Part 40

This was decisive! If these two gentlemen, nephews of the poetess, who are enjoying the two splendid estates of the family, Woodstock and Rosanna, show thus little respect to the only one of their name that ever lifted it above the mob, it is not to be expected that they will show much courtesy to strangers. Well is it that Mrs. Tighe raised her own monument, that of immortal verse, and wrote her own epitaph in the hearts of all the pure and loving, not on a stone which sordid relatives, still fonder of earth than stone, may consign to the oblivion of a lumber-room.

* * * * *

That these nephews of the poetess do look after the earth which her husband left behind him, though not after the stone, I learned while waiting in the village for the sexton. I fell into conversation with the woman at the cottage by which I stood. It was as follows:

_Self._ "Well, your landlord has a fine estate here. I hope he is good to you."

_Woman._ "Well, your honor, very good, very good."

_Self._ "Very good? What do you call very good? I find English and Irish notions of goodness don't always agree."

_Woman._ "Well, your honor, we may say he is mixed; mixed, your honor."

_Self._ "How mixed?"

_Woman._ "Why, your honor, you see I can't say that he was very good to me."

_Self._ "How was that?"

_Woman._ "Why, your honor, we were backward in our rent, and the squire sent for my husband, and told him that if he did not pay all next quarter, he would sell us up. My husband begged he would give him a little more time, as a neighbor said he had some money left him, and would take part of our land at a good rent, and then we should be able to pay; but now we got little, and the children were many, and it was hard to meet and tie. 'Oh!' said the squire, 'if you are going to get all that money, you will be able to pay more rent. I must have two pounds a year more.'"

_Self._ "Gracious Heaven! But, surely, he did not do such a thing?"

_Woman._ "But he did it, your honor. The neighbor _had_ no money: it was a hum; he never took the field of us at all; we never were able to get a penny more from any one than we gave; but when my husband went to pay the rent at the next rent-day, the steward would not take it. He said he had orders to have two pounds a year more; and from that day we have had it regularly to pay."

What a fall out of the poetry of Psyche to the iron realities of Ireland! This screwing system on the poor, which you find almost every where, soon makes us cease to wonder at the wretchedness and the wild outrages of the people there. At one splendid place where I was, the lord of the estate and the gentry were all bowling away on the Sunday morning to a church three miles distant. When I asked why they did not stay at their own, this was the reply: "The clergyman had given great offense by saying in one of his sermons that their dogs were better lodged and fed than their neighbors!" Poor Ireland! where such is the distortion of circumstances that the poor are too poor to have the truth told about them to ears polite even from the pulpit, and where the squirearchy live in splendid houses, and in state emulating the peerage, surrounded by hovels and wretchedness, such as the world besides can not parallel. The condition of Ireland is fatal in its effects on all classes. The poor are reduced to a misery that is the amazement of the whole world; and the squirearchy, who live in daily contemplation of this misery, are rendered utterly callous to it. They go on putting on the screw of high rental to the utmost limit, and surrounded, as it were, only by serfs, naturally grow selfish beyond our conceptions in England, haughty, and ungracious. I believe that no country, except Russia, can furnish such revolting examples of ignorant and churlish insolence as Ireland can from the ranks of its solitary squirearchy--so utterly opposed to the generally generous, courteous, and hospitable character of its people.

JOHN KEATS.

"Where is the youth for deeds immortal born, Who loved to whisper to the embattled corn, And clustered woodbines, breathing o'er the stream, Endymion's beauteous passion for a dream! Why did he drop the harp from fingers cold, And sleep so soon with demigods of old! Oh, who so well could sing Love's joys and pains? He lived in melody, as if his veins Poured music; from his lips came words of fire, The voice of Greece, the tones of Homer's lyre."

_Ebenezer Elliott._

We come now to one whose home and haunts on the earth were brief;

"Who sparkled, was exhaled, and went to heaven."

John Keats was one of those sweet and glorious spirits who descend, like the angel messengers of old, to discharge some divine command, not to dwell here. Pure, ethereal, glowing with the fervency of inward life, the bodily vehicle appears but assumed for the occasion, and as a mist, as a shadow, is ready to dissolve the instant that occasion is served. They speak and pass away into the higher light from whence they came; but their words remain--themselves life, and spirit, and power--like the electric element in the veins of the earth, quickening and vitalizing the souls of men to the end of time. They become part and parcel of our nature; they are as essential to the aliment and the progress of our intellectual being, as the light, the morning dew of summer, the morning and the evening star, or any of those great components of nature, the sky, the sea, or the mountain, from which we draw the daily spirit of beauty; and live!--live, not as mere material machines; not as animal existences--as brutes,

