John Keats.
Yet another singer of these days, in most earnest sympathy with the singing moods of Shelley—for whom I can have only a word now, was John Keats;[75] born within the limits of London smoke, and less than three-quarters of a mile from London Bridge—knowing in his boy days only the humblest, work-a-day ranges of life; getting some good Latinity and other schooling out of a Mr. Clarke (of the Cowden Clarke family)—reading Virgil with him, but no Greek. And yet the lad, who never read Homer save in Chapman, when he comes to write, as he does in extreme youth, crowds his wonderful lines with the delicate trills and warblings which might have broken out straight from Helicon—with a susurrus from the Bees of Hymettus. This makes a good argument—so far as it reaches—in disproof of the averments of those who believe that, for conquest of Attic felicities of expression, the Greek vocables must needs be torn forth root by root, and stretched to dry upon our skulls.
He published Endymion in the very year when Shelley set off on his final voyagings—a gushing, wavy, wandering poem, intermeshed with flowers and greenery (which he lavishes), and with fairy golden things in it and careering butterflies; with some bony under-structure of Greek fable—loose and vague—and serving only as the caulking pins to hold together the rich, sensuous sway, and the temper and roll of his language.
I must snatch one little bit from that book of Endymion, were it only to show you what music was breaking out in unexpected quarters from that fact-ridden England, within sound of the murmurs of the Thames, when Shelley was sailing away:—
“On every morrow are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching; yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such—the sun, the moon,
Trees—old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
’Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
And such, too, is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read.”
I might cite page on page from Keats, and yet hold your attention; there is something so beguiling in his witching words; and his pictures are finished—with only one or two or three dashes of his pencil. Thus we come upon—
“Swelling downs, where sweet air stirs
Blue harebells lightly, and where prickly furze
Buds lavish gold.”
And again our ear is caught with—
“Rustle of the reapéd corn,
And sweet birds antheming the morn.”
Well, this young master of song goes to Italy, too—not driven, like Byron, by hue and cry, or like Shelley, restless for change (from Chancellor’s courts) and for wider horizons—but running from the disease which has firm grip upon him, and which some three years after Shelley’s going kills the poet of the Endymion at Rome. His ashes lie in the Protestant burial-ground there—under the shadow of the pyramid of Caius Cestius. Every literary traveller goes to see the grave, and to spell out the words he wanted inscribed there:
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
Upon that death, Shelley, then living in Pisa, blazed out in the Adonais—the poem making, with the Lycidas of Milton, and the In Memoriam of Tennyson, a triplet of laurel garlands, whose leaves will never fade. Yet those of Shelley have a cold rustle in them—shine as they may:—
“Oh, weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Wake, melancholy mother, wake and weep!
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep
Like his—a mute and uncomplaining sleep.
For he is gone where all things wise and fair
Descend. Oh, dream not that the amorous deep
Will yet restore him to the vital air;
Death feeds on his mute voice and laughs at our despair.
“Oh, weep for Adonais! The quick dreams,
The passion-winged ministers of thought
Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught
The Love which was its music, wander not—
Wander no more from kindling brain to brain,
But droop there whence they sprung; and mourn their lot
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,
They ne’er will gather strength, or find a home again.”
The weak place in this impassioned commemorative poem lies in its waste of fire upon the heads of those British critics, who—as flimsy, pathetic legends used to run—slew the poet by their savagery. Keats did not range among giants; but he was far too strong a man to die of the gibes of the Quarterly, or the jeers of Blackwood. Not this; but all along, throughout his weary life—even amid the high airs of Hampstead, where nightingales sang—he sang, too,—
“I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath.”[76]