Chapter 19

We have seen what John Keats did in the shifting scene of the world, and in the high arena of poesy; we have seen what were the qualities of character and of mind which enabled him to bear his part in each. His work as a poet is to us the thing of primary importance: and it remains for us to consider what this poetic work amounts to in essence and in detail. The critic who _is_ a critic--and not a _Quarterly_ or a _Blackwood_ reviewer or lampooner--is well aware of the disproportion between his power of estimation, and the demand which such a genius as that of Keats, and such work as the maturest which he produced, make upon the estimating faculty. But this consideration cannot be allowed to operate beyond a certain point: the estimate has to be given--and given candidly and distinctly, however imperfectly. I shall therefore proceed to express my real opinion of Keats's poems, whether an admiring opinion or otherwise; and shall write without reiterating--what I may nevertheless feel--a sense of the presumption involved in such a process. I shall in the main, as in previous chapters, follow the chronological order of the poems.

As we have seen, Keats began versifying chiefly under a Spenserean influence; and it has been suggested that this influence remained puissant for harm as well as for good up to the close of his poetic career. I do not see much force in the suggestion: unless in this limited sense--that Spenser, like other Elizabethan and Jacobean poets his successors, allowed himself very considerable latitude in saying whatever came into his head, relevant or irrelevant, appropriate or jarring, obvious or far-fetched, simple or grandiose, according to the mood of the moment and the swing of composition, and thus the whole strain presents an aspect more of rich and arbitrary picturesqueness than of ordered suavity. And Keats no doubt often did the same: but not in the choicest productions of his later time, nor perhaps so much under incitement from Spenser as in pursuance of that revolt from a factitious and constrained model of work in which Wordsworth in one direction, Coleridge in another, and Leigh Hunt in a third, had already come forward with practice and precept. Making allowance for a few early attempts directly referable to Spenser, I find, even in Keats's first volume, little in which that influence is paramount. He seems to have written because his perceptions were quick, his sympathies vivid in certain directions, and his energies wound up to poetic endeavour. The mannerisms of thought, method, and diction, are much more those of Hunt than of Spenser; and it is extremely probable that the soreness against Hunt which Keats evidenced at a later period was due to his perceiving that that kindly friend and genial literary ally had misled him into some poetic trivialities and absurdities, not less than to anything in himself which could be taken hold of for complaint.

Keats's first volume would present nothing worthy of permanent memory, were it not for his after achievements, and for the single sonnet upon Chapman's Homer. Several of the compositions are veritable rubbish: probably Keats knew at the time that they were not good, and knew soon afterwards that they were deplorably bad. Such are the address "To Some Ladies" who had sent the author a shell; that "On Receiving a Curious Shell and a Copy of Verses [Moore's "Golden Chain"] from the same Ladies;" the "Ode to Apollo" (in which Homer, Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Tasso, are commemorated); the "Hymn to Apollo;" the lines "To Hope" (in which there is a patriotic aspiration, mingled with scorn for the gauds of a Court). "Calidore" has a certain boyish ardour, clearly indicated if not well expressed. The verses "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" are very far from good, and are stuffed with affectations, but do nevertheless show a considerable spice of the real Keats. Some lines have already been quoted from this effusion, about "flowery nests," and "the pillowy silkiness that rests full in the speculation of the stars." It is only by an effort that we can attach any meaning to either of these childish Della-Cruscanisms: the "pillowy silkiness" may perhaps be clouds intermingled with stars, and the "flowery nests" may, by a great wrenching of English, be meant for "flowery nooks"--nests or nooks of flowers. "Sleep and Poetry" contains various fine lines, telling and suggestive images, and luscious descriptive snatches, and is interesting as showing the bent of the writer's mind, and a sense of his mission begun. Serious metrical flaws are perceptible in it here and there, and throughout this first volume of verse--and indeed in "Endymion" as well. One metrical weakness of which he never got rid is the accenting of the preterite or participial form "ed" (in such words as "resolved," &c.), where its sound ekes out with feeble stress the prosody of a line. Two songs which have genuine lyric grace--dated in 1817, but not included in the volume of "Poems"--are those which begin "Think not of it, sweet one, so," and "Unfelt, unheard, unseen." The volume contains sixteen sonnets, besides the grand one on "Chapman's Homer." The best are those which begin "Keen fitful gusts are whispering here and there," and "Happy is England," and the "Grasshopper and Cricket," which was written in competition with Hunt. It seems to me that Keats's production has more of poetry, Hunt's of finish. The sonnet "On leaving some friends at an early hour" is characteristic enough. This is as much detail as need be given here to the "Poems" of 1817. The sonnet on Chapman's Homer revealed a hand which might easily prove to be a master's. All else was prentice-work, with some melody, some richness and freshness, some independence, much enthusiasm; also many solecisms and perversities of diction, imagery, and method: and not a few pieces were included which only self-conceit, or torpor of the critical faculty, or the mis-persuasion of friends, could have allowed to pass muster. But Keats chose to publish--to exhibit his poetic identity at this stage and in this guise; and of course we can see, in the light of his after-work, that the experiment was rather a rash forestalling than a positive mistake.