"Which graze the mountain top with faces prone, And eyes intent upon the scanty herb It yields them; or, recumbent on its brow, Ruminate heedless of the scene outspread Beneath, beyond, and stretching far away From inland regions to the distant main"--_Cowper._

not mere men of the world, money-getting, house-building, land-purchasing creatures, but souls of God and of eternity. "Man lives not by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God," and which descends to earth by his prophets, whether of prose or of poetry. It is by the mediation of such pure and seraphic intelligences that our true psychological frame and constitution are built up. For, created to take our places in the great future of the universe, amid the spiritual revelation of all things spiritual, we must be raised substantially from the mere germ of immortality within us into "spirits of just men made perfect." We must be composed of the spiritual elements of beauty, thought, sensation, and seizure of all intellectual things, growing by the daily absorption of divine essences into spiritual bodies, incorporate of love, of light, of lofty aspirations and tenderest desires; of thoughts that comprehend the world, and hearts that embrace it with a divine capacity of affection. As we walk on our daily way, and along the muddiest paths of life, amid our own cares and loneliness, we do not and can not walk unblessed. The shower of God's benedictions falls on us; the sunshine of his ceaseless gifts surrounds us. From his own appointed men, whether living or dead, "the refreshments from his presence" reach us, melt into us, and sustain us. Words spoken thousands of years ago steal, like the whisper of a breeze, into our bosoms, and become bright guests there; music, full of deep movings, heard but yesterday from the lips of the inspired, touches the spring of happiness within us. The thoughts and sentiments of poets and philosophers, "beautiful exceedingly," stand around us like the trees and the flowers of our wayside; and from every point of heaven and earth are reflected upon us the flowing waters, the cool forest shades, the bright and glittering stars of that mind, which has been poured through a myriad of vehicles and a host of ages down upon us here. The light, and color, and warmth which mature our very corn and fruits, come from the sun. They are no more inherent in this nether earth than our own life is. All that we have and enjoy must come from other worlds to us. Our material aliments are sustained by the strength and life issuing from the infinite heavens; and thence too descend, in still more ethereal actuality, all that our souls are made of.

Of the class of swift but resplendent messengers by whom these ministrations are performed, neither ours nor any other history can furnish a specimen more beautiful than John Keats. He was of feeling and "imagination all compact." His nature was one pure mass of the living light of poetry. On this world and its concerns he could take no hold, and they could take none on him. The worldly and the worldly wise could not comprehend him, could not sympathize with. To them his vivid orgasm of the intellect was madness; his exuberance of celestial gifts was extravagance; his unworldliness was effeminacy; his love of the universal man, and not of gross distinctions of pride and party, was treason. As of the highest and divinest of God's messengers to earth, they cried, "Away with him; he is not fit to live;" and the body, that mere mist-like, that mere shadow-like body, already failing before the fervency of his spiritual functions, fell, "faded away, dissolved," and disappeared before the bitter frost-wind of base criticism.

It was a dark and wretched time when Keats made his appearance among us. War, and party, and peculation on the one side, and resentment and discontent on the other; the necessity for the gainer maintaining his craft at all costs, and the equal necessity for the loser dragging this ruinous craft to the ground, had infused into literature an atrocious spirit. From this foul spirit, genius, in every fresh incarnation, suffered the most ruthless and inhuman assaults. The stronger possessor of it stood; the weaker or more sensitive fell. Keats was one of the latter. He had soul enough for any thing, but his _physique_ was feeble, and sunk. It will be one of the "damned spots" which will forever cling, not to the country, but to the age. But it is to the everlasting honor of Leigh Hunt, that, himself a critic as well as a poet, he never dipped his hand in the blood of the innocents. He never slew one of those martyrs whose glorious tombs we now build with adamantine stones of admiration, tempering the cement with the tears of our love. Himself assailed, and shot at, and cruelly wounded by the archers, he not only turned and manfully defended himself, but spread the shield of his heart to protect those who were rising up to become formidable rivals in the public regard. Will the country ever show to this generous man, and in time, that warm-heartedness which he always showed to its sons of genius in their unfolding hours? It is a glory that is peculiar, and peculiarly beautiful, that amid that iron age of a murderous criticism, he was forever found in close union and communion with the morning stars of poetry. They truly "sang together." They seemed by an instinct of life to flock to him, and by an instinct equally sure and unselfish, he felt at once their claims, and with open hand and heart maintained them. It was in the pages of the Examiner that, amid specimens of young poets, I first made acquaintance with the magnificent sonnet of Keats on reading Chapman's Homer, and with Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. From that hour there could be no moment's question but that great men were come among us; those men who, in fact, "turn the world upside down," and by which turning upside down, the only process, the asps and scorpions of malice are shook out of it, and all its strong-rooted fabrics of prejudice and pride are toppled into the dust. Till death, the souls of these men, who

"Learned in suffering what they taught in song,"

never ceased to maintain that brave union thus begun, but amid abuse, misrepresentation, and the vilest onslaughts from the army of the aliens, went on blessing the world with those emanations of splendid and unshackled thought, which are now recognized as among the most precious of the national property. Who in future days will not pray that he might have been as one of these?

