This would have been impossible before a consonant.
[380] So spirito and spirto in Italian, esperis and espirs in Old French.
[381] Milton, however, would not have balked at th' bottomless any more than Drayton at th' rejected or Donne at th' sea. Mr. Masson does not seem to understand this elision, for he corrects i' th' midst to i' the midst, and takes pains to mention it in a note. He might better have restored the n in i', where it is no contraction, but merely indicates the pronunciation, as o' for of and on.
[382] Exactly analogous to that in treasurer when it is shortened to two syllables.
[383] Milton himself has ínvísible, for we cannot suppose him guilty of a verse like
"Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep,"
while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions that he loved.
KEATS.
There are few poets whose works contain slighter hints of their personal history than those of Keats; yet there are, perhaps, even fewer whose real lives, or rather the conditions upon which they lived, are more clearly traceable in what they have written. To write the life of a man was formerly understood to mean the cataloguing and placing of circumstances, of those things which stood about the life and were more or less related to it, but were not the life itself. But Biography from day to day holds dates cheaper and facts dearer. A man's life, so far as its outward events are concerned, may be made for him, as his clothes are by the tailor, of this cut or that, of finer or coarser material; but the gait and gesture show through, and give to trappings, in themselves characterless, an individuality that belongs to the man himself. It is those essential facts which underlie the life and make the individual man that are of importance, and it is the cropping out of these upon the surface that gives us indications by which to judge of the true nature hidden below. Every man has his block given him, and the figure he cuts will depend very much upon the shape of that,—upon the knots and twists which existed in it from the beginning. We were designed in the cradle, perhaps earlier, and it is in finding out this design, and shaping ourselves to it, that our years are spent wisely. It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.
Keats hardly lived long enough to develop a well-outlined character, for that results commonly from the resistance made by temperament to the many influences by which the world, as it may happen then to be, endeavors to mould every one in its own image. What his temperament was we can see clearly, and also that it subordinated itself more and more to the discipline of art.