“Prodigious!” he shouted. “Go over that again. Keep the syllables wide apart. It is a good rule of water-colour sketching not to be too nice about joining the edges of the tints; this lets the light in. Keep the syllables as far apart as ever you can, and let the silentness in between to clear up the music. How the gods and the wondering men must have wondered! Do you know, I am sure Keats often frightened, terrified himself with his own visions. You remember he says somewhere he doesn’t think any one could dare to read some one or another aloud at midnight. I believe that often in the midnight he sat and cowered before the gigantic sights and sounds that reigned despotically over his fancy.”
“O dreams of day and night!
O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!
O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!
O lank-ear’d Phantoms of black-weeded pools!
Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why
Is my eternal essence thus distraught
To see and to behold these horrors new?
Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?
Am I to leave this haven of my rest,
This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,
This calm luxuriance of blissful light,
These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,
Of all my lucent empire? It is left
Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.
The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry
I cannot see—but darkness, death and darkness.
Even here, into my centre of repose,
The shady visions come to domineer,
Insult, and blind and stifle up my pomp—
Fall!—No, by Tellus and her briny robes!
Over the fiery frontier of my realms
I will advance a terrible right arm
Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,
And bid old Saturn take his throne again.”
“What more magnificent prelude ever was uttered to oath than the portion of this speech preceding ‘No, by Tellus’! What more overpowering, leading up to an overwhelming threat, than the whole passage going before ‘Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible right arm’! What menacing deliberativeness there is in this whole speech, and what utter completeness of ruin to come is indicated by those words, ‘I will advance a terrible right arm’! You feel no sooner shall that arm move than ‘rebel Jove’s’ reign will be at an end, and that chaos will be left for Saturn to rule and fashion once more into order. Shut up the poem now. That’s plenty of Hyperion, and the other books of it are inferior. There is more labour and more likeness to Paradise Lost.” And so my friend, who is 16,000 miles away, and I turned from the Titanic theme, and spoke of the local board of guardians, or some young girl whose beauty was making rich misery in the hearts of young men in those old days.
There is no other long poem in the volume bearing any marks which indicate such close connection with any individual reader as in the case of Hyperion. Endymion boasts only one mark, and that expressing admiration of the relief afforded from monotony of the heroic couplets by the introduction in the opening of the double rhyming verses:
“Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing—”
The friend to whom this mark is due never handled the volume, never even saw it; but once upon a time when he, another man, and I had got together, and were talking of the “gallipot poet,” the first friend said he always regarded this couplet as most happily placed where it appears. So when I reached home I marked my copy at the lines. Now, when I open the volume and find that mark, it is as good to me as, better than, a photograph of my friend; for I not only see his face and figure, but once more he places his index-finger on the table, as we three sit smoking, and whispers out the six opening lines, ending with the two I have quoted. Suppose I too should some day go 16,000 miles away from London, and carry this volume with me, shall I not be able to open it when I please, and recall what I then saw and heard, what I now see and hear, as distinctly as though no long interval of ocean or of months lay between to-night and that hour?
Can I ever forget my burly tenor friend, who sang and composed songs, and dinted the line in The Eve of St. Agnes,
“The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide,”
and declared a hundred times in my unwearied ears that no more happy epithet than snarling could be found for trumpets? He over and over again assured me, and over and over again I loved to listen to his fancy running riot on the line, how he heard and saw brazen and silver and golden griffins quarrelling in the roof and around his ears as the trumpets blared through the echoing halls and corridors. He, too, marked