to die. It was this sympathy which made Keats write a few months later, 'How astonish'ingly does the chance of leaving the world im'press a sense of its natural beauties upon us! 'The simple flowers of our spring are what I 'want to see again.''

It was therefore no mere poetic wish, but the expression of a real sadness, which prompted the longing 'to fade away into the forest dim' with the nightingale.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret,

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan :
Where palsy shakes a few sad last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies ;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs;

Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

We can imagine, too, how his thoughts were haunted by the suffering of his brother's last weeks, when he wrote of being 'half in love with 'easeful death;' and how true it is in that passion

! Tennyson has touched on this sympathy of dying life in one of the most beautiful lines of the May Queen.

'I only wish to live till the snowdrops come again.'

ately loving nature, which loved even its brothers with more than the love of women, that thinking of Tom in his new-made grave, and of George far away in America, John Keats should write from his heart,

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell,

To toll me back from thee to my sole self.

The whole of this magical ode seems to make life vocal for us as we read it, but it also brings us very close to the wearied young heart that was nearing death.

A few months later it was the quiet Sunday walk through the stubble fields near Winchester which won for us the 'Ode to Autumn,' a walk of which Keats writes: 'I never liked stubble 'fields as much as now; ay, better than the 'chilly green of spring. Somehow a stubble plain 'looks warm in the way some pictures look warm. 'This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk 'that I composed upon it.' And who is there that has not realised the charm of that English landscape described in the

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

164

JOHN KEATS:

and does not feel the autumnal glory which had touched the poet when he wrote:

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, ·
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.

Of the 'Ode to Psyche' Keats says in a letter written to his brother in America, in March 1819:-The following poem, the last I have written, is the first and only one with which I have taken even moderate pains. I have for 'the most part dashed off my lines in a hurry: ⚫ this one I have done leisurely. I think it reads 'the more richly for it, and it will, I hope, encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit. You must ' recollect that Psyche was not embodied as a 'goddess before the time of Apuleius the Plato'nist, who lived after the Augustan age, and consequently the goddess was never worshipped ' or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour, and perhaps never thought of in the old reli'gion. I am more orthodox than to let a 'heathen goddess be so neglected.'

This note explains the careful work which

resulted in the condensation of beauty in this Ode, the wonderful music of its progress, and the exquisite spirituality of its thoughts. It is a link between Hyperion' and the other poems, for Psyche is

The latest born and loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy,

though she has come to the world too late for temple, shrine, or 'pale-mouth'd prophet.'

O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire.

Again we feel the wondrous power of realising the past and uniting it with the present and the future, which was one of the peculiar inspirations of the genius of Keats. This link with the 'faint Olympians' has in it the very principle of continuity, the recognition of the growing soul of the ages. For that prophetic gaze, drawing from the past the undying principle of beauty, which it saw also in a distant future, found a fitness in the absence of Psyche from the deities of long ago. It is 'the latest born, 'the loveliest vision far;' it comes into the

world unrecognised and as yet unworshipped save by one here and there, who sees and sings 'by his own eyes inspired.' But such an one will be its priest, and in 'some untrodden region 'of the mind' its sanctuary shall be made,

Where branched thoughts, new-grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind.

The Ode on Melancholy' seems to have been partly influenced by the verses at the commencement of Burton's 'Anatomy of Melan'choly,' which suggest that fulfilled joy is melancholy, and that the other side of every pleasure is pain. But the thought of Keats goes beyond this, he sees the sadness of all joy, and that it is not the acknowledged grief of our lives which is the secret of true melancholy, but that our gladness should be what it is. It is not the wolf's-bane, the night-shade, the yew berries, the death-moth, that are the saddest emblems; it is 'the morning rose,' 'the rainbow 'of the salt sand-wave,' 'the wealth of globed 'peonies,'' the peerless eyes' of her that is loved. The most sorrowful reality of melancholy is that