I saw much
of Keats. And I invited him to return with me to Oxford, and spend as
much time as he could afford with me in the silence and solitude of
that beautiful place during the absence of the numerous members and
students of the University. He accepted my offer, and we returned
together. I think in August 1817. It was during this visit, and in my
room, that he wrote the third book of _Endymion_.... His mode of
composition is best described by recounting our habits of study for
one day during the month he visited me at Oxford. He wrote, and I
read, sometimes at the same table, and sometimes at separate desks or
tables, from breakfast to the time of our going out for
exercise,--generally two or three o'clock. He sat down to his
task,--which was about 50 lines a day,--with his paper before him, and
wrote with as much regularity, and apparently as much ease, as he
wrote his letters.... Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task,
but not often: and he would make it up another day. But he never
forced himself. When he had finished his writing for the day, he
usually read it over to me: and he read or wrote letters until we went
for a walk. This was our habit day by day. The rough manuscript was
written off daily, and with few erasures.

I remember very distinctly, though at this distance of time, his
reading of a few passages; and I almost think I hear his voice, and
see his countenance. Most vivid is my recollection of the following
passage of the finest affecting story of the old man, Glaucus, which
he read to me immediately after its composition:--

The old man raised his hoary head and saw
The wildered stranger--seeming not to see,
The features were so lifeless. Suddenly
He woke as from a trance; his snow white brows
Went arching up, _and like two magic ploughs
Furrowed deep wrinkles in his forehead large,
Which kept as fixedly as rocky marge,
Till round his withered lips had gone a smile._

The lines I have italicised, are those which then forcibly struck me
as peculiarly fine, and to my memory have 'kept as fixedly as rocky
marge.' I remember his upward look when he read of the 'magic
ploughs,' which in his hands have turned up so much of the rich soil
of Fairyland.

When we had finished our studies for the day we took our walk, and
sometimes boated on the Isis.... Once we took a longer excursion of a
day or two, to Stratford upon Avon, to visit the birthplace of
Shakespeare. We went of course to the house visited by so many
thousands of all nations of Europe, and inscribed our names in
addition to the 'numbers numberless' of those which literally
blackened the walls. We also visited the Church, and were pestered
with a commonplace showman of the place.... He was struck, I remember,
with the simple statue there, which, though rudely executed, we agreed
was most probably the best likeness of the many extant, but none very
authentic, of Shakespeare.

His enjoyment was of that genuine, quiet kind which was a part of his
gentle nature; deeply feeling what he truly enjoyed, but saying
little. On our return to Oxford we renewed our quiet mode of life,
until he finished the third Book of _Endymion_, and the time came that
we must part; and I never parted with one whom I had known so short a
time, with so much real regret and personal affection, as I did with
John Keats, when he left Oxford for London at the end of September
or the beginning of October 1817.

_Life-mask of Keats

From an electrotype in the National Portrait Gallery_]

Living as we did for a month or six weeks together (for I do not
remember exactly how long) I knew him at that period of his life,
perhaps as well as any one of his friends. There was no reserve of any
kind between us.... His brother George says of him that to his
brothers his temper was uncertain; and he himself confirms this
judgment of him in a beautiful passage of a letter to myself. But with
his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew. Gentleness was
indeed his proper characteristic, without one particle of dullness, or
insipidity, or want of spirit. Quite the contrary. 'He was gentle but
not fearful,' in the chivalric and moral sense of the term 'gentle.'
He was pleased with every thing that occurred in the ordinary mode of
life, and a cloud never passed over his face, except of indignation at
the wrongs of others.

His conversation was very engaging. He had a sweet toned voice, 'an
excellent thing' in _man_ as well as 'in woman....' In his letters he
talks of _suspecting_ everybody. It appeared not in his conversation.
On the contrary, he was uniformly the apologist for poor, frail human
nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man I ever knew,
especially for the faults of his friends. But if any act of wrong or
oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he rose into sudden
and animated indignation. He had a truly poetic feeling for women; and
he often spoke to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from
him, with great delicacy and tenderness of affection. He had a soul of
noble integrity: and his common sense was a conspicuous part of his
character. Indeed his character was in the best sense manly.

Our conversation rarely or never flagged, during our walks, or
boatings, or in the evening. And I have retained a few of his opinions
on Literature and criticism which I will detail. The following passage
from Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality was deeply felt by Keats, who
however at this time seemed to me to value this great Poet rather in
particular passages than in the full-length portrait, as it were, of
the great imaginative and philosophic Christian Poet, which he really
is, and which Keats obviously, not long afterwards, felt him to be.

Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
_High instincts, before which our mortal nature_
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprized.

The last lines he thought were quite awful in their application to a
guilty finite creature, like man, in the appalling nature of the
feeling which they suggested to a thoughtful mind. Again, we often
talked of that noble passage in the lines on _Tintern Abbey_:--

That blessed mood,
In which _the burthen of the mystery_,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened.

And his references to this passage are frequent in his letters.--But
in those exquisite stanzas,

She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
Beside the springs of Dove,

ending,--

She lived unknown and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh,
_The difference to me_.

The simplicity of the last line he declared to be the most perfect
pathos.

Among the qualities of high poetic promise in Keats was, even at this
time, his correct taste. I remember to have been struck with this by
his remarks on that well known and often quoted passage of the
_Excursion_ upon the Greek Mythology--where it is said that

Fancy fetched
Even from the blazing chariot of the Sun
A beardless youth who touched a golden lute,
_And filled the illumined groves with ravishment_.

Keats said this description of Apollo should have ended at the 'golden
lute,' and have left it to the imagination to complete the picture,
_how_ he 'filled the illumined groves.' I think every man of taste
will feel the justice of the remark.

Every one now knows what was then known to his friends that Keats was
an ardent admirer of Chatterton. The melody of the verses of the
marvellous Boy who perished in his pride, enchanted the author of
_Endymion_. Methinks I now hear him recite, or _chant_, in his
peculiar manner, the following stanza of the Roundelay sung by the
minstrels of Ella:--

_Come with acorn cup and thorn_
Drain my hertys blood away;
Life and all its good I scorn;
Dance by night or feast by day.

The first line to his ear possessed the great charm. Indeed his sense
of melody was quite exquisite, as is apparent in his own verses; and
in none more than in numerous passages of his _Endymion_.

Another object of his enthusiastic admiration was the Homeric
character of Achilles--especially when he is described as 'shouting in
the trenches.' One of his favourite topics of discourse was the
principle of melody in verse, upon which he had his own notions,
particularly in the management of open and close vowels. I think I
have seen a somewhat similar theory attributed to Mr Wordsworth. But I
do not remember his laying it down in writing. Be this as it may,
Keats's theory was worked out by himself. It was, that the vowels
should be so managed as not to clash one with another, so as to hear
the melody,--and yet that they should be interchanged, like differing
notes of music to prevent monotony....[3]

Bailey here tries to reconstruct and illustrate from memory Keats's theory of vowel sounds, but his attempt falters and breaks down.

Keats's own first account of himself from Oxford is in a letter of September 5th to the Reynolds sisters, then on holiday at Littlehampton: a piece of mere lively foolery and rattle meant to amuse, in a taste which is not that of to-day. Five days later he writes the first of that series of letters to his young sister Fanny which acquaints us with perhaps the most loveable and admirable parts of his character. She was now just fourteen, and living under the close guardianship of the Abbeys, who had put her to a boarding school at Walthamstow. Keats shows a tender and considerate elder-brotherly anxiety to get into touch with her and know her feelings and likings:--

Let us now begin a regular question and answer--a little pro and con;
letting it interfere as a pleasant method of my coming at your
favourite little wants and enjoyments, that I may meet them in a way
befitting a brother.

We have been so little together since you have been able to reflect on
things that I know not whether you prefer the _History of King Pepin_
to Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_--or _Cinderella_ and her glass
slipper to Moor's _Almanack_. However in a few Letters I hope I shall
be able to come at that and adapt my scribblings to your Pleasure. You
must tell me about all you read if it be only six Pages in a Week and
this transmitted to me every now and then will procure full sheets of
Writing from me pretty frequently.--This I feel as a necessity for we
ought to become intimately acquainted, in order that I may not only,
as you grow up love you as my only Sister, but confide in you as my
dearest friend. When I saw you last I told you of my intention of
going to Oxford and 'tis now a Week since I disembark'd from his
Whipship's Coach the Defiance in this place. I am living in Magdalen
Hall on a visit to a young Man with whom I have not been long
acquainted, but whom I like very much--we lead very industrious
lives--he in general Studies and I in proceeding at a pretty good rate
with a Poem which I hope you will see early in the next year.--Perhaps
you might like to know what I am writing about. I will tell you. Many
Years ago there was a young handsome Shepherd who fed his flocks on a
Mountain's Side called Latmus he was a very contemplative sort of a
Person and lived solitary among the trees and Plains little thinking
that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in Love
with him.--However so it was; and when he was asleep on the Grass she
used to come down from heaven and admire him excessively for a long
time; and at last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms
to the top of that high Mountain Latmus while he was a dreaming--but I
dare say you have read this and all the other beautiful Tales which
have come down from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece. If you
have not let me know and I will tell you more at large of others quite
as delightful. This Oxford I have no doubt is the finest City in the
world--it is full of old Gothic
buildings--Spires--towers--Quadrangles--Cloisters--Groves etc and is
surrounded with more clear streams than ever I saw together. I take a
Walk by the Side of one of them every Evening and, thank God, we have
not had a drop of rain these days.

