I have quoted the three lines and a half of the earlier stanza merely that they may act as an overture to the last two lines. Surely there are no two lovelier lines in the language! In the last line the words seem to melt together of their own propinquity.
Here is an alexandrine that haunts me night and day—
“Sweete is the love that comes alone with willingnesse.”
As a rule, I hate writing with the books I am speaking of near me; they fetter one cruelly when they are at hand. There is a tendency to verify one’s memory, and read up the context of favourite lines. This is checking to the speed and chilling to the spirits. When I was saying something about the Spelling-Book and the Pilgrim’s Progress, I had the copies within arm’s length, for I did not know either well enough to trust to memory. Since I got done with them I have placed them in distant safety. But one likes to handle Spenser—to have it nigh. My copy is lying at my left elbow in the blazing sun as I write now. It seems to me I shall never again look into the Spelling-Book or the Pilgrim’s Progress. Fables and allegories are only foolishnesses fit for people of weak intellect and children. Well, when I put down this pen, and before this ink is dry, I shall have resumed my interrupted reading of the Faerie Queen at page 473. My intellect is too weak and my heart too childish to resist the seduction of Spenser’s verse. So much for my own theory of allegory and my respect for my own theory.
MY COPY OF KEATS.
The only copy of Keats I ever owned is a modest volume published by Edward Moxon and Co. in the year 1861. By writing on its yellow fly-leaf I find it was given to me four years later, in September 1865. At that time it was clean and bright, opened with strict impartiality when set upon its back, and had not learned to respond with alacrity to hasty searches for favourite passages.
The binding is now racked and feeble from use; and if, as in army regulations, service under warm suns is to be taken for longer service in cooler climes, it may be said that to the exhaustion following overwork have been added the prejudices of premature age.
It is not bound as books were bound once upon a time, when they outlasted the tables and chairs, even the walls; ay, the very races and names of their owners. The cover is simple plain blue cloth; on the back is a little patch of printing in gold, with the words Keats’s Poetical Works in the centre of a twined gilt ribbon and twisted gilt flowers. The welt at the back is bleached and frayed; the corners of the cover are battered and turned in. There is a chink between the cover and the arched back; and the once proud Norman line of that arc is flattened and degraded, retaining no more of its pristine look of sturdy strength than a wheaten straw after the threshing.
In a list of new books preceding the biography of the poet I find the volume I speak of under the head “Poetry—Pocket Editions;” described as “Keats’s Poetical Works. With a Memoir by R. M. Milnes. Price 3s. 6d. cloth.” It was from no desire to look my gift-horse in the mouth I alighted upon the penultimate fact disclosed in the description. When I become owner of any volume my first delight in it is to read the catalogue of new books annexed, if there be any, before breaking my fast upon the subject-matter of the writer in my hand—as a poor gentleman in a spacious restaurant, who, having ordered luncheon, consisting of bread and cheese, butter, and a half-pint of bitter ale, takes up the bill of fare and the list of wines, and designs for his imagination a feast his purse denies to his lips.