There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of immortality." "I carry all matters to an extreme-so when I have any little cause of vexation, it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles. Then, and in that temper, if I write to any friend, I have so little self-possession, that I give him time for grieving at the very time, perhaps, when I am laughing at a pun." "We are still here enveloped in clouds. I lay awake last night listening to the rain, with a sense of being drowned and rotted like a grain of wheat." All the above passages were written long before the appearance of the acknowledged symptoms of consumption, and to us they seem to have shown forth the end as infallibly as did the nerveless clasp of the hand, from which Coleridge predicted the early death of Keats, at an equal distance of time from its Occurrence. To theorize justly upon character is the more difficult for the extreme ease with which mere plausibilities may be put forth on the subject; and the common difficulty is greatly increased, in the present case, by the necessity of constantly distinguishing between signs of character and the products of a very peculiar physical temperament, always subject to the influence of a malady, which, in its earliest stages, is frequently so subtle as to defy detection, and to cause its identification for a long period, with the constitution that it is destroying. The case becomes still further complicated, when we take into account the periods of prostration and lethargy, which are the re-action that follows inevitably from the prodigious activity of poetical production. To give anything like a systematic view of the mind and character of Keats, is therefore more than we dare to undertake; all we can attempt is, to select the salient points of the work before us, and to present them to our readers in such juxtaposition and contrast as may seem to be best adapted to the elimination of their significance. A cotemporary journal of respectable authority, pronounces the writings of Keats to be distingnished by two of the Miltonic characteristics of poetry, sensuousness and passion, and to be wanting in the third, simplicity. We do not think that Keats' verses are characterized remarkably by either of these qualities, in the sense in which Milton understood them, when he proclaimed his famous rule. That Keats' poems, if we except certain parts of the fragment of Hyperion, want simplicity, is too obvious to require proof or illustration. His verses constitute a region of eye-wearying splendor, from which all who can duly appreciate. them, must feel glad to escape, after the astonishment and rapture caused by a short sojourn among them. As for sensuousness, it is an excellence which cannot thrive in the presence of sensuality; and it is by sensuality, in the broader, and not in the vulgar and degrading sense of the term, that Keats' poems are most obviously characterized. This charge, for such we admit that it is, must be substantiated; and to this object we devote our second batch of extracts. They will be, not from Keats' poems, but from his letters; since the shortest way of establishing the general prevalence of a quality in a man's writings is to show it to have been constantly present in his personal character. The first quotation we make is a very important one. It contains Keats' explicit testimony against himself, with regard to the quality in point. Notwithstanding the young poet's unusual honesty of character, he would probably not have made the following confession and complaint, had he not secretly, though certainly very erroneously, believed them to be a revelation of traits of which he was possessed in common with Shakspeare. "As to the poetical character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am anything, I am a member, that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime, which is a thing per se, and stands alone,) it is not itself-it has no self-it is everything and nothing. It has no character; it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elenjoys light and shade; it lives in a gusto, be it evated. It has as much delight in conceiving an lago as an Imogene. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the cameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste of the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the he has no identity; he is continually in for and most unpoetical of anything in existence, because filling some other body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women, who are creatures of an impulse, are poetical, and have about them an uuchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity; he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures. If, then, he has no self; and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say, I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess; but it is a very fact, that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature. How can it when I have no nature? When I am in a room with people, if I am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself; but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, so that I am in a very little time annihilated; not only among men, but in a nursery of children it would be the same. I know not whether I make myself wholly understood; I hope enough to make you see that no dependence is to be placed on what I said that day." Now this want of identity, as Keats calls it, has been more or less the characteristic of artists of all kinds, who have been endowed only with the first, or sensual degree of genius. In Keats, the preponderance of this nature was, however, overwhelming, especially in the earlier portion of his career. great revolution must have occurred in his views, if not in his character, had he lived a | at the end of a journey or a walk, though the carpet were made of silk, and the curtain of the morning clouds, the chairs and sofas stuffed with cygnet's down, the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Windermere, I should not feel; or rather my happiness should not be so fine; and my solitude is sublime. Then, instead of what I have described, there is a sublimity to welcome me home, the roaring of the wind is my wife, and the stars through my window panes are my children. The mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things I have, stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. An amiaAble wife and sweet children, I contemplate as parts of that beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, more and more every day, as my imagination but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone, than the shapes of Ethic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a king's bodyguard. Then tragedy with sceptered pall, comes sweeping by.' According to my state of mind I am with Achilles vales of Sicily, or throw my whole being into Teishouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the olus, and repeating those lines, 'I wander like a lost soul along the Stygian bank, staying for waftage.' I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone. Those things, combined with the opinion I have formed of the quality of women, who appear to me as children, to whom I would rather give a sugarplum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in." year or two longer than he did; but, as it happened, it was impossible that his poetry as a general thing, should be other than sensual, or literal, and for the most part, opposed in quality to the sensuous or interpretative. We hold it to be out of the question, that Keats, with such a physical organization as his, could have ever entirely escaped from the preponderance of sense in his character and writings; but a year or two more of reflection and emotion must have led him to the determinate and deliberate adoption of a creed of some sort or other, if it had been no other than the wretched one, that all creeds are worthless; and this would have been an immense accession to his mental power. A man without a belief is like a