He goes on to tell her (herein echoing Hunt's opinion) how much better it would be if Italian instead of French were taught everywhere in schools, and winds up:--

Now Fanny you must write soon--and write all you think about, never
mind what--only let me have a good deal of your writing--You need not
do it all at once--be two or three or four days about it, and let it
be a diary of your Life. You will preserve all my Letters and I will
secure yours--and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have
a good Bundle--which, hereafter, when things may have strangely
altered and God knows what happened, we may read over together and
look with pleasure on times past--that now are to come.

Next follows another letter to Jane Reynolds; partly making fun, much better fun than in the last, about Dilke's shooting and about the rare havoc he would like to make in Mrs Dilke's garden were he at Hampstead: partly grave in the high style into which he is apt at any moment to change from nonsense:--

Now let us turn to the sea-shore. Believe me, my dear Jane, it is a
great happiness to see that you are, in this finest part of the year,
winning a little enjoyment from the hard world. In truth, the great
Elements we know of, are no means comforters: the open sky sits upon
our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of state--the
Earth is our throne and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before
it--able, like David's harp, to make such a one as you forget almost
the tempest cares of life. I have found in the ocean's music,--varying
(tho' self-same) more than the passion of Timotheus, an enjoyment not
to be put into words; and, 'though inland far I be,' I now hear the
voice most audibly while pleasing myself in the idea of your
sensations.

To Reynolds Keats writes on September the 21st:--

For these last five or six days, we have had regularly a Boat on the
Isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number
than your eye-lashes. We sometimes skim into a Bed of rushes, and
there become naturalized river-folks,--there is one particularly nice
nest, which we have christened 'Reynolds's Cove,' in which we have
read Wordsworth, and talked as may be; I think I see you and Hunt
meeting in the Pit.--What a very pleasant fellow he is, if he would
give up the sovereignty of a room pro bono. What evenings we might
pass with him, could we have him from Mrs H. Failings I am always
rather rejoiced to find in a man than sorry for; they bring us to a
level.

Then follows a diatribe against the literary and intellectual pretensions of certain sets of ladies, from which he has felt an agreeable relief in some verses he has found on taking down from Bailey's shelves the poems of Katherine Philips, 'the matchless Orinda.' The verses which pleased him, truly of her best, are those _To M. A. at parting_, and Keats goes on to copy them in full. Had Orinda been a contemporary, he might not, indeed, have failed to recognize in her a true woman of letters: but would he not also have found something to laugh and chafe at in the poses of that high-flying coterie of mutual admirers, Silvander and Poliarchus, Lucasia and Rosania and Palaemon, of which she was the centre? This is one of the very few instances to be found in Keats's work or correspondence of interest in the poetry of the Caroline age.

Quite in the last days of his visit Keats, whose mind and critical power had been growing while he worked upon _Endymion_, and whom moreover the long effort of composition was clearly beginning to fatigue, confides to Haydon his dissatisfaction with what he has done:--'You will be glad to hear that within these last three weeks I have written 1000 lines--which are the third Book of my Poem. My Ideas with respect to it I assure you are very low--and I would write the subject thoroughly again--but I am tired of it and think the time would be better spent in writing a new Romance which I have in my eye for next summer--Rome was not built in a day--and all the good I expect from my employment this summer is the fruit of Experience which I hope to gather in my next Poem.'

Coming back in the first week of October to Hampstead, whither his brothers had by this time also returned from a trip to Paris, Keats was presently made uncomfortable by evidences of discord among his friends and reports of what seemed like disloyalty on the part of one of them, Leigh Hunt, to himself. Haydon had now left the studio in Great Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove, and the Hunts, having come away from Hampstead and paid a long late-summer visit to the Shelleys at Marlow, were lodging near him in the same street. 'Everybody seems at loggerheads,' Keats writes to Bailey. 'There's Hunt infatuated--there's Haydon's picture in statu quo--There's Hunt walks up and down his painting-room--criticizing every head most unmercifully.' Both Haydon and Reynolds, he goes on, keep telling him tales of Hunt: How Hunt has been talking flippantly and patronizingly of _Endymion_, saying that if it is four thousand lines long now it would have been seven thousand but for him, and giving the impression that Keats stood to him in the relation of a pupil needing and taking advice. He declares in consequence that he is quite disgusted with literary men and will never know another except Wordsworth; and then, more coolly and sensibly, 'now, is not this a most paltry thing to think about?... This is, to be sure, the vexation of a day, nor would I say so many words about it to any but those whom I know to have my welfare and reputation at heart.'

