IV
Two more lives suggest themselves as especially rich in the testimony they bring of haunting influences which permanently moulded them—those of Keats and Rossetti.
It is well known how completely the early life of Rossetti came under the influence of the Florence of the Middle Ages, and how from the very beginning there fell athwart his life and across his very name the shadow of her greatest son. It is doubtful whether we gain as much knowledge of him by a study of the modern times in which he lived, as by turning our attention to the history and ideals of the Florence of the time of Dante and Lorenzo de' Medici.
'It has been said,' writes Pater, 'that all the great Florentines were preoccupied with death. Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe! is the burden of their thoughts, from Dante to Savonarola. Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edge to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge from the danger of death by plague, in a country house. It was to this inherited sentiment, this practical decision that to be preoccupied with the thought of death was in itself dignifying and a note of high quality, that the seriousness of the great Florentines of the fifteenth century was partly due; and it was reinforced in them by the actual sorrows of their times.'
A careful study of Rossetti reveals him also, like them, early and profoundly preoccupied with death. The richly lighted chambers of his mind are in their dark moments visited repeatedly by its pity and its melancholy. Space does not admit of citing here the many evidences; but if ever a mind was visited, preoccupied, and at last mastered by a strong idea, a dominant persuasion, the mind of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was so haunted—so dominated—by the idea of death.
When we turn to Keats's life and writings, they offer examples hardly less notable. For as Rossetti was haunted by the idea of death, so Keats would seem from the first to have been preoccupied by the idea of beauty. By his own memorable confession he had worshiped the spirit of it in all things; he has not the slightest feeling of humility, he says, toward anything in existence with three exceptions only: The Eternal Being, the Memory of Great Men, and the Principle of Beauty.
There is further and ample evidence throughout his writings that he was perpetually possessed by certain definite forms of beauty: by the beauty of mead and moon, the wash of waters at their priestly task, the splendor of the night's starred face; but very especially and more often, it would seem, was he haunted by that most intimate and tangible of all lovelinesses—the loveliness of flowers.
There is constant reference to them, a constant recurring delight in them. Their influence again and again visited him and pervaded his most delicate observations. The memory of flowers again and again laid a detaining hand upon him, and must have ministered to him unrecorded in how many a night hour, mindful, reminiscential, with what gentle ministerings!
They bloom in his lines everywhere, familiar as the name of the beloved on the lips. It will be recalled that they stand among those things of beauty which he names with so much devotion as 'joys forever'; 'daffodils, with the green world they live in' shedding an ethereal sunlight across the more sombre beauty of 'the dooms we have imagined for the mighty dead.'
So, too, 'hushed cool rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,' touch his memory with an ever-freshening sensibility. The greatest pleasure he has experienced in life, he tells us, is in watching the growth of flowers; and to him—as Hazlitt recalls—Hebrew poetry was faulty because it made so little mention of them; and for the converse reason, it would seem likely, Chaucer and Spenser were forever his delight.
What he specially longs for now, he writes,—he has been ill, and is within a year of his death,—is 'the simple flowers of Spring.'
In the same letter we get a glimpse of certain early personal associations not fully followed, which would seem to lend an added loveliness to flowers which he had always found in themselves so lovely.
'How astonishingly,' he writes, ' ...does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not "babble," I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy—their shapes and colors are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I want to see again!'
He did see them once again, and then no more.
In the account of his drive to Rome, he who reads sympathetically must enjoy most, it seems to me, as doubtless Keats did, the autumn flowers which Severn gathered for him by the way and put into his remembering hand.
Lying quiet at the last, as Severn tells us, with his hand clasped on the white carnelian Fanny Brawne had given him, when all other presences seemed to have departed from him,—Love and Ambition having for the last time visited him,—and when life itself, with her hand already on the latch, stood ready to depart, there lingered yet awhile beside him that old sense of loveliness that had so often, even from earliest infancy, visited and haunted his spirit—the loveliness and friendliness of flowers. Already, in some vision of his spirit, he was laid down in their green world he knew so well and loved. 'I feel,' he said, 'the flowers growing over me.'