'I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's Bodyguard : "then tragedy with sceptred pall comes sweeping by." According to my state of mind, I am with Achilles shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily; or throw my whole being into Troilus, and repeating those lines, "I wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, staying for waftage," I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone.' If Keats could write with the light magic of a touch such as is displayed here, for example, in 'Endymion': 'Whence came ye, merry damsels! whence came ye! We follow Bacchus ! Bacchus on the wing, Bacchus, young Bacchus ! good or ill betide, To our wild minstrelsy!' If he could write like this, he could reach a higher strain, not far from the very highest, reached only when the supreme vision is vouchsafed-he could reach the truth, the gravity and the loveliness of this, when, speaking of melancholy, he says:— 'She dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die : And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.' We have seen that Keats shared in the new feeling for Nature. Nature, for her own sake, had never before the close of the 18th century so occupied the minds of the poets. Keats' nature-painting is not the mere detailed description of Thomson or of Cowper, it is rather Chaucer's enriched. There is the same freshness of apprehension and of touch as in Chaucer, for, like Chaucer, his contact with Nature was direct. Those pictures of Nature are not likest her which reproduce with photographic accuracy her every detail, but which, with the fewest strokes, convey to the eye of the mind an impression of the whole as received by the poet himself. In seeing and representing the features which are characteristic, the lines wherein the true expression lies, in this is the difficulty only overcome by genius. Keats' feeling for Nature was rich and full; his was the seeing eye and the understanding heart; and thrilled as he was by the subtle effluences of her beauty--' I have loved the principle of beauty in all things,' he said—he had the gift of recording his emotion in the key of words appropriate and perfect. Is not this the key of Nature's music at the close of a day of opening summer? 'I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.' Magical as many of his effects are, Mr Palgrave is right in noting that his landscape falls short of the landscape of Shelley in its comparative absence of the larger features of sky and earth; it is in foreground work that he excels: while again, in comparison with Wordsworth, Keats rests satisfied with exquisitely true delineation, and has little thought of allying Nature with human sympathy; still less of penetrating and rendering her deeper eternal signifi cance. On the life as on the poetry of Keats a potent influence was the friendship of Leigh Hunt. The author of 'Rimini' was a lover of Spenser and of the Italians who were Spenser's models. Although, as editor of the Examiner, he was a prominent soldier in the cause of Liberalism, and suffered for his faith and courage, he never lost a native light-heartedness and gaiety which gave a winning charm to his character and person. Kindred poetic tastes and mutual admiration (deepest at first, of course, on the side of Keats, for Leigh Hunt was already at the beginning of the friendship a poet of reputation) drew these two men very closely together. The motto most appropriate to the title-page of Leigh Hunt's poetical works would be that sentence of Oliver Goldsmith's which so well characterises the motive of his own gentle art-'Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom.' Leigh Hunt does not permit the Sturm und Drang' of life to appear in his verse; he kept far, far off the insidious, unintelligible world, and loved to lose himself in the enchanted forests of the H chivalric epics of Italy. To Keats his kindness was that of a tender, admiring and unfailing friend, and only in the influence of his somewhat too luscious and conversationally easy style was he anything but a true helper and guide to the younger poet. At Leigh Hunt's house Keats met Shelley, with whom, however, he was never intimate, and Haydon, the painter, who became his friend. To the influence of Spenser and of Leigh Hunt we may trace the mannerisms of Keats and his liberties with the language which drew from De Quincey the characteristic remark that he had trampled upon his mother tongue as with the hoofs of a buffalo.' The laxities occur, however, only in the early longer poems; in the lyrics, and as he grew older, they are not to be found. Here, however, we strike on one of the essential differences between Keats and that other English poet who was a Roman at heart and a Greek at brain-Landor. 'I hate false words,' wrote the latter, 'and seek with care, difficulty and moroseness those that fit the thing.' From the first the intention of Landor's art was evident--fully realised, clear-cut ideas, and words that fit the thing. He lived aloof not only from his own time, but from modern life and thought altogether. He is freer from all trace of the romantic spirit, freer, perhaps, than was even Milton, and his charm is the charm of noble severity. Landor's indifference to Spenser 'Thee, gentle Spenser fondly led,* But me he mostly sent to bed ' serves as clue to the wide diversity between himself and Keats in poetic apprehension, and in the modes and aims of their common art, though both were poets upon whose * To Wordsworth. imaginations had powerfully seized the marvellous conceptions of the mythology of Greece, and who had recognised its essential and unique poetic value by finding in it the most congenial themes. The influences of the classical renaissance of the fifteenth century reached England together with the spirit of Italian romance; and in Spenser we have Aristotelian scheme, Italian mysticism and colour, and the old Celtic legends, in bewildering but fascinating confusion. No poet, after his time, could avoid taking in with his breath each constituent element of the atmosphere thus composed so completely as to give to his workmanship the distinctive stamp of purely romantic, much less of purely classic, art. The spell that Spenser, and, later, the Greek myths, threw over Keats, proving the susceptibility of his nature, as he said, 'to the principle of beauty in all things,' was the spell that determined the aim and tendency of his art. His treatment of the subjects taken from the mythology of Greece is essentially-and here he is distinguished from Landor-in the opulent romantic vein; and even 'Hyperion,' with its unique grandeur, though, as we have seen, in diction nearer Sophocles than Spenser, or, at least, nearing him, is rather a tour de force in an antique mode than a natural artistic product. Though in Virgil and Milton we have splendid exceptions, it may truly be said that the greatest poetry of the world drew its inspiration from the times which gave it birth. A revived interest, a recollected passion, can have little inspiring force beside the glow of a present enthusiasm, the rapture of a living love. From Keats we date the English poetry of culture, the poetry which depends for its effect upon sentiments that bore their fruit in past ages, upon the glories of ancient heroisms, the pathos of dead faiths, the romance of buried |