THE INDICATOR. There he arriving round about doth flie, SPENSER. No. XLIII.-WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 2d, 1820. THE STORIES OF LAMIA, THE POT OF BASIL, THE EVE OF ST. AGNES, &c. AS TOLD BY MR. KEATS. IN laying before our readers an account of another new publication, it is fortunate that the nature of the work again falls in with the character of our miscellany; part of the object of which is to relate the stories of old times. We shall therefore abridge into prose the stories which Mr. Keats has told in poetry, only making up for it, as we go, by cutting some of the richest passages out of his verse, and fitting them in to our plainer narrative. They are such as would leaven a much greater lump. Their drops are rich and vital, the essence of a heap of fertile thoughts. The first story, entitled Lamia, was suggested to our author by a passage in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, which he has extracted at the end of it. We will extract it here, at the beginning, that the readers may see how he has enriched it. Burton's relation is itself an improvement on the account in Philostratus. The old book-fighter with melancholy thoughts is speaking of the seductions of phantas mata. "Philostratus, in his fourth book 'De Vita Apollonii,' hath a memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius, a young man twenty-five years of age, that going betwixt Cenchreas and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house, in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him; but she, being fair and lovely, would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold. The young man, a philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with her awhile to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, amongst other guests, came Apollonius; who, by some probable conjectures, found her out to be a serpent, a lamia; and that all her furniture was, like Tantalus' gold, described by Homer, no substance but mere illusions. When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and therefore she, plate, house, and all that was. in it, vanished in an instant: many thousands took notice of this fact, for it was done in the midst of Greece."-Anat. of Mel. Part 3, Sect. 2. According to our poet, Mercury had come down from heaven, one day, in order to make love to a nymph, famous for her beauty. He could not find her; and he was halting among the woods uneasily, when he heard a lonely voice, complaining. It was A mournful voice, Such as once heard, in gentle heart, destroys "And love, and pleasure, and the ruddy strife Mercury went looking about among the trees and grass, Until he found a palpitating snake, Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake. The admiration, pity, and horror, to be excited by humanity in a brute shape, were never perhaps called upon by a greater mixture of beauty and deformity than in the picture of this creature. Our pity and suspicions are begged by the first word: the profuse and vital beauties with which she is covered seem proportioned to her misery and natural rights; and lest we should lose sight of them in this gorgeousness, the "woman's mouth" fills us at once with shuddering and compassion. She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet! She had a woman's mouth with all it's pearls complete : And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there, But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair? The serpent tells Mercury that she knows (upon what quest he is bound, and asks him if he has succeeded. The god, with the usual eagerness of his species to have his will, falls into the trap; and teils her that he will put her in possession of any wish she may have at heart, provided she can tell him where to find his nymph. As eagerly, she accepts his promise, making him ratify it by an oath, which he first pronounces with an earnest lightness, and afterwards with a deeper solemnity. Then once again the charmed God began An oath, and through the serpent's ears it ran The creature tells him that it was she who had rendered the nymph invisible, in order to preserve her from the importunities of the ruder wood gods. She adds, that she was a woman herself, that she loves a youth of Corinth and wishes to be a woman again, and that if he will let her breathe upon his eyes, he shall see his invisible beauty. The god sees, loves, and prevails. The serpent undergoes a fierce and convulsive change, and flies towards Corinth, A full-born beauty, new and exquisite. Lamia, whose liability to painful metamorphosis was relieved by a supernatural imagination, had been attracted by the beauty of Lycius, while pitching her mind among the enjoyments of Corinth. By the same process, she knew that he was to pass along, that evening, on the road from the sea-side to Corinth; and there accordingly she contrives to have an interview, which ends in his being smitten with love, and conducting her to her pretended home in that city. She represents herself as a rich orphan, living "but half-retired," and affects to wonder that he never saw her before. As they enter Corinth, they pass the philosopher Apollonius, who is Lycius's tutor, and from whom he instinctively conceals his face. Lamia's hand shudders in that of her lover; but she says she is only wearied; and at the same moment, they stop at the entrance of a magnificent house : Here they lived for some time, undisturbed by the world, in all the delight of a mutual passion. The house remained invisible to all eyes, but those of Lycius. There were a few Persian mutes, 66 seen that year about the markets;" and nobody knew whence they came; but the most inquisitive were baffled in endeavouring to track them to some place of abode. But all this while, a god was every night in the house, taking offence. Every night With a terrific glare, Love, jealous grown of so complete a pair, And down the passage cast a glow upon the floor. Lycius, to the great distress of his mistress, who saw in his vanity a great danger, persuaded her to have a public wedding-feast. She only begged him not to invite Apollonius; and then, resolving to dress up her