The most perfect, and withal the favorite portrait of him, was the one by Severn, published in Leigh Hunt's "Lord Byron and his Contemporaries," and which I remember the artist's sketching in a few minutes, one evening, when several of Keats's friends were at his apartments in the Poultry. The portrait prefixed to the "Life," also by Severn, is a most excellent one-look-and-expression likeness,—an every-day, and of "the earth, earthy" one;—and the last, which the same artist painted, and which is now in the possession of Mr. John Hunter, of Craig Crook, Edinburgh, may be an equally felicitous rendering of one look and manner; but I do not intimately recognize it. There is another, and a curiously unconscious likeness of him, in the charming Dulwich Gallery of Pictures. It is in the portrait of Wouvermans, by Rembrandt. It is just so much of a resemblance as to remind the friends of the poet,—though not such a one as the immortal Dutchman would have made, had the poet been his sitter. It has a plaintive and melancholy expression, which, I rejoice to say, I do not associate with him.
There is one of his attitudes, during familiar conversation, which, at times, (with the whole earnest manner and sweet expression of the man) presents itself to me, as though I had seen him only last week. The attitude I speak of was that of cherishing one leg over the knee of the other, smoothing the instep with the palm of his hand. In this action I mostly associate him in an eager parley with Leigh Hunt, in his little cottage in the "Vale of Health." This position, if I mistake not, is in the last portrait of him at Craig Crook; if not, it is in a reminiscent one, painted after his death.
His stature could have been very little more than five feet; but he was, withal, compactly made and—well-proportioned; and before the hereditary disorder which carried him off began to show itself, he was active, athletic, and enduringly strong,—as the fight with the butcher gave full attestation.
The critical world,—by which term I mean the censorious portion of it; for many have no other idea of criticism than, that of censure and objection,—the critical world have so gloated over the feebler, or, if they will, the defective side of Keats's genius, and his friends, his gloryingly partial friends, have so amply justified him, that I feel inclined to add no more to the category of opinions than to say, that the only fault in his poetry I could discover was a redundancy of imagery,—that exuberance, by-the-by, being a quality of the greatest promise, seeing that it is the constant accompaniment of a young and teeming genius. But his steady friend, Leigh Hunt, has rendered the amplest and truest record of his mental accomplishment in the Preface to the "Foliage," quoted at page 150 of the first volume of the "Life of Keats"; and his biographer has so zealously, and, I would say, so amiably, summed up his character and intellectual qualities, that I can add no more than my assent.
Keats's whole course of life, to the very last act of it, was one routine of unselfishness and of consideration for others' feelings. The approaches of death having come on, he said to his untiring nurse—friend,—"Severn,—I,—lift me up,—I am dying:—I shall die easy; don't be frightened;—be firm, and thank God it has come."
There are constant indications through the memoirs, and in the letters of Keats, of his profound reverence for Shakspeare. His own intensity of thought and expression visibly strengthened with the study of his idol; and he knew but little of him till he himself had become an author. A marginal note by him in a folio copy of the Plays is an example of the complete absorption his mind had undergone during the process of his matriculation;—and, through life, however long with any of us, we are all in progress of matriculation, as we study the "myriad-minded's" system of philosophy. The note that Keats made was this;—"The genius of Shakspeare was an innate universality; wherefore he laid the achievements of human intellect prostrate beneath his indolent and kingly gaze: he could do easily men's utmost; his plan of tasks to come was not of this world. If what he proposed to do hereafter would not in the idea answer the aim, how tremendous must have been his conception of ultimates!"
THE EUROPEAN CRISIS.
It is not long since we listened to an interesting discussion of this question:—Which was the more important year to Europe,—1859 or 1860? The question is one that may be commended to the attention of those ingenuous young gentlemen, in debating-societies assembled, who have not yet settled whether Brutus, Cassius, & Co. were right in assassinating "the mighty Julius," or whether Mary Stuart was a martyred saint or a martyred sinner, or whether the cold chop to which Cromwell treated Charles I. on a memorable winter-day was either a just or a politic mode of touching for the king's evil. It would have the merit of novelty,—and Americans are as fond of new things in their day of power as ever were the Athenians in the day of their decline. A yet rarer merit it would have, in the fact that a great deal could justly be said on both sides of the question. An umpire would probably decide in favor of 1859,—because, he might say, had the events of that year been different, those of 1860 must have undergone a complete change.
The romantic conquest of Sicily by Garibaldi, and his successes in Naples, whereby a junior branch of the Bourbon family has been sent to "enjoy" that exile which has so long been the lot of the senior branch,—and the destruction of the Papalini by the Italian army of Victor Emanuel II., which asserted the superiority of the children of the soil over the bands of foreign ruffians assembled by De Merode and Lamoricière for the oppression of the Peninsula in the name of the venerable head of the Church of Rome,—these are events even more striking than those by which the iron sceptre of Austria was cut through in the earlier year, because they have been accomplished by Italian genius and courage, the few foreigners in the army of Garibaldi not counting for much in the contest. They prove the regeneration of Italy. But it is evident that nothing of the kind could have been done in 1860, if 1859 had been as quiet a year for Italy as its immediate predecessor. Before the leaders and the soldiers of Italy could obtain the indispensable place whereon to stand, it was imperatively necessary that the power of Austria should be broken down, through the defeat and consequent demoralization of her army. For a period of forty-four years, Austria had had her own way in the Peninsula. From the fall of Napoleon's Italian dominion, in 1814, to the day when the third Napoleon's army entered Sardinia, there was, virtually, no other rule in Italy but that which Austria approved. The events of 1848, which at one time promised to remove "the barbarians," had for their conclusion the re-establishment of her ascendency in greater force than ever; and the last ten years of that ascendency will always be remembered as the period when its tyrannical character was most fully developed. The hoary proconsul of the Lorraines, Radetzky, if not personally cruel, was determined to do for his masters what Castilian lieutenants had done for the Austro-Burgundian monarchs of Spain and her dependencies, the fairest portions of Italy being among those dependencies, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,—to destroy the public spirit of Italy. Could he have completed a century of life, or had there been no European nation ready to prevent the success of the Germanic policy under which Italy was to wither to provincial worthlessness, he might have been successful. But Austria lost her best man, the only one of her soldiers who had shown himself capable of upholding her Italian position, when he had reached to more than ninety years; and it pleased Providence to raise up a friend to Italy in a quarter to which most men had ceased to look for anything good.
Well has it been said, that "it is not the best tools that shape out the best ends; if so, Martin Luther would not have been selected as the master-spirit of the Reformation." Napoleon III. may deserve all that is said against him by men of the extreme right and by men of the extreme left,—by Catholics and infidels,—by Whites, and Reds, and Blues,—but it cannot be denied that he gave to the Italians that assistance without which they never could have obtained even partial deliverance from the Austrian yoke, and which they could have procured from no other potentate or power. Bankrupt though she was, Austria's force was so superior to anything that Italy could present in the shape of an army, that Sardinia must have been conquered, if she had contended alone with her enemy; and a war between Austria and Sardinia was inevitable, and would probably have broken out long before 1859, had the former country been assured of the neutrality of France.