in Surrey. Mrs. Owen* rightly suggests a comparison between the first hundred lines of the poem and that delightful description of the island, in a letter to Reynolds from Carisbrooke. "But the sea, Jack, the sea, the little waterfall, then St. Catherine's Hill, 'the sheep in the meadows, the cows in the corn' . . . I see Carisbrooke Castle from my window, and have found several delightful wood alleys, and copses, and quiet freshes; as for primroses, the island ought to be called Primrose Island, that is, if the nation of Cowslips agree thereto, of which there are divers clans just beginning to lift up their heads." Perhaps it was in the Isle of Wight that Keats conceived the first idea of that picture of a wave breaking, as it nears the shore, Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar, which Mr. Ruskin has called "quite perfect, as an example of the modern manner," and perhaps it was in that southern chalk country of bright colour and undulating down that his eye caught the beauty of those Swelling downs, where sweet air stirs or that he Linger'd in a sloping mead To hear the speckled thrushes, and see feed Our idle sheep. For the rest, the landscape of Endymion is essentially an English landscape, whether the poet takes us— Through the green evening, quiet in the sun, O'er many a heath, through many a woodland dun, or tells us how Rain-scented eglantine Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun; "Keats. A Study." By F. M. Owen-a charming and enthusiastic book. Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co. or how The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run Clear summer has forth walk'd Unto the clover-sward, and she has talk'd * or calls to mind his explorations of those "sedged brooks" "Thames' tributaries," and gives us this picture of the which are willow And as a willow keeps A patient watch over the stream that creeps Held her in peace: so that a whispering blade Of grass, a wailful gnat, a bee bustling Down in the blue bells, or a wren light rustling Among sere leaves and twigs, might all be heard. The flowers of the Endymion are the wild rose and the pansy; its birds are the lark, the nightingale, the wren, the linnet, and the thrush. In a word, Keats in the Endymion is writing, so far as the background of his story is concerned, about what he knows and not about what he pretends to know, and he both knew and felt the beauty of the English land, and of the sky over it, and of the sea encompassing it, far better than it was ever known or felt by Byron. Between the publication of Endymion in 1818 and that of the volume containing Lamia, Hyperion, St. Agnes' Eve, and other pieces, in 1820, Keats spent some months in Devonshire, where he was kept in faithful attendance upon his brother Tom, who finally died at Teignmouth. He also stayed at Winchester for the best part of the autumn of 1819, and spent the spring of the same year with Armitage Brown in the Isle of Wight. Winchester is the only one of these places which can certainly be connected "Life and Letters," i. 55. (Written from Oxford.) "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 then become naturalized river-folks. There is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened Reynold's Cove,' in which we have read Wordsworth, and talked as may be.” * with any particular poem. He speaks of it as "an exceedingly pleasant town, enriched with a beautiful cathedral, and surrounded by a fresh-looking country." The cathedral is probably partly responsible for the Eve of St. Mark, that strange and beautiful poem which was indeed begun before Keats went to Winchester, but which a casual allusion in one of his Winchester letters shows to have been in his mind while he was staying in the old cathedral city. The "fresh-looking country" supplied the inspiration of the Ode to Autumn. "How beautiful the season is now," he writes from Winchester, on the 22nd of September, 1819. "How fine the air—a temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather-Dian skies. I never liked stubble fields so much as now— ay, better than the chilly green of the Spring. Somehow, a stubble field looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it." And then follows the "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." But neither Winchester, nor Teignmouth, nor the Isle of Wight was capable of introducing Keats to country of a kind which he had never seen before. The tour through the English Lakes and the Scotch Highlands was on the other hand an entirely new experience. The two friends-Keats and Armitage Brown-walked on foot from Lancaster as far north as Inverness. They saw Windermere, Grasmere, Derwentwater, the country of Burns, Iona, Staffa, and went up Skiddaw and Ben Nevis. "Mr. Brown has recorded," writes Lord Houghton, "the rapture of Keats, when he became sensible for the first time of the full effect of mountain scenery. At * See "Life and Letters," ii. 24, where in