kind of incessant love-longing, drove him to shun the realities of life, and to find an asylum in the regions of imagination. One passage after another taken from his poems will illustrate what is here said. We see it in the striking sonnet:

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high piled books in charactery

Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behold upon the night's starred face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance
And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery bower

Of unreflecting love!-then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

We see it in these lines in Sleep and Poetry:

The visions all are fled-the car is fled
Into the light of heaven, and in their stead
A sense of real things comes doubly strong,
And, like a muddy stream, would bear along
My soul to nothingness; but I will strive
Against all doubtings, and will keep alive

The thought of that same chariot, and the strange
Journey it went.

It appears in the Ode to the Nightingale:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down.

And in the Ode to a Grecian Urn:

Cold Pastoral!

When old age doth this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st

66

Beauty is truth, truth beauty," that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The same feeling repeats itself in his created characters. Who doubts that Keats himself is the pining Endymion, the enchanted Glaucus, the passionate Lorenzo, the infatuated Lycius, the amorous Porphyro, the love-sick

Knight at arms

Alone and palely loitering?

Or that he is speaking from his heart when he writes:

Great Muse, thou knowest what prison

of flesh and bone, curbs and confines and frets

Our spirit's wings; despondency besets
Our pillows; and the fresh to-morrow morn
Seems to give forth its light in very scorn

Of our dull, uninspired, snail-paced lives.

Such being the character and emotional temper of Keats, as

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depicted by himself in his verse, what was the “vast idea,' the
end and aim of poetry," which he sets before himself as his
goal?
"His critics," says Mr. Colvin, "sometimes speak as if
his aim had been merely to create a paradise of art and beauty,
remote from the cares and interests of the world. If the foregoing
pages have been written to any purpose, the reader will be aware
that no criticism can be more mistaken." I do not think that
there is any evidence that Keats sought to "create a paradise of
art and beauty, remote from the cares and interests of the world";
but neither do I think that anything that Mr. Colvin, or anyone
else, may urge can outweigh the testimony of Keats himself to the
fact that, either spontaneously or by the compulsion of genius, he
sought to employ poetry as a moral opiate.

All hail delightful hopes!

As she was wont the imagination

Into most lovely labyrinths will be gone,
And they shall be accounted poet kings

Who simply tell the most heart-easing things.

Nature, or, at least, organized society, appeared to him a confused and shifting scene, in which the "hungry generations" trod each other down in a chaotic struggle, while only in imagination or in sleep (an idea that was a favourite with him) could be caught glimpses of those firm and abiding forms which are to be met with in the world of Ideal Beauty.

O magic sleep! O comfortable bird,

That broodest o'er the troubled sea of the mind
Till it is hushed and smooth! O unconfined
Restraint! imprisoned liberty! great key

To golden palaces, strange minstrelsy,

Fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves,

Echoing grottos full of tumbling waves

And moonlight; aye to all the mazy world

Of silvery enchantment! who upfurled

Beneath thy drowsy wing a triple hour
But renovates and lives?

*

I have elsewhere sought to indicate what, in my opinion, was the course of poetry inevitably determined for Keats by the ideal that he proposed to himself. He endeavoured to produce through the medium of metrical language effects which the painter and the sculptor produce by means of form and colour. I will only add here, by way of illustration, a few passages (although almost every line in his poems is an illustration) that show how strongly the pictorial motive influenced his genius. I have already cited the sonnet in which occur the lines

When I behold upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, &c.

*The Liberal Movement in English Literature. Chap. v., "Music, Painting, and Poetry."

In the same vein is the opening of his Induction :
Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry,

For large white plumes are dancing in mine eye.

And in the Epistle to his brother George:

But there are times when those that love the bay
Fly from all sorrowing far, far away;

A sudden glow comes on them, nought they see
In water, earth, or air, but poesy.

It has been said, dear George, and true I hold it,
(For knightly Spenser to Libertas told it)
That when a poet is in such a trance,

In air he sees white coursers paw and prance,
Bestridden of gay knights, in gay apparel,
Who at each other tilt in playful quarrel,
And what we ignorantly sheet lightning call
Is the swift opening of the wide portal,

When the bright warder blows his trumpet clear,

Whose tones reach nought on earth but poet's car.

In Sleep and Poetry he writes with a reminiscence of Titian's picture of Bacchus and Ariadne.

Scarce can I scribble on; for lovely airs

Are fluttering round my room like doves in pairs;
Many delights of that glad day recalling
When first my senses caught their tender falling.
And with these airs come forms of elegance
Stooping their shoulders o'er a horse's prance
Careless and grand-fingers soft and round
Parting luxuriant curls; and the swift bound
Of Bacchus from his chariot, when his eye
Made Ariadne's cheek look blushingly.
Thus I remember all the pleasant flow
Of words at opening a portfolio.

