[6] The late precociously gifted and prematurely lost Mary Suddard, in Essays and Studies (Cambridge, 1912).
[7] If it is objected that The Handful of Pleasant Delites is an excessively rare book, which Keats is not likely to have known, the answer is that it had been reprinted three years earlier in Heliconia, the great three-volume collection edited by Thomas Park; and moreover that Park, one of the most zealous and learned of researchers in the field of old English literature, had long been living in Church Row, Hampstead, and both as neighbour and elder fellow-worker can hardly fail to have been known to Dilke and his circle.
[8] Crewe MSS.
[9] This poem was first printed posthumously in 1829: both in The Gem, a periodical of the Keepsake type then edited by Thomas Hood, and in Galignani’s collective edition of the poems of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats published the same year in Paris. In these and all versions subsequently printed the first lines of stanzas I and II are altered and read ‘In a drear-nighted December,’ and the fifth line is made to run, ‘To know the change and feel it.’ The first line thus gets two light syllables instead of one before the first stress, giving a faint suggestion of a triple-time movement which certainly does not hurt the metre. The new fifth line is to modern ears more elegant than the original, as getting rid of the vulgar substantive form ‘feel’ for feeling. But ‘feel,’ which after all had been good enough for Horace Walpole and Fanny Burney, was to Keats and the Leigh Hunt circle no vulgarism at all, it was a thing of every day usage both in verse and prose. And does not the correction somewhat blunt the point of Keats’s meaning? To be emphatically aware of no longer feeling a joy once felt is a pain that may indeed call for steeling or healing, while to steel or heal a ‘change’ seems neither so easy nor so needful: at all events the phrase is more lax. It may be doubted whether the alterations are due to Keats at all and not to someone (conceivably, in the case of The Gem, Thomas Hood) editing him after his death. I should add, however, that I have found what must perhaps be regarded as evidence that Keats did try various versions of this final stanza, in the shape of another transcript made in 1827 by a brother of his friend Woodhouse. In this version the poem is headed Pain of Memory, an apt title, and while the first and second stanzas keep their original form, the third runs quite differently, as follows:—
| But in the Soul’s December The fancy backward strays, And darkly doth remember The hue of golden days, In woe the thought appalling Of bliss gone past recalling Brings o’er the heart a falling Not to be told in rhyme. |
This can hardly be other than an alternative version tried by Keats himself. The ‘Fallings from us, vanishings’ of Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality, may be responsible for the ‘falling’ in the seventh line, and though ‘the thought appalling’ is a common-place phrase little in Keats’s manner, it is worth noting that the word occurs in Bailey’s report of his spoken comment on this very passage of Wordsworth (see above, p. 146).
CHAPTER VI
ENDYMION.—I. THE STORY: ITS SOURCES, PLAN, AND SYMBOLISM