bridals with a sort of despairing magnificence, equal to her apprehensions of danger, she worked a fairy architecture in secret, served only with the noise of wings and a restless sound of music A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone Supportress of the faery-roof, made moan Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade. This is the very quintessence of the romantic. The walls of the long. vaulted room were covered with palms and plantain-trees imitated in cedar-wood, and meeting over head in the middle of the ceiling; between the stems were jasper pannels, from which "there burst forth creeping imagery of slighter trees ;" and before each of these "lucid pannels Fuming stood A censer filled with myrrh and spiced wood, To the high roof, still mimick'd as they rose Twelve tables stood in this room, set round with circular couches, and on every table was a noble feast and the statue of a god. Approving all, she faded at self-will, And shut the chamber up, close, hush'd, and still, Complete and ready for the revels rude, When dreadful guests would come to spoil her solitude. The guests came. They wondered and talked; but their gossiping would have ended well enough, when the wine prevailed, had not Apollonius, an unbidden guest, come with them. He sat right opposite the lovers, and -Fixed his eye, without a twinkle or stir Full on the alarmed beauty of the bride, Brow-beating her fair form, and troubling her sweet pride. Lycius felt her hand grow alternately hot and cold, and wondered more and more both at her agitation and the conduct of his old tutor. He looked into her eyes, but they looked nothing in return: he spoke to her, but she made no answer: by degrees the music ceased, the flowers faded away, the pleasure all darkened, and A deadly silence step by step increased, And not a man but felt the terror in his hair. The bridegroom at last shrieked out her name; but it was only echoed back to him by the room. Lamia sat fixed, her face of a deadly white. He called in mixed agony and rage to the philosopher to take off his eyes; but Apollonius, refusing, asked him whether his old guide and instructor who had preserved him from all harm to that day, ought to see him made the prey of a serpent. A mortal faintness came into the breath of Lamia at this word; she motioned him, as well as she could, to be silent; but looking her stedfastly in the face, he repeated Serpent! and she vanished with a horrible scream. Upon the same night, died Lycius, and was swathed for the funeral in his wedding-garments. Mr. Keats has departed as much from common-place in the character and moral of this story, as he has in the poetry of it. He would see fair play to the serpent, and makes the power of the philosopher an illnatured and disturbing thing. Lamia though liable to be turned into r painful shapes had a soul of humanity; and the poet does not see why she should not have her pleasures accordingly, merely because a philosopher saw that she was not a mathematical truth. This is fine and good. It is vindicating the greater philosophy of poetry. At the same time, we wish that for the purpose of his story he had not appeared to give into the common-place of supposing that Apollonius's sophistry must always prevail, and that modern experiment has done a deadly thing to poetry by discovering the nature of the rainbow, the air, &c.: that is to say, that the knowledge of natural history and physics, by shewing us the nature of things, does away the imaginations that once adorned them. This is a condescension to a learned vulgarism, which so excellent a poet as Mr. Keats ought not to have made. The world will always have fine poetry, as long as it has events, passions, affections, and a philosophy that sees deeper than this philosophy. There will be a poetry of the heart, as long as there are tears and smiles: there will be a poetry of the imagination, as long as the first causes of things remain a mystery. A man who is no poet, may think he is none, as soon as he finds out the physical cause of the rainbow; but he need not alarm himself:-he was none before. The true poet will go deeper. He will ask himself what is the cause of that physical cause; whether truths to the senses are after all to be taken as truths to the imagination; and whether there is not room and mystery enough in the universe for the creation of infinite things, when the poor matterof-fact philosopher has come to the end of his own vision. It is remark. able that an age of poetry has grown up with the progress of experiment; and that the very poets, who seem to countenance these notions, accompany them by some of their finest effusions. Even if there were nothing new to be created,-if philosophy, with its line and rule, could even score the ground, and say to poetry "Thou shalt go no further," she would look back to the old world, and still find it inexhaustible. The crops from its fertility are endless. But these alarms are altogether idle. The essence of poetical enjoyment does not consist in belief, but in a voluntary power to imagine. The next story, that of the Pot of Basil, is from Boccaccio. After the narrative of that great writer, we must make as short work of it as possible in prose. To turn one of his stories into verse, is another thing. It is like setting it to a more elaborate music. Mr. Keats is so struck with admiration of his a hor, that even while giving him this accompaniment, he breaks out into an apology to the great Italian, asking pardon for this -Echo of him in the worth-wind sung. We might waive a repetition of the narrative altogether, as the public have lately been familiarized with it in the Sicilian Story of Mr. Barry Cornwall: but we cannot help calling to mind that the hero and heroine were two young and happy lovers, who kept their love a secret from her rich brothers; that her brothers, getting knowledge of their intercourse, lured him into a solitary place, and murdered him; that Isabella, informed of it by a dreary vision of her lover, found out where he was buried, and with the assistance of her nurse, severed the head from the body that she might cherish even that ghastly memo |