During the six or seven autumn weeks spent at Hampstead after his return from Oxford Keats was getting on, a little flaggingly, with the fourth book of _Endymion_, besides writing an occasional lyric or two. Fresh from the steadying and sympathetic companionship of Bailey, he keeps up their intimacy by affectionate letters in which he discloses much of that which lay deepest and was best in him. Writing in the first days of November he congratulates Bailey on having got a curacy in Cumberland and promises some day to visit him there; says he is in a fair way to have finished _Endymion_ in three weeks; mentions an idea he has of shipping his brother Tom, who has been looking worse, off to Lisbon for the winter and perhaps going with him; and gets in by a side wind a masterly criticism of Wordsworth's poem _The Gipsies_ and also of Hazlitt's criticism of it in the _Round Table_. A fragment of another letter, dated November the 5th, alludes with annoyance, not for the first time, to some failure of Haydon's to keep his word or take trouble about a young man from Oxford named Cripps whom he had promised to receive as pupil and in whom Bailey and Keats were interested. The same fragment records the appearance in _Blackwood_ (the _Endinburgh Magazine_, as Keats calls it) of the famous first article of the Cockney School series, attacking Hunt with a virulence far beyond even the accustomed licence of the time, and seeming by the motto prefixed to it (verses of Cornelius Webb coupling the names of Hunt and Keats) to threaten a similar handling of Keats later on. 'I don't mind the thing much,' says Keats, 'but if he should go to such lengths with me as he has done with Hunt, I must infallibly call him to an Account if he be a human being, and appears in Squares and Theatres, where we might possibly meet--I don't relish his abuse.'

Some time about mid-November Keats, his health and strength being steadier than in the spring, felt himself in the mood for a few weeks of solitude and went to spend them at Burford Bridge Inn, in the beautiful vale of Mickleham between Leatherhead and Dorking. The outing, he wrote, was intended 'to change the scene--change the air---and give me a spur to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting 500 lines.' Keats dearly loved a valley: he loved even the sound of the names denoting one. In his marginal notes to a copy of _Paradise Lost_ he gave a friend we find the following:--

'Or have ye chosen this place
After the toil of battle to repose
Your wearied virtue, for the ease you find
To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?'

There is cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is
of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with
the very utter affection and yearning of a great Poet. It is a sort of
Delphic Abstraction--a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being
reflected and put in a Mist. The next mention of Vale is one of the
most pathetic in the whole range of Poetry:--

'Others, more mild,
Retreated in a silent valley, sing
With notes angelical to many a harp
Their own heroic deeds and hapless fall
By doom of battle.'

How much of the charm is in the valley!

There, from his inmost self, speaks a poet of another poet, and as if to and for poets, deep calling unto deep. But in his every-day vein of speech or writing Keats was always reticent in regard to the scenery of places he visited, disliking nothing more than the glib ecstasies of the tourist in search of the picturesque. When he has looked round him in his new quarters at Burford Bridge he says simply, writing to Reynolds on November the 22nd, 'I like this place very much. There is Hill and Dale and a little river. I went up Box Hill this evening after the moon--"you a' seen the Moon"--came down and wrote some lines.' 'Whenever I am separated from you,' he continues, 'and not engaged in a continuous Poem, every letter shall bring you a lyric--but I am too anxious for you to enjoy the whole to send you a particle:' the whole, that is, of _Endymion_. The sequel shows him to be just as deep and ardent in the study of Shakespeare as when he was beginning his poem at Carisbrooke in the spring. 'I never found so many beauties in the Sonnets--they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally--in the intensity of working out conceits:' and he goes on to quote passages and phrases both from them and from _Venus and Adonis_. Next, with a sudden change of mind about letting Reynolds see a sample of _Endymion_, 'By the Whim-King! I'll give you a stanza, because it is not material in connexion, and when I wrote it I wanted you to give your vote, pro or con.'--The stanza he gives is from the song of the Constellations in the fourth book, certainly one of the weakest things in the poem: pity Reynolds had not been there indeed, to give his vote _contra_.