There are a few other sonnets which Keats wrote in 1817, or, in general terms, between the publishing dates of the "Poems" volume and of "Endymion." Those "On a Picture of Leander," and "On the Sea," and the one which begins "After dark vapours have oppressed our plains," rank among the best of his juvenile productions. A general observation, applicable to all the early work, whether printed at the time or unprinted, is that the ideas are constantly _expressed_ in an imperfect way. There are perceptions, thoughts, and emotions; but the vehicle of words is, as a rule, huddled and approximate.

"Endymion" now claims our attention. I believe that no better criticism of "Endymion" has ever been written than that which Shelley supplied in a letter dated in September 1819. Certainly no criticism which is equally short is also equally good. I therefore extract it here, and shall have little to say about the poem which is not potentially condensed into Shelley's brief utterance. "I have read Keats's poem," he wrote: "much praise is due to me for having read it, the author's intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. Yet it is full of some of the highest and the finest gleams of poetry; indeed, everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. I think if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought, of which there is now no danger." In July 1820 Shelley wrote to Keats himself on the subject, furnishing almost the only addendum which could have been needed to the preceding remarks: "I have lately read your 'Endymion' again, and even with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion." As Shelley shared with Gifford the conviction that it is difficult to read "Endymion" from book 1, line 1, to book 4, line 1003, and as human nature has not changed essentially since the time of that pre-eminent poet and that rather less eminent critic, I daresay that there are at this day several Keats-enthusiasts who know _in foro conscientiæ_, though they may not avow in public, that they have left "Endymion" unread, or only partially read. Others have perused it, but have found in it so much "indistinct profusion" that they also remain after a while with rather a vague impression of the course of the story; although they agree with Gifford, and even exceed him in the assurance, that "it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion." As the poem is an extremely important one in relation to the life-work of Keats, I think it may not be out of place if I here give a succinct account of what the narrative really amounts to. This may be all the more desirable as Keats has not followed the convenient if prosaic practice of several other epic poets by prefixing to the several books of his long poem an "argument" of their respective contents.

_Book 1._ On a lawn within a forest upon a slope of Mount Latmos was held one morning a festival to Pan. The young huntsman-chieftain Endymion attended, but his demeanour betrayed a secret preoccupation and trouble. After the rites were over, his sister Peona addressed him, and gradually won him to open his heart to her. He told her that at a certain spot by the river, one of his favourite haunts, he had lately seen a sudden efflorescence of dittany and poppies (the flowers sacred to Diana). He fell asleep there, and had a dream or vision of entering the gates of heaven, seeing the moon in transcendent splendour, and then being accosted by a woman or goddess lovely beyond words, who pressed his hand. He seemed to faint, and to be upborne into the upper regions of the sky, where he gave the beauty a rapturous kiss, and then they both paused upon a mountain-side. Next he dreamed that he fell asleep. This was the prelude to his actual waking out of the vision. Ever since he had retained a mysterious sense that the dream had not been all a dream. This was confirmed by various incidents of obscure suggestion, and especially by his hearing in a cavern the words (we have read them already, beslavered by the "human serpentry" of criticism, but they remain delicious words none the less)--

"Endymion, the cave is secreter Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys And trembles through my labyrinthine hair."