Or take the sculpture-like figure of Autumn which has so well inspired Mr. Matthew Arnold in The Scholar Gipsy.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swathe, and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook

Or by a cyder press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

To construct a fairy world, based upon these picturesque associations of idea, was Keats' "end and aim of poesy," and, in my opinion the most interesting thing to observe in his poetical progress is the gradual manner in which he worked out his peculiar conception of art. The range of subjects from which he had to choose was necessarily limited. Mr. Colvin speaks as if he had awakened in this country "the love of classic fable and

romance." But the love of classic fable and romance had been wakened long before, when the Renaissance first made itself felt in England. It had embodied itself in the mythological fancies of Spenser and Browne. It had furnished Milton with numberless similes and allusions. It had joined with the spirit of old English Catholicism in tuning the lyrics of Herrick. To Keats it came, as far as it came at all, in a revived and literary form, touched with the spirit of archæology and philosophy, and in close association with the taste for the plastic arts, now widely spread through English society. On the whole it may be confidently said that there was at the time less sympathy with the old dramatic spirit of Greek mythology than when Dryden published his Tales and Translations. Nor was Keats himself ever thoroughly at home in a Greek story. He was deficient in the classic genius for architectural design, and, as Mr. Colvin truly says, was "alike by his aims and his gifts, in his workmanship essentially 'romantic,' Gothic, English." In Endymion the lines of the old Greek story are completely lost, and the subject becomes merely a vehicle for the expression of the poet's own individual moods and caprices of fancy. Hyperion, in which the outlines are clearer, was left by the author as a fragment, because, as he said, "there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." His sense of dissatisfaction was also probably based on the truer perception that his design was artistically wrong, the poem being in effect an epic, but wanting in the most essential of epic elements, human interest. On the other hand, in Isabella, Lamia, St. Agnes Eve, the odes to the Nightingale, the Greek Urn, and Autumn, he had lighted on a region exactly congenial to his powers; whether short stories, founded on weird mediæval and romantic legend, wherein his imagination could move with freedom, and his rich fancy work out, unhindered, the finest pictorial effects of language; or lyrical themes, on which his sympathy might fix itself with intensity, while his invention brought his idea into relief by a succession of sculpturesque phrases. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the admirable artistic power shown in these poems, so long as we recognize their limitations, and perceive in them primarily the genius of a painter exercising itself on the materials of the poet. When the enthusiastic admirer of Keats points to the volume containing Lamia and its companions, and asks whether the man who could produce these wonders did not die too soon for his full fame, the answer is "No! The painter of the moonlit window in St. Agnes Eve, of the transformation of the snake in Lamia, the sculptor of the reliefs on the Grecian urn, and the figure of reclining Autumn, had accomplished his mission: he could have done no more in the sphere he had marked out for himself, and in the

atmosphere of this sphere his spirit had steeped itself too deeply to achieve the more masculine style required for the drama, the epic, or even for a stirring tale of sustained romantic action."

If this judgment be thought too confident, its justification is to be found in the avowed aim of Keats' style, which may be described in his own phrase, cited by Mr. Colvin as "loading every rift of a subject with ore," or, as his biographer defines it, an "endeavour after a continual positive poetic richness and felicity of phrase." Such a method resembles that of a goldsmith, or of a minute and highly finishing painter; it is not that of an epic or dramatic poet, who, in the swift and fervent rush of imaginative action, has no time to dwell on each particular phrase, and who, possessed by the whole nature of his subject, chooses his diction according to his occasion, following the principle of Homer

Cui lecta potenter erit res

Nec facundia deseret hunc nec lucidus ordo.

Nevertheless, it was a narrative of something like epic length to which Keats, in Endymion, applied his picturesque style, with what result we can see for ourselves. Like Marini in Italy, and Gongora in Spain, he seeks to produce a poetic diction by saying everything he has to say in an out-of-the-way manner, so that the attention of the reader, instead of being fixed on certain clear landmarks of action and character, loses itself in a wilderness of imagery. How intolerable such a style becomes in a long narrative poem may be judged from the following:

Thus ending loudly, as he would o'erleap
His destiny, alert he stood; but when
Obstinate silence came heavily again,
Feeling about for its old couch of space
And airy cradle, lowly bowed his face
Desponding, o'er the marble floor's cold thrill.
But 'twas not long; for sweeter than the rill
To its old channel, or a swollen tide

To margin sallows, were the leaves he spied,
And flowers, and wreaths, and ready myrtle crowns
Up-heaping through the slab; refreshment drowns
Itself, and strives its own delights to hide

Nor in one spot alone; the floral pride

In a long whispering birth enchanted grew

Before his footsteps; as when heard anew

Old Ocean rolls a lengthened wave to the shore

Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar,

Bursts gradual with a wayward indolence.

It speaks well for Keats' artistic judgment that he felt Endymion to be a failure; that he knew that neither in that theme nor in Hyperion had he the res lecta potenter; and it is equally a sign of the power of his genius that, instead of being discouraged by his want of success, he passed on to a new range of subjects, chasten