“The music, yearning like a God in pain.”
“Keats,” he would say, “seems to have got not only at the spirit of the music, but at the very flesh and blood of it. He has done one thing for me,” my friend continued. “Before I read these lines, and others of the same kind, in Keats, my favourite tunes always represented an emotion of my own mind. Now they stand for individual characters in scenes, like descriptions of people in a book. When I hear music now I am with the Falstaffs or the Romolas, with Quasimodo or Julius Cæsar.”
I have been regarding the indentures in the volume chronologically. The next marks of importance in the order of the years occur, one in The Eve of St. Agnes, the other in the Ode to a Nightingale. These marks, more than any others, I regard with grateful memory. They are not the work of the hand of him for whom I value them. I have good reason to look on him as a valid friend. For months between him and me there had existed an acquaintance necessarily somewhat close, but wholly uninformed with friendship. We spoke to one another as Mr. So-and-so. Neither of us suspected that the other had any toleration of poets or poetry. Our commerce had been in mere prose. One day, in mid-winter, when a chilling fog hung over London, I chanced to go into a room where he was writing alone. After a formal greeting, I complained of the cold. He dropped his pen and looked up. “Yes,” he said, “very cold and dark as night. Do you know the coldest night that ever was?” I answered that I did not. “It was St. Agnes’s Eve, when
“‘The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.’”
And so we fell to talking about Keats, and talked and talked for hours; and before the first hour of our talk had passed we had ceased “Mistering” one another for ever. The fire of his enthusiasm rose higher and higher as the minutes swept by. He knew one poet personally, for whose verse I had profound respect, and this poet, he told me, worshipped Keats. Often in our talks I laid plots for bringing him back to the simple sentence, “You should hear M. talk about Keats.” The notion that any one who knew M. could think M. would talk to me about Keats intoxicated me. “He would not let me listen to him?” I said half fearfully. “M. would talk to any one about Keats—to even a lawyer.” How I wished at that moment I was a Lord Chancellor who might stand in M.’s path. I have, in a way, been near to that poet since. I might almost have said to him,
“So near, too! You could hear my sigh,
Or see my case with half an eye;
But must not—there are reasons why.”
So this friend I speak of now and I came to be great friends indeed. We often met and held carnivals of verse, carnivals among the starry lamps of poetry. He had a subtle instinct that saw the jewel, however it might be set. He owned himself the faculty of the poet, which gave him ripe knowledge of all matters technical in the setting.
“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”
He would quote these two lines and cry, “Was ever death so pangless as that spoken of here? ‘To cease upon the midnight!’ Here is no struggle, no regret, no fear. This death is softer and lighter and smoother than the falling of the shadow of night upon a desert of noiseless sand.”