I
If we look to the sources of his experience, Keats was more nearly secluded from the stimulus of mountain scenery than any of his compeers. By the outward circumstances, of his birth and breeding he was in reality the ‘cockney poet’ of later derisive criticism. During the whole formative period of youth he hardly encountered even ‘wild’ scenery; what lay about him in his infancy was at best the semi-suburban meadow and woodland landscape of Edmonton, or the ‘little hill’ (of Hampstead) on which he ‘stood tiptoe’ to command a wider view. Before the summer of 1818 there is no sign that either ‘mountain power’ or ‘mountain mystery’ had any meaning for him. He deeply admired Wordsworth, and regarded The Excursion as one of the three things to rejoice at in that age; but it was Wordsworth as an interpreter of human life, the poet who ‘thought into the human heart’ (to Reynolds, May 1818), rather than the mountain lover. There is no clear trace as yet in his earlier poetry of Cumberland fells; there is none whatever of the great mountain mythology of Wordsworth. No menacing peak had ever towered up between him and the stars, no far-distant hills had sent an alien sound of melancholy to his ear. Not that he owes nothing as a poet to the mythic rendering of mountains. On the contrary, up to this date, all his imagining of mountains, in the stricter sense, is derived from, or at least touched with, myth. Only it is the myth of classic legend, not of modern ‘natural religion.’ Had not the ‘lively Grecians’ inhabited a ‘land of hills,’ these would hardly have entered even as largely as they do into the enchanted scenery of Endymion; and on the whole it is a scenery of woods and waters, flowery glades and ocean caverns, not of Olympian heights. But if Keats’s experience of nature is still limited, it is used to the full. Endymion, at first sight a tissue of exquisite dreams, is full of the evidence of his no less exquisite perception of the living nature within his reach. From the very outset we are aware that the ‘things of beauty’ he loved best and knew most intimately in the natural world were woods and flowers and streams. There is no mention, in that opening survey, of hills, and when they come perforce into the story they are arrayed as far as may be in the semblance of these beloved things. ‘A mighty forest’ is ‘outspread upon the sides of Latmus’ (i. 62); in the summons to the Shepherds, the highland homes are touched vaguely and without interest (‘whether descended from beneath the rocks that overtop your mountains’), while he lingers with evident delight upon the ‘swelling downs’
... where sweet air stirs
Blue hare-bells lightly and where prickly furze
Buds lavish gold. (i. 201.)
as later, no less daintily, upon the
... hill-flowers running wild
In pink and purple chequer. (ii. 286.)
The ideal dwelling for Endymion and his ‘swan of Ganges’ will be under the brow of a steep hill, but they will be embowered in ivy and yew, and the hill itself, like their bridal couch, will be ‘mossy’—the haunting character of the Keatsian woodland and its ‘winding ways’ (iv. 670).
On the other hand, some of the hills in Endymion, like ‘fountain’d Helicon,’ are purely legendary, and the higher and bolder ones derive their characters from the tales of Olympus or Cyllene. Between nature and classic myth there was for Keats no trace of the disparity which so deeply offended Wordsworth; his imagination passed without thought of discord from one to the other, or blended them together; it was probably the Nature poet yet more than the Christian in Wordsworth who responded so coldly (‘A pretty piece of paganism’) when the young poet brought his train of Bacchanals ‘over the light-blue hills.’ It is of Arcadian boar-hunts that we have to think when Endymion on the mountain-heights will ‘once more make his horn parley from their foreheads hoar’ (i. 478), or sees the thunderbolt hurled from his threshold (ii. 203); it is an Arcadian shepherd whose ‘pipe comes clear from aery steep’ (iii. 359). And it is at least no English mountain of whose ‘icy pinnacles’ we have a momentary and here quite isolated glimpse.