John Keats.
Yet another singer of these days, in most earnest sympathy with the singing moods of Shelley—for whom I can have only a word now, was John Keats;[75] born within the limits of London smoke, and less than three-quarters of a mile from London Bridge—knowing in his boy days only the humblest, work-a-day ranges of life; getting some good Latinity and other schooling out of a Mr. Clarke (of the Cowden Clarke family)—reading Virgil with him, but no Greek. And yet the lad, who never read Homer save in Chapman, when he comes to write, as he does in extreme youth, crowds his wonderful lines with the delicate trills and warblings which might have broken out straight from Helicon—with a susurrus from the Bees of Hymettus. This makes a good argument—so far as it reaches—in disproof of the averments of those who believe that, for conquest of Attic felicities of expression, the Greek vocables must needs be torn forth root by root, and stretched to dry upon our skulls.
He published Endymion in the very year when Shelley set off on his final voyagings—a gushing, wavy, wandering poem, intermeshed with flowers and greenery (which he lavishes), and with fairy golden things in it and careering butterflies; with some bony under-structure of Greek fable—loose and vague—and serving only as the caulking pins to hold together the rich, sensuous sway, and the temper and roll of his language.
I must snatch one little bit from that book of Endymion, were it only to show you what music was breaking out in unexpected quarters from that fact-ridden England, within sound of the murmurs of the Thames, when Shelley was sailing away:—
“On every morrow are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching; yes, in spite of all,