ST. AGNES’ EVE.

A CHIT-CHAT ABOUT KEATS.

God bless you, Oliver, don’t think of such a thing! I join the temperance society!—why, you old curmudgeon, would you murder me outright? Not that temperance societies haven’t done good—many a poor wife and weeping mother have they made happy—but, then, ever since I read Anacreon at college and shot buffalos at the Black Hills, I’ve had a fellow feeling for the good things of this life, especially for beef-steaks and port wine. I’m an Epicurean, sir—you needn’t talk to me of glory—I despise the whole cant about posthumous renown. The great end of life is happiness, and happiness is best secured by gratifying our physical as well as our intellectual nature. I go in, sir, for enjoying existence, and when I was in my prime, I flatter myself that few could beat me at a dinner or had a more delicate way of making love to the girls. But alas! we have fallen on troublous times. The wine of these days—I say it with tears in my eyes—isn’t the wine of my youth; and the girls—here’s a health to the sweet angels—have sadly deteriorated from what their grandmothers were. Eheu! Eheu! The world is getting upside down, and I shouldn’t wonder if an earthquake or epidemic or some other calamity should overtake us yet to fill up the catalogue of our ills.

I have just been reading Keats—shame on the wretches who tortured him to death! He is a practical argument, sir, for my creed. Genius he had unquestionably, yet he never enjoyed a happy hour. Why was this? Born in humble life, he thirsted for distinction, and trusting to his genius to achieve renown, found himself assailed by hostile critics, who dragged his private life before the public eye, and sneered at his poetry with the bitter scorn of fiends. He was naturally of a delicate constitution—of a proud and aspiring character; but of a modesty as shrinking as the sensitive plant; and when he found himself slighted, abused, maligned—when he saw that he was thrust back at every attempt to elevate himself, his delicate nature gave way, and he died of a broken heart, requesting that his epitaph might be, “Here lies one whose name was writ on water.” The world, since then, has done tardy justice to his genius—but this did not soothe his sorrows, nor will it reach him in his silent grave. What to him is posthumous renown?—what the tears of this generation or the plaudits of the next? Had he been less sensitive, had he thirsted less after glory, he might still have been living, with matured powers, extorting even from his enemies deserved commendation. But he fell in his youthful prime, an eaglet pierced before it had learnt to soar. I have shed tears over his grave at Rome—let us drink to his memory in solemn silence.

Keats would have made a giant had he lived, sir. Everything he wrote evinced high genius. Each successive poem he published displayed increased merit. His sonnets remind me of Milton—his shorter pieces breathe of Lycidas or Venus and Adonis. He had little artistical skill, but then what an exuberant fancy! Few men had a finer perception of the beautiful, the το καλον of poetry. He is one of the most Grecian—if I may use the expression—of our poets. Shelley, perhaps, was more deeply imbued with the Attic spirit, but then, although his heart was always right, his intellect was always wrong, and thus it happens that his poetry is often mystic, obscure, and even confused. Keats was not so. He had this freshness without its mysticism. He delighted in themes drawn from classic fountains, in allusions breathing of Thessaly and the gods. There was in many of his poems a voluptuousness approaching to effeminacy, reminding one of the Aphrodite in her own fragrant bowers. In others of his poems there was an Arcadian sweetness. What is finer than his ode to the Grecian Urn? Do you remember the opening?