THE ‘love of mountains’ which plays so large a part in the poetry of the age of Wordsworth, and has so few close analogies in that of any other country or any earlier time, offers matter of still unexhausted interest to the student of poetic psychology. This is not the place to consider how it happened that any mass of boldly crumpled strata, on a certain scale, became in the course of the eighteenth century charged with a kind of spiritual electricity which set up powerful answering excitements in the sensitive beholder. Gray already in 1739 expressed the potential reach and compass of these excitements in our psychical life when he called the scenery of the Grande Chartreuse ‘pregnant with religion and poetry’—a thought which Wordsworth’s sublime verses on the Simplon, sixty years later, only made explicit. Not all the mountain-excitement of the time was of this quality; and we can distinguish easily enough between the ‘picturesque,’ ‘romantic’ mountain sentiment of Scott, to whom the Trossachs and Ben Venue spoke most eloquently when they sounded to the pad of a horseman’s gallop, and the ‘natural religion’ of Wordsworth, to whom the same pass wore the air of a ‘Confessional’ apt for autumnal meditation on the brevity of life. In the younger poets of the age mountain sentiment is less original and profound than in Wordsworth, less breezily elemental than in Scott. The mountain poetry of Wordsworth concurred, as an explicit stimulus to mountain sentiment, with the inarticulate spell of the mountains themselves, transforming in some degree the native feeling and experience of almost all mountain-lovers of the next twenty years, even when they were of the calibre of Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley. Yet even where the Wordsworthian colour is most perceptible, as in The Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni, in Alastor, Mont Blanc, and in the Third Canto of Childe Harold, the younger poet has seen his mountains with his own eyes and through the glamour of his own passions, impregnated them with his own genius and temperament. Shelley’s mountains are no longer the quiet brotherhood of Grasmere, with a listening star atop, but peaks of flamelike aspiration, or embodied protests against men’s code of crime and fraud; Byron’s are warriors calling joyously to one another over the lit lake across the storm. For all these poets—even for Scott when he was a poet—mountain scenery was not so much new matter to be described as a new instrument of expression, a speaking symbol for their own spiritual appetencies and ideal dreams. Of its importance for the poetry of any one of them there cannot be a moment’s doubt. There remains, however, another poet, the youngest, the shortest-lived, but in some respects the most gifted of the whole group. On a general view Keats appears to be sharply distinguished, in regard to the characteristic here in question, from all the rest. Mountains and mountain sentiment seem to have a quite negligible place in his poetry. It may be worth while to consider how far this is really the case.
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).