As nothing further, however, had happened, Endymion promised Peona that he would henceforth cease to live a life of feverish expectation, and would resume the calm tenor of his days.

_Book 2._--Endymion's promise had not been strictly fulfilled; he was still restless and craving. One day he plucked a rosebud: it suddenly blossomed, and a butterfly emerged from it, with strangely-charactered wings. He pursued the butterfly, which led him to a fountain by a cavern, and then disappeared. A naiad thereupon addressed him, saying that he must wander far before he could be reunited to his mystic fair one. He then appealed to the moon-goddess for some aid, was rapt into a dizzy vision as if he were sailing through heaven in her car, and heard a voice from the cavern bidding him descend into the entrails of the earth. He eagerly obeyed, and passed through a region of twilight dimness starred with gems, until he reached a natural temple enshrining a statue of Diana. An awful sense of solitude weighed upon him, and he implored the goddess to restore him to his earthly home. A profusion of flowers budded forth before his feet, followed by music as he resumed his journey. At last he came to a verdant space, peopled with slumbering Cupids. Here in a beautiful chamber he found Adonis lying tranced on a couch, attended by other Cupids.[18] One of them gave him wine and fruit, and explained to him the winter-sleep and summer-life of Adonis; and at this moment Adonis woke up from his trance, and Venus came to solace him with love. Venus spoke soothingly also to Endymion, telling him that she knew of his love for some one of the immortals, but who this was she had failed to fathom. She promised that one day he should be blessed, and with Adonis she then rose heavenward in her car. The earth closed, and Endymion gladly pursued his way through caves, jewels, and water-springs. Cybele passed on her lion-drawn chariot. The diamond path ended in middle air; Endymion invoked Jupiter, an eagle swooped and bore him down through darkness into a mossy jasmine-bower. With a sense of ecstasy, chequered by an unsatisfied longing for his unknown love, Endymion prepared himself to sleep:

"And, just into the air Stretching his indolent arms, he took, O bliss! A naked waist. 'Fair Cupid, whence is this?' A well-known voice sighed, 'Sweetest, here am I!'"

The lovers indulged their passion in kisses and caresses; he urgent to know who she might be, and she confessing herself a goddess hitherto awful in loveless chastity, but not naming herself, though perhaps her avowals were sufficiently indicative,[19] and she promised to exalt him ere long to Olympus. The rapturous interview ended with the sleep of Endymion, and awaking he found himself alone. He strayed out, and reached an enormous grotto. Two springs of water gushed forth--the springs of Arethusa and Alpheus, whose loves found voice in words. Endymion, sending up a prayer for their union, stepped forward and found himself beneath the sea.

_Book 3._ Soothed by a moonbeam which greeted him through the waters, Endymion pursued his course. Upon a rock within the sea he encountered an old, old man, with wand and book. The ancient man started up as from a trance, declaring that he should now be young again and happy. This was Glaucus, who imparted to Endymion the story of his ill-omened love for Scylla (it is told at considerable length, but need not be detailed here), the witchcraft of Circe which had doomed him to a ghastly marine life of a thousand years, and how, after a shipwreck, he came into possession of a book of magic, which revealed to him that at some far-off day a youth should make his appearance and break the accursed spell. In Endymion, Glaucus recognized the predicted youth. Glaucus then led Endymion to an edifice in which he had preserved the corpse of Scylla, and thousands of other corpses, being those of lovers who had been shipwrecked during his many cycles of sea-dwelling doom. Glaucus tore his scroll into fragments, bound his cloak round Endymion, and waved his wand nine times. He then instructed Endymion to unwind a tangled thread, read the markings on a shell, break the wand against a lyre, and strew the fragments of the scroll upon Glaucus himself, and upon the dead bodies. As the final act was performed, Glaucus resumed his youth, and Scylla and the drowned lovers returned to life. The whole joyous company then rushed off, and paid their devotions to Neptune in his palace. Cupid and Venus were also present here; and the goddess of love spoke words of comfort to Endymion, assuring him that his long expectancy would soon find its full reward. She had by this time probed the secret of Diana, but she refrained from naming that deity to Endymion. She invited him and his bride to pass a portion of their honeymoon in Cythera,[20] with Adonis and Cupid. A stupendous festival in Neptune's palace succeeded. Endymion finally sank down in a trance; Nereids conveyed him up to a forest by a lake; and as he floated earthwards he heard in dream words promising that his goddess would soon waft him up into heaven. He awoke in the sylvan scene.

