“If he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it already, and can put it into better language than any man. I hear that he does not like to be told that he may get better; nor is it to be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not survive. He can only regard it as a puerile thing, and an insinuation that he shall die. But if his persuasion should happen to be no longer so strong, or if he can now put up with attempts to console him, tell him of what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour) think always, that I have seen too many instances of recovery from apparently desperate cases of consumption not to be in hope to the very last. If he still cannot bear to hear this, tell him—tell that great poet and noblehearted man—that we shall all bear his memory in the most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads to it, as our loves do. Or if this, again, will trouble his spirit, tell him that we shall never cease to remember and love him; and that, Christian or infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think all who are of one accord in mind and heart are journeying to one and the same place, and shall unite somewhere or other again, face to face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted.”[148]
The literary relations of Keats and Hunt will be considered under two heads; first, the criticism of Keats’s writings by Hunt; and second, his direct influence upon them.
On first looking into Chapman’s Homer in The Examiner of December 1st, 1816, was embodied in an article entitled “Young Poets.” It was the first notice of Keats to appear in print and is in part as follows:
“The last of these young aspirants whom we have met with, and who promise to help the new school to revive Nature and
‘To put a spirit of youth in everything,’—
is we believe, the youngest of them all, and just of age. His name is John Keats. He has not yet published anything except in a newspaper, but a set of his manuscripts was handed us the other day, and fairly surprised us with the truth of their ambition, and ardent grappling with Nature.”
In Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries, the last line of the same sonnet—
“Silent upon a peak in Darien”—
is called “a basis of gigantic tranquillity.”[149]
Leigh Hunt’s review of the Poems of 1817[150] was kind and discriminating. He writes characteristically of the first poem, I stood tiptoe, that it “consists of a piece of luxury in a rural spot”; of the epistles and sonnets, that they “contain strong evidences of warm and social feelings.” This comment is quite characteristic of Hunt. He was as fond of finding “warm and social feelings” in the poetry of others as of putting them into his own. In his anxiety he sometimes found them when they did not exist. He continues: “The best poem is certainly the last and the longest, entitled Sleep and Poetry. It originated in sleeping in a room adorned with busts and pictures [Hunt’s library], and is a striking specimen of the restlessness of the young poetical appetite, obtaining its food by the very desire of it, and glancing for fit subjects of creation ‘from earth to heaven.’ Nor do we like it the less for an impatient, and as it may be thought by some irreverend [sic] assault upon the late French school of criticism[151] and monotony.” But Hunt did not allow his affection for Keats or his approval of Keats’s poetical doctrine to blunt his critical acumen. In summarizing he says: “The very faults of Mr. Keats arise from a passion for beauties, and a young impatience to vindicate them; and as we have mentioned these, we shall refer to them at once. They may be comprised in two;—first, a tendency to notice everything too indiscriminately, and without an eye to natural proportion and effect; and second, a sense of the proper variety of versification without a due consideration of its principles.” In conclusion, the beauties “outnumber the faults a hundred fold” and “they are of a nature decidedly opposed to what is false and inharmonious. Their characteristics indeed are a fine ear, a fancy and imagination at will, and an intense feeling of external beauty in its most natural and least inexpressible simplicity.”