through which, densely as it is woven, steals here and there a sunbeam to play upon the carpet underneath. In such a place we know little and care less whither we may be going. Standing still is a good progress. Not a step but something offers itself,—a flower, a bed of moss, a trailing, berry-covered vine, a tuft of ferns. A brook talks to us, a bird sings to us, a vista invites us, a leafy spray, as we brush against it, whispers of beauty and the summer. These, and trifles like these, are what we could specify. All of them together do not make the forest, yet the least of them is not only part of the forest, but is what it is because of the forest. The soul of the forest speaks through it. How incomparably significant becomes of a sudden every common sound. If two branches but rub together, we must stop and listen. If a thrush whistles, we could stand forever to hear it. Not a sight or sound of them all would mean the same, or anything like the same, if it were encountered in the open and by itself. It is the old lesson. The sparrow’s note must come from the alder bough, the shell must be seen on the beach with the tide rippling over it.
And the magical verse, if it is to exercise its full charm, must be found, not in a book of extracts, nor as a fragment, but at home in its native surroundings. It must have been born in the poem, and we must discover it there! The poem which has made the verse must also have put us into the mood to receive it. How often have all readers found this true by its opposite. How often a line quoted is a line from which the glory seems to have departed, a line dépaysé!—as the tree, the bird, the leaf, if we see them in the open country and in the mood of the open country, can never be the same as if we saw them in the forest and in the mood which the forest induces.
We think, then, that the poet’s plea is sound; that his long poem, whatever its shortcomings, is abundantly justified as a good place to wander about in; that there is poetry (one of the rare things of the world) in it which never would have been produced elsewhere, and which, now that it has been produced, can only be appreciated when read, as scientific men say, in situ. To transfer its beauties to a commonplace book would be like putting roses into a herbarium, or, more justly, perhaps, like setting a seashell on a parlor mantel.
In the long poem, too, as in the forest, though we were near forgetting to speak of it, there is always the chance of finding something unexpected; a line, an epithet, an image, that seems to have come into being since we were last here. Every perusal is thus a kind of voyage of discovery. It is as if the season had changed. New flowers have blossomed, new birds have come from the South, and the wood is a new place.
In all the work of genius, as we began by saying, there is no small part that seems to come from almost anywhere rather than from the mind and intention of the writer. And the more genius, we must believe, the more of this appearance of what is known (or unknown) as inspiration. Yet, in the case of Keats, a man of genius all compact, one has only to read his letters to see (and glad we must be to see it) that, for all his youthfulness and comparatively slight acquaintance with books, he was pretty well aware of himself, having withal a kind of philosophy of life and many shrewd ideas concerning the poetic art. His gift was no external, detachable thing, an influence of which he could give no account, and over which he had no control, like, shall we say, the inscrutable, uncanny, unrelated mathematical faculty of a Zerah Colburn, a thing by itself, significant of no general capacity on the part of its possessor. The man himself was a genius.
And being such, he was safest when he followed his own leadings. When he humbled himself to write what he hoped men would pay for, as, under pressure of his brother’s and sister’s need, he persuaded himself he might do (“the very corn which is now so beautiful, as if it had only took to ripening yesterday, is for the market; so, why should I be delicate?”), he was mostly wasting his time. “I have great hope of success,” he writes, “because I make use of my judgment more deliberately than I have yet done.” It was a vain dependence. “Live and learn,” says the proverb. And, prose men or poets, the brightest must mind the lesson. But Keats, alas! could not live. He was “born for death,” and was already marked. His work, the best of it, was already finished. Racked and broken, devoured by the very madness of passion and wasting away with incurable disease, his tale henceforth is pure tragedy. If his passion was a weakness,—and no doubt it was,—to colder-blooded men a state of mind incredible, and to Pharisees and fools a thing to mock at,—so let us call it, and there be done. It was past cure, so much is certain. Here and there in his letters there are still gleams of brightness, sad touches of pleasantry. To his sister, about whose health he is continually in a fever, lest she should be going as his mother and his brother Tom have gone (and he himself far on the road), he is always a little improved, always making the most of the doctor’s words of encouragement; but between times, to some other correspondent, he shows for a moment the plague that is consuming his life. It is heart-breaking to hear him. “If I had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me.” He cannot name the one of whom he is night and day thinking. “I am afraid to write to her—to receive a letter from her—to see her handwriting would break my heart.” Even to see her name written would be more than he could bear. “Oh, Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery.”
And strange it is how cruel a price a man can be made to pay for what, at the worst, is only a piece of natural foolishness.
“Well and wisely said the Greek,
Be thou faithful, but not fond;
To the altar’s foot thy fellow seek,