_Book 4._ The first sound that Endymion heard was a female voice; the wail of a damsel who had followed Bacchus from the banks of the Ganges, and who longed to be at home again, if only to die there. Unseen himself, he saw a beautiful girl, who lay bemoaning her loveless lot. He at once felt that, if he adored his unknown goddess, he loved also his Indian Bacchante. He sprang forward and declared his passion.[21] She, after chaunting her long journeyings in the train of Bacchus, explained that, being sick-hearted and weary, she had strayed away in the forest, and was now but the votary of sorrow. Endymion continued to woo her with sweet words and hot: he heard a dismal voice, "Woe to Endymion!" echoing through the forest. Mercury descended and touched the ground with his wand, and two winged horses sprang out of the earth. Endymion seated his Bacchante upon one horse and mounted the other; they flew upward, eagle-high. In the air they passed Sleep, who had heard a report that a mortal was to wed a daughter of Jove, and who desired to hearken to the marriage ditties before he returned to his cave. The influence of Sleep made the winged horses drowse, and also Endymion and the Bacchante. Endymion then dreamed of being in heaven, the mate of gods and goddesses, Diana among them. In dream he sprang towards Diana, and so awoke; but awake he still saw the same vision. Diana was there in heaven; his Bacchante was beside him lying on the horse's pinions. He kissed the Bacchante, and almost in the same breath protested to Diana his unshaken constancy. The Bacchante then awoke. Endymion, dazed in mind with his divided allegiance, urged her to be gone, and the winged horses resumed their flight. They advanced towards the galaxy, the moon peeped out of the sky, the Bacchante faded away in the moonbeams. Her steed dropped down to the earth; while the one which bore Endymion continued mounting upwards, and he again fell into a sort of trance. He heard not the celestial messengers bespeaking guests to Diana's wedding. The winged horse then carried Endymion down to a hill-top. Here once more he found his beautiful Indian, and for her sake forswore all præterhuman passion. She, however, declared to him that a divine terror forbade her to be his. His sister Peona now re-appeared. She rallied him and the Bacchante on their love and melancholy, both equally obvious, and bade him attend at night a festival to Diana, whom the soothsayers had pronounced to be in a mood peculiarly propitious. Endymion announced his resolution to abandon the world, and live an eremitic life: Peona and the fair Indian should both be his sisters. The Indian vowed lifelong chastity, devoted to Diana. Both the women then retired. The day passed over Endymion motionless and mute. At eventide he walked towards the temple: he heeded not the hymning to Diana. Peona, companioned by the Indian damsel, accosted him. He replied, "Sister, I would have command, if it were heaven's will, on our sad fate." The Indian replied that this he should assuredly have; as she spoke she changed semblance, and stood revealed as Diana herself. She laid upon her own fears and upon fate the blame of past delays, and told Endymion that it had also been fitting that he should be spiritualized out of mortality by some unlooked-for change. As Endymion kneeled and kissed her hands, they both vanished away. The last words of the poem are--

"Peona went Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment:"

words which may perhaps be modelled upon the grave and subdued conclusion of "Paradise Lost."

