“Softly the breezes from the forest came,
Softly they blew aside the taper’s flame;
Clear was the song from Philomel’s far bower;
Grateful the incense from the lime-tree flower;
Mysterious, wild, the far-heard trumpet’s tone;
Lovely the moon in ether, all alone.”
To set against this are occasionally expressions in the complete taste of Leigh Hunt, as for instance—
“The lamps that from the high-roof’d wall were pendent,
And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent.”
The Epistles are full of cordial tributes to the conjoint pleasures of literature and friendship. In that to Cowden Clarke, Keats acknowledges to his friend that he had been shy at first of addressing verses to him:—
“Nor should I now, but that I’ve known you long;
That you first taught me all the sweets of song:
The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine,
What swell’d with pathos, and what right divine:
Spenserian vowels that elope with ease,
And float along like birds o’er summer seas;
Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness;
Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve’s fair slenderness.
Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly
Up to its climax, and then dying proudly?
Who found for me the grandeur of the ode,
Growing, like Atlas, stronger for its load?
Who let me taste that more than cordial dram,
The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram?
Show’d me that Epic was of all the king,
Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn’s ring?”
This is characteristic enough of the quieter and lighter manner of Keats in his early work. Blots like the ungrammatical fourth line are not infrequent with him. The preference for Miltonian tenderness over Miltonian storms may remind the reader of a later poet’s more masterly expression of the same sentiment:—‘Me rather all that bowery loneliness—’. The two lines on Spenser are of interest as conveying one of those incidental criticisms on poetry by a poet, of which no one has left us more or better than Keats. The habit of Spenser to which he here alludes is that of coupling or repeating the same vowels, both in their open and their closed sounds, in the same or successive lines, for example,—
“Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide,
More swift than swallow sheres the liquid skye;
Withouten oare or pilot it to guide,
Or winged canvas with the wind to fly.”
The run here is on a and i; principally on i, which occurs five times in its open, and ten times in its closed, sound in the four lines,—if we are indeed to reckon as one vowel these two unlike sounds denoted by the same sign. Keats was a close and conscious student of the musical effects of verse, and the practice of Spenser is said to have suggested to him a special theory as to the use and value of the iteration of vowel sounds in poetry. What his theory was we are not clearly told, neither do I think it can easily be discovered from his practice; though every one must feel a great beauty of his verse to be in the richness of the vowel and diphthong sequences. He often spoke of the subject, and once maintained his view against Wordsworth when the latter seemed to be advocating a mechanical principle of vowel variation.
Hear, next how the joys of brotherly affection, of poetry, and of nature, come naively jostling one another in the Epistle addressed from the sea-side to his brother George:—
“As to my sonnets, though none else should heed them
I feel delighted, still, that you should read them.
Of late, too, I have had much calm enjoyment,
Stretch’d on the grass at my best loved employment
Of scribbling lines for you. These things I thought
While, in my face, the freshest breeze I caught.
E’en now I am pillow’d on a bed of flowers
That crowns a lofty cliff, which proudly towers
Above the ocean waves. The stalks and blades
Chequer my tablet with their quivering shades.
On one side is a field of drooping oats,
Through which the poppies show their scarlet coats;
So pert and useless that they bring to mind
The scarlet coats that pester human kind.
And on the other side, outspread is seen
Ocean’s blue mantle, streak’d with purple and green.
Now ’tis I see a canvass’d ship, and now
Mark the bright silver curling round her brow;
I see the lark down-dropping to his nest,
And the broad wing’d sea-gull never at rest;
For when no more he spreads his feathers free,
His breast is dancing on the restless sea.”