It is to the account by Leigh Hunt, in his "Byron and some of his Cotemporaries," that we owe almost all that we know of the life and haunts of Keats. From this we learn that "Mr. Keats's origin was of the humblest description. He was born October 29, 1796, at a livery-stable in Moorfields, of which his grandfather was proprietor. He never spoke of it, perhaps out of a personal soreness which the world had exasperated. After receiving the rudiments of a classical education at Mr. Clarke's school at Enfield, he was bound apprentice to Mr. Hammond, a surgeon, in Church-street, Edmonton; and his enemies having made a jest even of this, he did not like to be reminded of it; at once disdaining them for their meanness, and himself for being weak enough to be moved by them. Mr. Clarke, Jun., his schoolmaster's son, a reader of genuine discernment, had encouraged with great warmth the genius that he saw in the young poet; and it was to Mr. Clarke I was indebted for my acquaintance with him."

Mr. Hunt, in his warm-hearted way, lost no time in introducing his poetry to the best judges of poetry, among them to Godwin, Hazlitt, Basil Montagu, Charles Lamb, and others. He read to them, among others, that fine sonnet already mentioned, which, as it is printed in a volume now not much seen, can not too often be quoted:

"ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER.

"Much have I traveled in the land of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen, Round many western islands have I been, Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold; Oft of one wide expanse have I been told, That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet I did never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when, with eagle eyes, He stared at the Pacific--and all his men Looked at each other in a wild surprise, Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

The two poets became speedily familiar and almost inseparable. They read, walked, and talked together continually; and Mr. Hunt gives us various particulars of Keats's haunts at this period which are nowhere else to be obtained. "The volume containing the above sonnet," he says, "was published in 1817, when the author was in his twenty-first year. The poem with which it begins was suggested to him by a delightful summer day, as he stood beside the gate that leads from the battery on Hampstead Heath into a field by Caen Wood; and the last poem, the one on Sleep and Poetry, was occasioned by his sleeping in one of the cottages in the Vale of Health, the first one that fronts to the valley, beginning from the same quarter. I mention these things, which now look trivial, because his readers will not think them so twenty years hence. It was in the beautiful lane running from the road between Hampstead and Highgate to the foot of Highgate Hill, that, meeting me one day, he first gave me the volume. If the admirer of Mr. Keats's poetry does not know the lane in question, he ought to become acquainted with it, both on his author's account and its own. It has been also paced by Mr. Lamb and Mr. Hazlitt, and frequently, like the rest of the beautiful neighborhood, by Mr. Coleridge; so that instead of Millfield Lane, which is the name it is known by 'on earth,' it has sometimes been called Poet's Lane, which is an appellation it richly deserves. It divides the grounds of Lords Mansfield and Southampton, running through trees and sloping meadows, and being rich in the botany for which this part of the neighborhood of London has always been celebrated." Mr. Hunt was at this time living at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health, and the house at which it is said Keats wrote the beautiful poem on Sleep and Poetry was his. There is another fact in this account that deserves attention, and that is, the date of the publication of Keats's first small volume. This was 1817; in 1818 he published his Endymion; on the 26th of June, 1820, his third volume, Lamia, and other Poems, was published; and on the 27th of December of the same year he died at Rome. Thus the whole of his poetical life, from the issue of his first small volume to his death, was but about three years. During the greater part of that period he felt his disease, consumption, was mortal. Yet what progress in the development of his powers, and the maturing of his judgment and feeling of art, was manifested in that short space and under those circumstances! The first volume was a volume of immature fancies and unsettled style, but with things which denoted the glorious dawn of a short but illustrious day. The Endymion had much extravagance. It was a poetical effervescence. The mind of the writer was haunted by crowds of imaginations, and scenes of wonder, and dreams of beauty, chiefly from the old mythological world, but mingled with the passion for living nature, and the warmest feelings of youth. It brought forward the deities of Greece, and invested them with the passions and tenderness of men, and all the youthful glow which then reigned in the poet's heart. The mind was boiling over from intense heat; but amid the luscious foam rose streams of the richest wine of poetry which ever came from the vintage of this world. The next volume, Lamia, Isabella, &c., showed how the heady liquor had cleared itself, and become spirit bright and strong. There was an aim, a settled plan and purpose in each composition, and a steady power of judgment growing up amid all the vivid impulses of the brain that still remained vivid as ever. The style was wonderfully condensed, and the descriptive as well as conceptive faculty had assumed a vigor and acumen which was not, and is not, and probably never will be, surpassed by any other poet. For proofs to justify these high terms, it is only necessary to open the little volume, and open it almost any where. How powerful and tender is the narrative of Isabella; how rich, and gorgeous, and chaste, and well-weighed is the whole of St. Agnes's Eve; how full of the soul of poetry is The Ode to the Nightingale. Perhaps there is no poet, living or dead, except Shakspeare, who can pretend to any thing like the felicity of epithet which characterizes Keats. One word or phrase is the essence of a whole description or sentiment. It is like the dull substance of the earth struck through by electric fires, and converted into veins of gold and diamonds. For a piece of perfect and inventive description, that passage from Lamia, where, Lycius gone to bid the guests to his wedding, Lamia, in her uneasy excitement, employs herself and her demon powers in adorning her palace, is unrivaled:

