On the other hand, some of the hills in Endymion, like ‘fountain’d Helicon,’ are purely legendary, and the higher and bolder ones derive their characters from the tales of Olympus or Cyllene. Between nature and classic myth there was for Keats no trace of the disparity which so deeply offended Wordsworth; his imagination passed without thought of discord from one to the other, or blended them together; it was probably the Nature poet yet more than the Christian in Wordsworth who responded so coldly (‘A pretty piece of paganism’) when the young poet brought his train of Bacchanals ‘over the light-blue hills.’ It is of Arcadian boar-hunts that we have to think when Endymion on the mountain-heights will ‘once more make his horn parley from their foreheads hoar’ (i. 478), or sees the thunderbolt hurled from his threshold (ii. 203); it is an Arcadian shepherd whose ‘pipe comes clear from aery steep’ (iii. 359). And it is at least no English mountain of whose ‘icy pinnacles’ we have a momentary and here quite isolated glimpse.
II
But while the mountain-drawing in Endymion is on the whole vague and derivative, there are hints that Keats was already becoming alive to the imaginative spell of great mountains, to their power in poetry, and for his poetry. When he imagines the moonlit earth, he sees it partly in delicate miniature like the image of the nested wren, who takes glimpses of the moon from beneath a sheltering ivy-leaf, but this is coupled with a picture of Miltonic grandeur and tumult:
Innumerable mountains rise, and rise,
Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes. (iii. 59.)
He was already on the way to that clear recognition of his need of great mountains which speaks from his famous explanation of the motives of the northern tour which he undertook, with Brown, in the summer of 1818—the crucial event of his history from our present point of view. ‘I should not have consented to myself,’ he wrote to Bailey, ‘these four months tramping in the highlands, but that I thought that it would give me more experience, rub off more prejudice, use me to more hardship, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would stopping at home among books, even though I should read Homer.’[11] The passage has great psychological value, for it shows how closely involved his nascent apprehension of mountains was with the other spiritual appetencies urgent within him in these months. To be ‘loaded with grander mountains’ he thought of as an integral part of an inner process of much wider scope, of which the common note was to be the bracing and hardening of a mind which had not yet won complete control of its supreme gift of exquisite sensation. The ‘grander mountains’ were to be only one of the bracing forces, but it is clear that he felt this new force, under whose sway he was for a while about to live, akin to others which his letters show to have been alluring him during these months. The bare rugged forms of the mountains he was now to explore accorded subtly for him with the hardihood and endurance of the climber, and not less with the severity of the epic poet, who, like Milton, preferred ‘the ardours to the pleasures of song,’ or who, like Homer, allowed us fugitive but sublime glimpses of the mountains which looked down upon the scene of his Tale. When Keats and Brown came down upon the town of Ayr, they had before them ‘a grand Sea view terminated by the black Mountains of the isle of Arran. As soon as I saw them so nearly I said to myself: How is it they did not beckon Burns to some grand attempt at Epic?’[12] Keats perhaps thought of the Isle of Tenedos, which similarly dominates the plain of Troy across a reach of sea; ‘You would lift your eyes from Homer only to see close before you the real Isle of Tenedos,’ he was writing to Reynolds in a different context on the same day. That one peaked Isle should stand out in Keats’s mind from all the other imagery of Homer, and that he should wonder at the failure of another to beget new Iliads in the unhomeric Burns, shows with much precision how his literary passion for the Homeric poetry was now quickened and actualized by the visible presence of grand mountains.
It is needless (though not irrelevant) to dwell here upon other kindred features of the expanding horizons which came into view for Keats in this momentous year: the resolve to renounce his ‘luxurious’ art for philosophy and knowledge;[13] and the disdain for women, for effeminate characters, for the pleasures of domesticity. In each case the urgency of this passion for what he felt more bracing, more intellectually fortifying, more masculine, found vent, for a time, in language too peremptory and exclusive to be true to the needs of his rich and complex nature.[14] Philosophy would, had he lived, assuredly have ministered more abundantly to his poetry, but Lamia shows how far she was from becoming its master, or its substitute; the Miltonic ardours of Hyperion were to be qualified in the renewed but chastened and ennobled ‘luxury’ of St. Agnes’ Eve and the Odes. The man who wrote: ‘the roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the windowpane are my children,’ would yet have found a place for noble womanhood within his ‘masculine’ ideal, had not a tragical influence intervened. And, similarly, the traces of his mountain experience fade after 1818, a new order of symbols, more congenial at bottom to the ways of his imagination, asserts or reasserts itself in his poetry; and it is hardly an accident that in the revised Hyperion of a year later we approach the granite precipices and everlasting cataracts of the original poem by way of a garden, a temple, and a shrine.
III
For, evidently, it is in Hyperion, if anywhere, that we have to seek the afterglow of that experience of ‘grander mountains’ which, in June, he had set out to encounter. We must not indeed look in poetry of this quality for those detailed reproductions of what he had seen which Wordsworth condemned as ‘inventories’ in Scott, but which are not strange either to the lower levels of his own verse. Even in the letters written for the entertainment of a sick brother Keats rarely describes; and constantly, to others, he breaks off impatiently when he has begun. ‘My dear Reynolds—I cannot write about scenery and visitings.’ His impressions come from him in brief, sudden, unsought phrases; he left it to the methodic Brown to give the enchanting and ‘picturesque’ detail of mountains and valleys ‘in the manner of the Laputan printing-press.’ ‘I have been among wilds and mountains too much to break out much about their grandeur,’ he writes a little later to Bailey. But there is no doubt of the impression. He had hoped that his experience would ‘load’ him with grander mountains; and, in fact, as he goes on to tell, ‘The first mountains I saw, though not so large as some I have since seen, weighed very solemnly upon me.’ And Brown tells us that when Windermere first burst upon their view, ‘he stopped as if stupefied with beauty.’[15]
Their actual experiences of mountain-climbing were few. Weather checked them at Helvellyn, and expense at Ben Lomond; but in the ‘bleak air atop’ of Skiddaw, as Lamb had called it, ‘I felt as if I were going to a Tournament.’ What he felt about the Arran mountains we have seen. Ailsa Craig—the seafowl-haunted ‘craggy ocean pyramid,’ evoked ‘the only sonnet of any worth I have of late written.’ They found the north end of Loch Lomond ‘grand to excess,’ and Keats made a rude pen-and-ink sketch of ‘that blue place among the mountains.’ But their greatest experience was doubtless the climb on Ben Nevis, on 2 August. The chasms below the summit of Nevis seemed to him ‘the most tremendous places I have ever seen,’ ‘the finest wonder of the whole—they appear great rents in the very heart of the mountain, ... other huge crags rising round ... give the appearance to Nevis of a shattered heart or core in itself.’