a letter dated " Winchester, 22nd of September, 1819," Keats uses the words "kepen în solitarinesse" from that poem. It is possible that he had kept the poem by him, and added some touches to it at Winchester. But in the letter to his brother and sister, dated February 14th, 1819, and written shortly after his return from Chichester, he expressly says that he wrote St. Agnes' Eve in that ancient city, and adds :-"In my next packet I shall send you my Pot of Basil, St. Agnes' Eve, and if I should have finished it, a little thing, called the Eve of St. Mark." This looks as if Chichester had the better claim to be regarded as the place which suggested the background to the poem. a turn of the road above Bowness, where the Lake of Windermere first bursts on the view, he stopped as if stupefied with beauty." One result of this tour is the amount of purely local poetry-poetry absolutely identified with, and descriptive of, some particular place which it produced. The verses on Meg Merrilies, on Staffa, the sonnets on Ailsa Rock, Ben Nevis, and Burns' Cottage are only some of the instances of this. But the tour left traces in his poetry less obvious, but even more interesting than these. Most readers of Keats are familiar with that passage in which Mr. Ruskin speaks of the Ode to Psyche. "Keats," says Mr. Ruskin, "as is his way, puts nearly all that may be said of the pine into one verse, though they are only figurative pines of which he is speaking. 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; but others must not leave unread, in considering the influence of trees upon the human soul, that marvellous Ode to Psyche. Here is the piece about pines." Mr. Ruskin then quotes the lines beginning, "Yes, I will be thy priest—and let the warm Love in," italicizing the words "fledge the wild-ridged mountains," as those to which he desires to call the reader's particular attention. In a letter from Keswick, Keats describes a clamber he had about Lodore. "There is no great body of water, but the accompaniment is delightful; for it oozes out from a cleft in perpendicular rocks, all fledged with ash and other beautiful trees." This is the first occurrence in Keats' work of the use of the verb which so fascinated Mr. Ruskin in the exact sense in which it is used in the passage from the Ode to Psyche, and it is perhaps not fanciful to put the two passages together.* The same letter supplies another interesting parallel to a passage in Hyperion. "On our return from the circuit," writes Keats, "we set forth about a mile and a half on the Penrith road to see the Druid temple. We had a fag The letters supply several interesting parallelisms of usage. I have quoted another of these on p. xxxiii., and it is worth while to put the words in a letter to Fanny Brawne,-"The last two years taste like brass upon my palate "-side by side with the "savour of poisonous brass and metal sick" of Hyperion. b up-hill, rather too near dinner-time, which was rendered void by the gratification of seeing those aged stones on a gentle rise in the midst of the mountains, which at that time darkened all round, except at the fresh opening of the Vale of St. John." The passage in Hyperion is descriptive of "that sad place Where Cybele and the bruised Titans mourn'd." This is Keats' simile for the Titans Scarce images of life, one here, one there, Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque In dull November, and their chancel vault, The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night. It is surely a natural suggestion that the "cirque of Druid stones which Keats ad in mind was that known as the Druidical Stones near Keswick, the position of which has been described as "commanding nearly all the summit ranges of the district detached from the human culture and occupation of their lower slopes, which are wholly out of sight from the high table-ground formed by the field," and which his own letter proves to have made so strong an impression upon his mind. This is a subject which might easily be continued further. A comparison, for instance, of Keats' letter descriptive of Staffa, with a linen Hyperion—“Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern -makes it certain that in writing that line Keats was thinking of Fingal's Cave. But enough has perhaps been said to indicate that Keats knew his native land unusually well for a young man in the days before railways, that the touches of natural beauty so frequent in the poems were derived from real impressions of the writer's own, and that the landscape of the poems is a thoroughly English landscape. Keats' impressions of natural beauty were implanted early, and they retained their freshness all his life. readers of Keats will remember that pathetic passage in a letter written just a year before his untimely death, in which he notes "how astonishingly does the chance of leaving this world impress its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not Most |