This is a bald outline of the thread of story which meanders through that often-skimmed, seldom-read, not easily readable poem--in snatches alluring, in entirety disheartening--the "Endymion" of Keats. It will be perceived that the poet keeps throughout tolerably close to his main and professed subject matter--the loves of Diana and Endymion, although the episode of Glaucus, which is brought within the compass of the amorous quest, is certainly a very long and extraneous one. As we have seen, Keats, when well advanced with this poem, spoke of it as a test of his inventive faculty: and truly it is such, but I am not sure that his inventive faculty has come extremely well out of the ordeal. The best part which invention could take in such an attempt would be a vigorous, sane, and adequate conception of the imaginable relation between a loving goddess and her human lover; her emotion towards him, and his emotion towards her; and his ultimate semi-spiritualized and semi-human mode of existence in the divine conclave; along with a chain of incidents--partly of mythologic tradition, partly the poet's own--which should illustrate these essential elements of the legend, and take possession of the reader's mind, for their own sake at the moment, and for the sake of the main conception as ultimate result. Of all this we find little in Keats's poem. Diana figures as a very willing woman, passing out of the stage of maidenly coyness. Endymion talks indeed at times of the exaltation of a passion transcending the bounds of mortality, but his conduct and demeanour go little beyond those of an adventurous lover of the knight-errant sort who, having taken the first leap in the dark, follows where Fortune leads him--and assuredly she leads him a very curious dance, where one cannot make out how his human organism, with respirative and digestive processes, continues to exist. Moreover, the last book of the poem spoils all that has preceded, so far as continuity of feeling is concerned; for here we learn that no sooner does Endymion see a pretty Indian Bacchante than he falls madly in love with her, and casts to the winds every shred and thought of Diana, already his bride or quasi-bride; she goes out like a cloud-veiled glimpse of moonlight. True, the Bacchante is in fact Diana herself; but of this Endymion knows nothing at all, and he deliberately--or rather with fatuous precipitancy--gives up the glorious goddess for the sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber. Diana, when she re-assumes her proper person, has not a word of reproach to level at him. This may possibly be true to the nature of a goddess--it is certainly not so to that of a woman; and it is the only crisis at which she shows herself different from womanhood--shall we say superior to it?

In another and minor sense there is no lack of invention in this Poetic Romance. So far as I know, there is nothing in Grecian mythology furnishing a nucleus for the incidents of Endymion's descending into the bowels of the earth, passing thence beneath the sea, meeting Glaucus, and restoring to life the myriads of drowned lovers, encountering the Indian Bacchante, and taking with her an aërial voyage upon winged coursers. These incidents--except indeed that of the Bacchante--are passing strange, and could not be worked out in a long narrative poem without a lavish command of fanciful and surprising touches. The tale of the aërial voyage seems abortive; its natural _raison d'être_ and needful sequel would appear to be that Diana, having thus launched Endymion along with herself into the heavenly regions, should bear him straight onward to the high court of the gods; but, instead of that, the horses and their riders return to earth, the air has been traversed to no purpose and with no ostensible result, and Endymion is allowed again to forswear Diana for the Bacchante before the consummation is reached. Presumably Morpheus (Sleep) is responsible for this mishap. His untoward presence in the sky sent the Bacchante, as well as Endymion, to sleep for awhile: when they awoke, Diana had to leave the form of the Bacchante, and, in her character of Phoebe, regulate the nascent moon; though a goddess, she could not be in two places at once, and so the winged horses descended _re infectâ_. This is an ingenious point of incident enough; but it is just one of those points which indicate that the poet's mind moved in a region of scintillating details rather than of large and majestic contours.

