SPENSER! A JEALOUS HONOurer of thINE OH! HOW I Love, on a faIR SUMMER'S EVE TO A YOUNG LADY WHO SENT ME A LAUREL CROWN AFTER DARK VAPOURS have oppress'd our PLAINS WRITTEN ON THE BLANK SPACE OF A LEAF AT THE IF BY DULL RHYMES OUR ENGLISH MUST BE CHAIN'D THE DAY IS GONE, AND All its sweets are gone INTRODUCTION WHEN criticism is confronted by a phenomenon like the poetical work of Keats work produced in the brief twenty-six years of a young man's life, but which nevertheless has at its best reached a point of perfection which compels one critic to say that its author "is with Shakspere," and another great master of our tongue to confess that "I have come to that pass of admiration for him now that I dare not read him, so discontented he makes me with my own work -it is in a manner called upon to give such explanation of it as may be had. A full explanation is of course impossible. The vision and the faculty divine always remain in the last resort inexplicable and unexplained. But it is possible to consider more closely than has perhaps hitherto been done the external influences that did much to mould the faculty of Keatsthe country he knew, the art he studied, the poets whom in his early work he sought to imitate, and whose influence, "full alchemized" and twice distilled, has contributed something to the noble style of his maturer work. In an article which was to have formed a reply to Bowles strictures on Pope, Lord Byron takes occasion to fall foul of the "Cockney School" to which, in his view. Keats belonged. After speaking of the Lakists, he goes on: "I can understand the pretensions of the aquatic gentlemen of Windermere to what Mr. B― calls entusumusy, for lakes and mountains and daffodils and buttercups; but I should be glad to be apprized of the foundation of the London propensities of their imitative brethren to the same 'high argument.' Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge have rambled over half Europe, and seen Nature in most of her varieties (although I think that they have occasionally not used her very well); but what on earth-of earth and sea and Nature have the others seen? Not a half nor a tenth part so much as Pope. While they sneer at his Windsor Forest, have they ever seen anything of Windsor except its brick ?" Byron here of course puts aside the real question, which is, not so much what a poet sees, but how he sees it—whether, in Wordsworthian phrase, he has had his eye upon the object. But it may be admitted that if poetry of the class to which that of Keats belongs had been composed by a man who had never been beyond the sound of Bow Bells it could not but possess an unreal, bookish, and factitious element. As a matter of fact, Keats was at school for some years at Enfield, made no doubt many an excursion thence into Epping Forest, afterwards lived, during his apprenticeship, in the same neighbourhood at Edmonton, and, even after he had come to London and settled in Hampstead, found time for many a flight to Surrey, or Devonshire, or the Isle of Wight, or Oxford, or Winchester, or the English lakes, or the Scotch Highlands. Moreover the Hampstead of 1816-1820 was not the Hampstead of to-day. The lines to the Thrush were written at an open window in Hampstead, and the Ode to a Nightingale was suggested by the song of the bird that, in the spring of 1819, had built its nest close to Mr. Brown's house in the same old-world suburb. The bird's song "often threw Keats," says his biographer, "into a sort of trance of tranquil pleasure. One morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table, placed it on the grass plot under a plum-tree, and sat there for two or three hours with some scraps of paper in his hands." It was then and there that the ode was written. The neighbourhood of Hampstead also suggested to Keats the charming juvenile vcrses, "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill," and Mr. Cowden Clarke relates that the passage on the stream and the minnows in that little poem-one of the most delicately touched to be found anywhere in Keats' workwas the recollection of our having frequently loitered over the rail of a foot-bridge that spanned (probably still spans, notwithstanding the intrusive and shouldering railroad) a little brook in the last field upon entering Edmonton." The fact is, that though 66 Keats did not see anything that could be called a mountain till, late in his short life, he made that tour with his friend Brown through the North of England and Western Scotland, he was yet from his early boyhood familiar with the average, unspoilt country of the southern English Midlands, and must have seen the sea long before his first visit to the Isle of Wight. His biographer gives so few details of his life before the publication of the volume of 1817, that it is impossible to say where Keats first saw the sea, but it is clear that the man who wrote these lines- or these As when ocean Heaves calmly its broad swelling smoothness o'er The patient weeds; that now unshent by foam I see the lark down dropping to his nest And the broad-wing'd sea-gull never at rest; had other than a merely bookish knowledge of what he is describing. In the same way we may be assured that the poet to whom occurred the simile Nought more untranquil than the grassy slopes had seen a Surrey or a Sussex down, and the "pigeon tumbling in clear summer air" is not the picture of a man who knew nothing outside of London brick. Before Keats published his Endymion we know that he had stayed, in some cases for weeks, in others for days, in the Isle of Wight, at Leatherhead in Surrey, and at Oxford. He had not penetrated northwards, and the very interesting reference to Skiddaw in the third book of the poem is a reminiscence, not of Skiddaw, but of Wordsworth. The first book of Endymion appears to have been written in the Isle of Wight. It was continued at Margate, Oxford, and Hampstead, and finished at Burford Bridge |