"It was the custom then to bring away The bride from home at blushing shut of day, Veiled, in a chariot, heralded along By strewn flowers, torches, and a marriage-song, With other pageants: but this fair unknown Had not a friend. So being left alone-- Lycius was gone to summon all his kin-- And knowing surely she could never win His foolish heart from its most pompousness, She set herself, high-thoughted, how to dress The misery in fit magnificence. She did so; but 'tis doubtful how and whence Came, and who were her subtle servitors. About the halls, and to and from the doors, There was a noise of wings, till in short space The glaring banquet-room shone with wide-arched grace. A haunting music, sole, perhaps, and lone Supportress of the fairy roof, made moan Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade. Fresh carved cedar mimicking a glade Of palm and plantain, sent from either side High in the midst, in honor of the bride, Two palms, and then two plantains, and so on; From either side their stems branched one to one All down the aisled place; and beneath all There ran a stream of lamps straight on from wall to wall. So canopied lay an untasted feast Teeming with odors. Lamia, regal dress'd, Silently paced about, and as she went, In pale, contented, silent discontent, Missioned her viewless servants to enrich The fretted splendor of each nook and niche: Between the tree-stems, marbled plain at first, Came jasper panels; then anon there burst Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees, And with the larger wove in small intricacies. Approving all, she faded at self-will, And shut the chamber up, close, hushed, and still, Complete and ready for the revels rude, When dreadful guests would come to spoil her solitude."

The description of Lamia undergoing the metamorphosis by which she escaped from the form of a serpent to that of a beautiful woman, is marvelous for its power and precision of language.

"Left to herself, the serpent now began To change: her elfin blood in madness ran, Her mouth foamed, and the grass, therewith bespent, Withered with dew so sweet and virulent. Her eyes in torture fixed, and anguish drear, Hot, glazed, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear, Flashed phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear. The colors all inflamed throughout her train, She writhed about convulsed with scarlet pain: A deep, volcanian yellow took the place Of all her milder mooned body's grace; And as the lava ravishes the mead, Spoiled all her silver mail and golden brede; Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks, and bars, Eclipsed her crescents, and licked up her stars: So that in moments few she was undress'd Of all her sapphires, gems, and amethyst, And rubious argent; of all these bereft, Nothing but pain and ugliness was left. Still shone her crown; that vanished, also she Melted and disappeared as suddenly; And in the air her new voice luting soft Cried 'Lycius, gentle Lycius!' Borne aloft With the bright mists about the mountains hoar These words dissolved: Crete's forest heard no more."

The most magnificent trophy of his genius, however, is the fragment of Hyperion. On this poem, which has something vast, colossal, and dreamy about it, giving you a conception of the unfoldings of an almost infinite scope of "the vision and the faculty divine" in this extraordinary youth, he was employed when the progress of his complaint, and the savage treatment of the critics, sunk his heart, and he abandoned the task, and went forth to die. How touching, under the circumstances, is the short preface affixed to this volume by the publishers. "If any apology be thought necessary for the appearance of the unfinished poem of HYPERION, the publishers beg to state that they alone are responsible, as it was printed at their particular request, and contrary to the wish of the author. The poem was intended to have been of equal length with the ENDYMION, but the reception given to that work discouraged the author from proceeding." Can a critic even read the passage without some compunction? and who shall again repeat the stale sophism that unkind criticism never extinguished genuine poetry?

Mr. Hunt says of Keats, that "he enjoyed the usual privileges of greatness with all whom he knew, rendering it delightful to be obliged by him, and an equal, but not a greater, to oblige. It was a pleasure to his friends to have him in their houses, and he did not grudge it."