Such is in fact the quality of "Endymion" throughout. Everything is done for the sake of variegation and embroidery of the original fabric; or we might compare it to a richly-shot silk which, at every rustling movement, catches the eye with a change of colour. Constant as they are, the changes soon become fatiguing, and in effect monotonous; one colour, varied with its natural light and shade, would be more restful to the sight, and would even, in the long run, leave a sense of greater, because more congruous and harmonized, variety. Luscious and luxuriant in intention--for I cannot suppose that Keats aimed at being exalted or ideal--the poem becomes mawkish in result: he said so himself, and we need not hesitate to repeat it. Affectations, conceits, and puerilities, abound, both in thought and in diction: however willing to be pleased, the reader is often disconcerted and provoked. The number of clever things said cleverly, of rich things richly, and of fine things finely, is however abundant and superabundant; and no one who peruses "Endymion" with a true sense for poetic endowment and handling can fail to see that it is peculiarly the work of a poet. The versification, though far from faultless, is free, surging, and melodious--one of the devices which the author most constantly employs with a view to avoiding jogtrot uniformity being that of beginning a new sentence with the second line of a couplet. On every page the poet has enjoyed himself, and on most of them the reader can joy as well. The lyrical interludes, especially the hymn to Pan, and the chaunt of the Bacchante (which comprises a sort of verse-transcript of Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne"), are singularly wealthy in that fancy which hovers between description and emotion. The hymn to Pan was pronounced by Wordsworth, _vivâ voce_, to be "a pretty piece of paganism"--a comment which annoyed Keats not a little. Shelley (in his undispatched letter to the editor of the _Quarterly Review_) pointed out, as particularly worthy of attention, the passages--"And then the forest told it in a dream" (book ii.); "The rosy veils mantling the East" (book iii.); and "Upon a weeded rock this old man sat" (book iii.) The last--relating to Glaucus and his pictured cloak--is certainly remarkable; the other two, I should say, not more remarkable than scores of others--as indeed Shelley himself implied.

To sum up, "Endymion" is an essentially poetical poem, which sins, and greatly or even grossly does it sin, by youthful indiscipline and by excess. To deny these blemishes would be childish--they are there, and must be not only admitted, but resented. The faults, like the beauties, of the poem, are positive--not negative or neutral. The work was in fact (as Keats has already told us) a venture of an experimental kind. At the age of twenty-one to twenty-two he had a mind full of poetic material; he turned out his mind into this poetic romance, conscious that, if some things came right, others would come wrong. We are the richer for his rather overweening experiment; we are not to ignore its conditions, nor its partial failure, but we have to thank him none the less. If "a thing of beauty is a joy for ever," a thing of alloyed beauty is a joy in its minor degree.

The next long poem of Keats--"Isabella, or the Pot of Basil"--is a vast advance on "Endymion" in sureness of hand and moderation of work: it is in all respects the better poem, and justifies what Keats said (in his letter of October 9, 1818, quoted in our Chapter v.) of the experience which he was sure to gain by the adventurous plunge he had made in "Endymion." Of course it was a less arduous attempt; the subject being one of directly human passion, the story ready-furnished to him by Boccaccio, and the narrative much briefer. Except in altering the locality from Messina to Florence (a change which seems objectless), Keats has adhered faithfully enough to the sweet and sad story of Boccaccio; he has however amplified it much in detail, for the Italian tale is a short one. "Isabella" has always been a favourite with the readers of Keats, and deservedly so; it is tender, touching, and picturesque. Yet I should not place it in the very first rank of the poet's works--the treatment seems to me at once more ambitious and less masculine than is needed. The writer seems too conscious that he has set himself to narrating something pathetic; he tells the story _ab extra_, and enlarges on "the pity of it," instead of leaving the pity to speak to the heart out of the very circumstances themselves. The brothers may have been "ledger-men" and "money-bags" (Boccaccio does not insist upon any such phase of character), and they certainly became criminals, though the Italian author treats their murder of Lorenzo as if it were a sufficiently obvious act in vindication of the family honour; but, when Keats "again asks aloud" why these commercial brothers were proud, he seems to intrude upon us overmuch the personality of the narrator of a tragic story, and pounds away at his text like a pulpiteer. This is only one instance of the flaw which runs through the poem--that it is all told as with a direct appeal to the reader to be sympathetic--indignant now, and now compassionate. Leigh Hunt has pointed out the absurdity of putting into the mouth of one of the brother "money-bags," just as they are about to execute their plot for murdering Lorenzo, the lines (though he praises the pretty conceit in itself)--

"Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count His dewy rosary on the eglantine."

