HYPERION.

[Lord Houghton records, on the authority of Brown, that Hyperion was begun after the death of Tom Keats, when the poet took up his residence at Wentworth Place; but Mr. Colvin asserts somewhat positively, on wholly inconclusive evidence, that the poem was begun in September or October 1818, at Tom's bedside. In the journal-letter

to George and his wife in which the first allusion to Tom's death occurs, written in December 1818 or January 1819, Keats says, “I think you knew before you left England, that my next subject would be the Fall of Hyperion.' I went on a little with it last night... ;" and on the 14th of February 1819 he writes "I have not gone on with ⚫ Hyperion."" In August he writes to Bailey from Winchester, "I have also been writing parts of my Hyperion."..." On the 22nd of September he says in his letter to Reynolds, "I have given up Hyperion' — there were too many Miltonic inversions in it — Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or, rather, artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from Hyperion,' and put a mark,+, to the false beauty, proceeding from art, and one ||, to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul, 'twas imagination; I cannot make the distinction - every now and then there is a Miltonic intonation but I cannot make the division properly." Lord Houghton observes upon this passage that the allusion is probably to the Vision version of Hyperion; but see the note quoted below from Woodhouse. Shelley, it will be remembered, says in the Preface to Adonais, “I consider the fragment of Hyperion, as second to nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years." And in his unfinished Letter to the Editor of The Quarterly Review he says, "The great proportion of this piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry." In a letter to Peacock he calls Hyperion "an astonishing piece of writing;" and in another he says if the Hyperion be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries." Hunt remarks in The Indicator, very happily, "The Hyperion is a fragment, gigantic one, like a ruin in the desart, or the bones of the mastodon. It is truly of a piece with its subject, which is the downfall of the elder gods." Woodhouse, in his interleaved and annotated copy of Endymion, in which I was so fortunate as to recover so many readings from

a

the draft of that poem, records under the date April 1819 that Keats had lent him the fragment of Hyperion for perusal. It contains," says Woodhouse, “2 books & ― (abt 900 lines in all)." As the extant fragment of the Vision consists of one Canto of 444 lines, and the 62 opening lines of a second Canto, while the fragment published in 1820 consists of 883 lines, that was, no doubt, what Woodhouse had: moreover he makes, in connexion with his note, three extracts which are from the published version. He records that Keats said he was dissatisfied with what he had done of it; and should not complete it." Woodhouse, like several of Keats's friends, thoroughly appreciated the portentous genius of the young poet: of Hyperion he says, "The structure of the verse, as well as the subject, are colossal. It has an air of calm grandeur about it which is indicative of true power. - I know of no poem with which in this respect it can be compared. — It is that in poetry, which the Elgin and Egyptian marbles are in sculpture." Again, at the close of his extracts from the manuscript, this judiciously admiring friend well says, "The above lines, separated from the rest, give but a faint idea of the sustained grandeur and quiet power which characterize the poem: but they are sufficient to lead us to regret that such an attempt should have been abandoned. The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former God of the Sun, by Apollo, — and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter &c., and of the war of the Giants for Saturn's reestablishment with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the Poet's brain. How he is qualified for such a task, may be seen in a trifling degree by the few mythological glimpses afforded in Endymion." The other version of Hyperion, in the form of a " Vision," which Lord Houghton gave first as a revised version and then as a draft, Mr. Colvin has shown on the distinct evidence of Brown to be a revision.-H. B. F.]

HYPERION.

BOOK I.

EEP in the shady sadness of a vale

DE

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,

Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head

Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day

Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity

Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds
Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips.

Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went,
No further than to where his feet had stray'd,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
While his bow'd head seem'd list'ning to the Earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.

It seem'd no force could wake him from his place; But there came one, who with a kindred hand

(14) It seems to me that the power of realization shown in the first decade, and indeed throughout the fragment, answers all objections to the subject, and is the most absolute security for the nobility of the result which Keats would have achieved had he finished the poem. It is impossible to over-estimate the value of such a landscape, so touched in with a few strokes of titanic meaning and completeness; and the whole sentiment of gigantic despair reflected around the fallen god of the Titan dynasty, and permeating the landscape, is resumed in the most perfect manner in the incident of the motionless fallen leaf, a line almost as intense and full of the essence of poetry as any line in our language. It were ungracious to take exception to the poor Naiad; but she has not the convincing appropriateness of the rest of this sublime opening.

Touch'd his wide shoulders, after bending low

With reverence, though to one who knew it not.
She was a Goddess of the infant world;
By her in stature the tall Amazon

25

Had stood a pigmy's height: she would have ta'en
Achilles by the hair and bent his neck;

Or with a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel.

30

Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx,
Pedestal'd haply in a palace court,

When sages look'd to Egypt for their lore.
But oh! how unlike marble was that face:
How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.
There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder labouring up.
One hand she press'd upon that aching spot
Where beats the human heart, as if just there,
Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain:
The other upon Saturn's bended neck
She laid, and to the level of his ear

35

40

45

Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake
In solemn tenour and deep organ tone:

Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue
Would come in these like accents; O how frail
To that large utterance of the early Gods!

50

(35-7) Although the counterpoint of lines 35 and 36 recalls the manner of Shakespeare, it is to a contemporary influence that line 37 points. In Landor's Gebir, Book I, we read

There was a brightening paleness in his face,
Such as Diana rising o'er the rocks
Shower'd on the lonely Latmian; on his brow

Sorrow there was, yet nought was there severe.

(51) Leigh Hunt's remarks upon Keats's failure to finish the poem (see Appendix) are specially appropriate to this passage, "If any living poet could finish this fragment, we believe it is the author himself. But perhaps he feels that he ought not. A story which involves passion, almost of necessity involves speech; and though we may well enough describe beings greater than ourselves by comparison, unfortunately we cannot make them speak by comparison." Of the magnificent three lines before Thea's speech he says, "This grand confession of want of grandeur is all that he could do for them. Milton could do no more. Nay, he did less, when according to Pope he made

God the father turn a school divine.

The moment the Gods speak, we forget that they did not speak like ourselves. The fact is, they feel like ourselves; and the poet would have to make them feel

66

Saturn, look up!- though wherefore, poor old King? "I have no comfort for thee, no not one :

"I cannot say, 'O wherefore sleepest thou?'
"For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth

64

66

Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God;
And ocean too, with all its solemn noise,

"Has from thy sceptre pass'd; and all the air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.

66

"Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,

66

· Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house; “And thy sharp lightning in unpractis'd hands "Scorches and burns our once serene domain.

66

O aching time! O moments big as years! "All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth, And press it so upon our weary griefs

66

"That unbelief has not a space to breathe.

"Saturn, sleep on : - O thoughtless, why did I “Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?

66

“Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes?

66

Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep."

55

60

65

70

As when, upon a tranced summer-night, Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods,

Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,

Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust

75

Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave;

So came these words and went; the while in tears.

She touch'd her fair large forehead to the ground,

80

Just where her falling hair might be outspread

A soft and silken mat for Saturn's feet.
One moon, with alteration slow, had shed
Her silver seasons four upon the night,
And still these two were postured motionless,
Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern;
The frozen God still couchant on the earth,

85

otherwise, which he cannot, unless he venture upon an obscurity which would destroy our sympathy: and what is sympathy with a God, but turning him into a man? We allow, that superiority and inferiority are, after all, human terms, and imply something not so truly fine and noble as the levelling of a great sympathy and love; but poems of the present nature, like Paradise Lost, assume a different principle; and fortunately perhaps, it is one which it is impossible to rec oncile with the other."