Keats said this description of Apollo should have ended at the ‘golden lute,’ and have left it to the imagination to complete the picture, how he ‘filled the illumined groves.’ I think every man of taste will feel the justice of the remark.
Every one now knows what was then known to his friends that Keats was an ardent admirer of Chatterton. The melody of the verses of the marvellous Boy who perished in his pride, enchanted the author of Endymion. Methinks I now hear him recite, or chant, in his peculiar manner, the following stanza of the Roundelay sung by the minstrels of Ella:—
| Come with acorn cup and thorn Drain my hertys blood away; Life and all its good I scorn; Dance by night or feast by day. |
The first line to his ear possessed the great charm. Indeed his sense of melody was quite exquisite, as is apparent in his own verses; and in none more than in numerous passages of his Endymion.
Another object of his enthusiastic admiration was the Homeric character of Achilles—especially when he is described as ‘shouting in the trenches.’ One of his favourite topics of discourse was the principle of melody in verse, upon which he had his own notions, particularly in the management of open and close vowels. I think I have seen a somewhat similar theory attributed to Mr Wordsworth. But I do not remember his laying it down in writing. Be this as it may, Keats’s theory was worked out by himself. It was, that the vowels should be so managed as not to clash one with another, so as to hear the melody,—and yet that they should be interchanged, like differing notes of music to prevent monotony....[3]
Bailey here tries to reconstruct and illustrate from memory Keats’s theory of vowel sounds, but his attempt falters and breaks down.
Keats’s own first account of himself from Oxford is in a letter of September 5th to the Reynolds sisters, then on holiday at Littlehampton: a piece of mere lively foolery and rattle meant to amuse, in a taste which is not that of to-day. Five days later he writes the first of that series of letters to his young sister Fanny which acquaints us with perhaps the most loveable and admirable parts of his character. She was now just fourteen, and living under the close guardianship of the Abbeys, who had put her to a boarding school at Walthamstow. Keats shows a tender and considerate elder-brotherly anxiety to get into touch with her and know her feelings and likings:—
Let us now begin a regular question and answer—a little pro and con; letting it interfere as a pleasant method of my coming at your favourite little wants and enjoyments, that I may meet them in a way befitting a brother.