The author's invocation to Melancholy, Music, Echo, Spirits in grief, and Melpomene, to condole the approaching death of Isabella, seems to me a _fadeur_ hardly more appropriate than the money-bag's epigram upon the "dewy rosary." But the reader is probably tired of my qualifying clauses for the admiration with which he regards "The Pot of Basil." He thinks it both beautiful and pathetic--and so do I.

"Isabella" is written in the octave stanza; "The Eve of St. Agnes" in the Spenserean. This difference of metre corresponds very closely to the difference of character between the two poems. "Isabella" is a narrative poem of event and passion, in which the incidents are presented so as chiefly to subserve purposes of sentiment; "The Eve of St. Agnes," though it assumes a narrative form, is hardly a narrative, but rather a monody of dreamy richness, a pictured and scenic presentment, which sentiment again permeates and over-rules. I rate it far above "Isabella"--and indeed above all those poems of Keats, not purely lyrical, in which human or quasi-human agents bear their part, except only the ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and the uncompleted "Eve of St. Mark." "Hyperion" stands aloof in lonely majesty; but I think that, in the long run, even "Hyperion" represents the genius of Keats less adequately, and past question less characteristically, than "The Eve of St. Agnes." The story of this fascinating poem is so meagre as to be almost nugatory. There is nothing in it but this--that Keats took hold of the superstition proper to St. Agnes' Eve, the power of a maiden to see her absent lover under certain conditions, and added to it that a lover, who was clandestinely present in this conjuncture of circumstances, eloped with his mistress. This extreme tenuity of constructive power in the poem, coupled with the rambling excursiveness of "Endymion," and the futility of "The Cap and Bells," might be held to indicate that Keats had very little head for framing a story--and indeed I infer that, if he possessed any faculty in that direction, it remained undeveloped up to the day of his death. One of the few subsidiary incidents introduced into "The Eve of St. Agnes" is that the lover Porphyro, on emerging from his hiding-place while his lady is asleep, produces from a cupboard and marshals to sight a large assortment of appetizing eatables. Why he did this no critic and no admirer has yet been able to divine; and the incident is so trivial in itself, and is made so much of for the purpose of verbal or metrical embellishment, as to reinforce our persuasion that Keats's capacity for framing a story out of successive details of a suggestive and self-consistent kind was decidedly feeble. The power of "The Eve of St. Agnes" lies in a wholly different direction. It lies in the delicate transfusion of sight and emotion into sound; in making pictures out of words, or turning words into pictures; of giving a visionary beauty to the closest items of description; of holding all the materials of the poem in a long-drawn suspense of music and reverie. "The Eve of St. Agnes" is _par excellence_ the poem of "glamour." It means next to nothing; but means that little so exquisitely, and in so rapt a mood of musing or of trance, that it tells as an intellectual no less than a sensuous restorative. Perhaps no reader has ever risen from "The Eve of St. Agnes" dissatisfied. After a while he can question the grounds of his satisfaction, and may possibly find them wanting; but he has only to peruse the poem again, and the same spell is upon him.

