| Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell: No God, no Demon of severe response Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell.— Then to my human heart I turn at once— Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone; Say wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain! O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain! Why did I laugh? I know this being’s lease; My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads: Yet could I on this very midnight cease And the world’s gaudy ensigns see in shreds. Verse, fame and Beauty are intense indeed But Death intenser—Death is Life’s High meed. |
I went to bed and enjoyed uninterrupted sleep. Sane I went to bed and sane I arose.
This is yet another of those invocations to friendly Death to which he himself refers in the Ode to the Nightingale written a few weeks later, and in its phrase ‘on this very midnight cease’ anticipates one of the great lines of the ode itself.
No letter of Keats—or of any one—is richer than this of February to May 1819 in variety of mood and theme and interest. It contains two of the freshest and most luminous of his discursive passages of meditation on life and on the nature of the soul and the meaning of things: passages showing a native power of thought untrained indeed, but also unhampered, by academic knowledge and study, and hardly to be surpassed for their union of steady human common-sense with airy ease and play of imaginative speculation. In one, starting from reflections on the unforeseen way in which circumstances, like clouds, gather and burst, reflections suggested by the expected death of the father of his friend Haslam, he calls up a series of pictures of the instinctiveness with which men, like animals,—the hawk, the robin, the stoat, the deer,—go about their purposes; considers the rarity of the exceptional human beings whose disinterestedness helps on the progress of the world; and then turns his thoughts on himself with the comment,—
Even here, though I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of, I am, however young, writing at random, straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness, without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin? May there not be superior beings, amused with any graceful, though instinctive, attitude my mind may fall into as I am entertained with the alertness of the Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer?
In the other passage he disposes of all Rousseau-Godwin theories of human perfectibility by a consideration of the physical frame and order of the world we live in, the flaws and violences which mar and jar it, and which its human offspring are likely to derive from and share with it until the end; and, provisionally accepting the doctrine of immortality, he broaches of his own a scheme of the spiritual discipline for the sake of which, as he suggests, the life of men on this so imperfect earth may have been designed.
In marked, not always entirely pleasant contrast with these passages of thought and beauty Keats sends his brother such things as a summary of a satiric fairy story of Brown’s and an impromptu comic tale of his own in verse, much in Brown’s manner, about a princess, a mule, and a dwarf: both of them apparently to his mind amusing, but to us rather silly and the former a little coarse: also some friendly satiric verses of his own on Brown in the Spenserian stanza. He tells how he has been turning over the love-letters palmed off by way of hoax upon his brother Tom by Charles Wells in the character of a pretended ‘Amena’, and vows fiercely to make Wells suffer for his heartlessness; gossips further of Dilke and his overstrained parental anxiety about his boy at school; asks a string of playful questions about his sister-in-law and her daily doings; and in another place gives us, in the mention of a casual walk and talk with Coleridge, the liveliest record we have of the astonishing variety of matters and mysteries over which that philosopher was capable, in a short hour’s conversation, of ranging without pause or taking breath:—
Last Sunday I took a walk towards Highgate and in the lane that winds by the side of Lord Mansfield’s park I met Mr Green our Demonstrator at Guy’s[8] in conversation with Coleridge—I joined them, after enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable—I walked with him at his alderman-after-dinner pace for near two miles I suppose. In those two Miles he broached a thousand things—let me see if I can give you a list—Nightingales, Poetry—on Poetical Sensation—Metaphysics—Different genera and species of Dreams—Nightmare—a dream accompanied with a sense of touch—single and double touch—a dream related—First and second consciousness—the difference explained between will and Volition—so say metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness—Monsters—the Kraken—Mermaids—Southey believes in them—Southey’s belief too much diluted—a Ghost story—Good morning—I heard his voice as he came towards me—I heard it as he moved away—I had heard it all the interval—if it may be called so. He was civil enough to ask me to call on him at Highgate.
It is amusing to note how the time and distance covered by his own encyclopædic volubility shrank afterwards in Coleridge’s memory. In his Table Talk taken down thirteen years later his account of the meeting is recorded as follows (with the name of his companion left blank: I fill it in from Keats’s letter): ‘A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said, “Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!” “There is death in that hand,” I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.’ The story of Coleridge’s observation after the handshake is no doubt exact: the ‘not well-dressed’ in his description of Keats may very well be so too: but the ‘loose’ and ‘slack’ applied to his appearance must have been drawn from the sage’s inward eye, as all accounts are agreed as to Keats’s well-knit compactness of person. One cannot but regret that Keats failed to follow up the introduction by going, as invited, to see Coleridge at Highgate: but in all cases save those of Hunt and Haydon, his contact with distinguished seniors seems thus to have stopped short at kindly and respectful acquaintance and not to have been pushed to intimacy.
Another, somewhat divergent, account of the meeting taken down, also from Coleridge’s lips, by Mr John Frere three years earlier has only lately been published. Its inaccuracy in details is evident, but there is much sense as well as kindness in Coleridge’s remarks on the reviews and their effect:—