"The Eve of St. Mark" was begun at much the same date as "The Eve of St. Agnes," rather the earlier of the two. Its relation to other poems by the author is singular. In "Endymion" he had been a prodigal of treasures--some of them genuine, others spurious; in "The Eve of St. Agnes" he was at least opulent, a magnate superior to sumptuary laws; but in "The Eve of St. Mark" he subsides into a delightful simplicity--a simplicity full, certainly, of "favour and prettiness," but chary of ornament. It comes perfectly natural to him, and promises the most charming results. The non-completion of "The Eve of St. Mark" is the greatest grievance of which the admirers of Keats have to complain. I should suppose that, in the first instance, he advisedly postponed the eve of one saint, Mark, to the eve of the other, Agnes; and that he did not afterwards find a convenient opportunity for resuming the uncompleted poem. The superstition connected with St. Mark's vigil is not wholly unlike that pertaining to St. Agnes's. In the former instance (I quote from Dante Rossetti), "it is believed that, if a person placed himself near the church porch when twilight was thickening, he would behold the apparition of those persons in the parish who were to be seized with any severe disease that year go into the church. If they remained there, it signified their death; if they came out again, it portended their recovery; and, the longer or shorter the time they remained in the building, the severer or less dangerous their illness." The same writer, forecasting the probable course of the story,[22] surmised that "the heroine, remorseful after trifling with a sick and now absent lover, might make her way to the minster porch to learn his fate by the spell, and perhaps see his figure enter but not return." If this was really to have been the sequel, we can perceive that the unassuming simplicity of the poem at its commencement would, ere its close, have deepened into a different sort of simplicity--emotional, and even tragic. As it stands, the simplicity of "The Eve of St. Mark" is full-blooded as well as quaint--there is nothing starved or threadbare about it. Diverse though it is from Coleridge's "Christabel," we seem to feel in it something of the like possessing or haunting quality, modified by Keats's own distinctive genius. In this respect, and in perfectness of touch, we link it with "La Belle Dame sans Merci."

"Hyperion" has next to be considered. This was the only poem by Keats which Shelley admired in an extreme degree. He wrote at different dates: "The fragment called 'Hyperion' promises for him that he is destined to become one of the first writers of the age.... It is certainly an astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of Keats which I confess I had not before.... If the 'Hyperion' be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.... The great proportion of this piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry." Byron, who had been particularly virulent against Keats during his lifetime, wrote after his death a much more memorable phrase: "His fragment of 'Hyperion' seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Æschylus." Mr. Swinburne has written of the poem more at length, and with carefully weighed words:

"The triumph of 'Hyperion' is as nearly complete as the failure of 'Endymion.' Yet Keats never gave such proof of a manly devotion and rational sense of duty to his art as in his resolution to leave this great poem unfinished; not (as we may gather from his correspondence on the subject) for the pitiful reason assigned by his publishers, that of discouragement at the reception given to his former work, but on the solid and reasonable ground that a Miltonic study had something in its very scheme and nature too artificial, too studious of a foreign influence, to be carried on and carried out at such length as was implied by his original design. Fortified and purified as it had been on a first revision, when much introductory allegory and much tentative effusion of sonorous and superfluous verse had been rigorously clipped down or pruned away, it could not long have retained spirit enough to support or inform the shadowy body of a subject so little charged with tangible significance."

Mr. Swinburne is a critic with whom one may well be content to go astray, if astray it is. I will therefore say that I entirely agree with him in this estimate of "Hyperion," and of the sound discretion which Keats exercised in giving it up. To deal with the gods of Olympus is no easy task--it had decidedly overtaxed Keats in "Endymion," though he limited himself to the two goddesses Diana and Venus, and casually the gods Neptune and Mercury; but to deal with the elder gods--Saturn, Ops, Hyperion--and with the Titans, on the scale of a long epic narration, is a task which may well be pronounced unachievable. The Olympian gods would also have had to be introduced: Apollo already appears in the poem, not too promisingly. The elder gods are necessarily mere figure-heads of bulk, might, majesty, and antiquity; to get any character out of them after these "property" attributes have been exhausted to the mind's eye, to "set them going" in act, and doing something apportionable into cantos, and readable by human energies, was not a problem which could be solved by a poet of the nineteenth century. Past question, Keats started grandly, and has left us a monument of Cyclopean architecture in verse almost impeccable--a Stonehenge of reverberance; he has made us feel that his elder gods were profoundly primæval, powers so august and abstract-natured as to have become already obsolete in the days of Zeus and Hades: his Titans, too, were so vast and muscular that no feat would have been difficult to them except that of interesting us. This sufficed for the first book of the poem; in the second book, the enterprise is already revealing itself as an impossible one, for the council at which Oceanus and others speak is reminiscent of the Pandæmonic council in Milton, and clearly very inferior to that. It could not well help resembling the scene in "Paradise Lost," nor yet help being inferior; besides, even were it equal or preferable, Milton had done the thing first. The "large utterance of the early gods," large though it be, tends to monotony. In