man without a backbone. Keats made the very common mistake of preferring the true to the good; for his rejection of all opinions was nothing more than his refusal to accept of any but such as seemed demonstrably true. Had he lived to think and feel more deeply than he did; had his thoughts and feelings been more ordinarily occupied than they were, about the interests and mysteries of the immortal spirit, Despair must have chased him from the regions of indifference, Goodness would probably have asserted her superiority over formal Truth, to which she is the only guide; and, finally, commanded by her, he would have chosen some star to steer by, although compelled to do so in the full assurance that it was, at best, but an approximation to the, perhaps, undiscoverable pole of absolute verity. Our next extract shall be one in which mere onesidedness of vision and defect of human love demand to be regarded as more than ordinary universality of mind and elevation of feeling. The letter is to his brother in America, who had recently been married : : "Notwithstanding your happiness and your recommendation, I hope I shall never marry; though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me Let our readers judge whether this letter indicates a mind above or below the enjoyment of domestic relationships. The most excellent notion that Keats can form to himself of a wife is " a beautiful creature," who is capable of being rendered more tempting to sense, by silken carpets, feather-stuffed sofas, Burgundy, and a lodging at Ambleside. With such views, the young poet did very well to remain contented with the roaring of the wind for his wife; but he ought not to have held up his power of being so easily satisfied, as a mark of distinction beyond those who, while they are awake to all the wonder and beauty of material nature, are cognizant likewise of the deeper and more religious worth of humanity, and alive to the "ever new delight" which arises out of woman's harmonizing contrasts with man, and out of her delicate and love-producing subordination to him. A short period before his death, Keats fell violently in love. In his letters we have a few vivid glimpses of the young lady. Here are two which show that the lover was faithful to what seems to have been his ideal, at the time when he was "fancy free:" "She is not a Cleopatra, but at least a Char mian; she has a rich eastern look, she has fine eyes and manners; when she comes into the room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess; she is too fine and conscious of herself to repulse any man that may address her, from habit she thinks that nothing particular; I always find myself more at ease with such a woman." "She is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way, for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things-the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical, and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron, and the Charmian, hold the first place in onr minds. In the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me." one. This last sentence, though it sounds very like nonsense, is, nevertheless, an important It is obvious that when Keats wrote it, the first alternative would have seemed preferable to the second. Indeed, his subsequent story shows beyond doubt that "the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical," vastly outweighed, in the poet's practical estimation, the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal." "This Charmian," whatever the fair qualities of mind and heart of which she may have been possessed, soon engrossed the whole of Keats' being, simply by the peculiar character of her personal attractions. ment. " Mr. Milnes has perceived the liability of Keats' nature to the charge that we are now making against it, and he defends him upon the plea of youth, and an ardent temperaCould we have convinced ourselves of the validity of this plea, our readers should have heard nothing of the present complaint; but we are persuaded that the quality under discussion was vitally inherent in the nature of Keats; that is to say, that it not only affected his life and writings, but entered into his ideal of what was desirable. A man is to be judged, not so much by what he outwardly is, as by what he wishes to become. Let Keats be judged out of his own mouth: "I have been hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious and a love for philosophy. Were I calculated for the former, I should be glad; but as I am not" (his health was then breaking down) "I shall turn all my soul to the latter." Mr. Milnes tells us that"Keats' health does not seem to have prevented him from indulging somewhat in that dissipation which is the natural outlet for the young energies of ardent temperaments, unconscious of how scanty a portion of vital strength had been allotted to him; but a strictly regulated and abstinent life would have appeared to him pedantic and sentimental. He did not however, to any serious extent, allow wine to usurp on his intellect, or games of chance to impair his means, for in his letters to his brothers he speaks of having drank too much as of a piece of rare joviality," &c. We repeat, that we do not believe Keats' dissipation, such as it was, to have been the spontaneous outbreak of the "young energies seems to have pursued the pleasures and of an ardent temperament." To us Keats temptations of sense, rather than to have been pursued by them. We often find him feasting coolly over the imagination of sensual enjoyment. "Talking of pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my mouth a nectarine. Good God! how fine! it went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy-all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified strawberry." He sometimes aspires to be thought a tippler, gamester, &c., but it is with the air of an unripe boy, awkwardly feigning the irregularities of a man. We have not noticed one-fourth of the passages which we had marked for quotation, as corroborating our views upon this point; but one proof is as good as a thousand, and we are glad to turn from this part of our task to the more agreeable duty of showing the truth of our assertion that the mind of Keats, before its withdrawal from the world, was upon the eve of a great intellectual and moral alteration. It must be remembered that our present purpose is to examine the character of Keats, solely in order to the illustration of his poetry, and of the species of poetry to which it belongs. Otherwise we should have gone more fully into the circumstances whereby the moral agency of young Keats is partly unburthened of the responsibility of much temporarily defective feeling, and erroneous thought. As it is, we can only take a hasty glance at two or three of those circumstances. "His mother, a lively and intelligent woman, was supposed to have prematurely hastened the birth of John by her passionate love of amusement, though his constitution at first gave no signs of the peculiar debility of a seventh months child." Keats was, moreover, unfortunate, we venture to think, in some of the friends, who by their powers and their reputations were calculated to exert the greatest influence upon him, at the most susceptible period of his life. Extremely clever, self-educated" men are not often otherwise the "Charmian" fever overtook him, but they are enough to show that it must have been a fever only, and not the final decision and devotion of his being. The next quotation we make is very curious :— than very ill adapted to form the standard of moral taste in a young man, unless, indeed, it be by antagonism. We fancy that we hear the voice of some of Keats' distinguished preceptors, in such sentences as the following, "Failings I am always rather rejoiced to find in a man than sorry for it, they bring us to a "I said if there were three things superior in level." John Keats was, however, so vastly the modern world they were The Excursion,' superior to even the most gifted of his reallyHaydon's Pictures,' and 'Hazlitt's Depth of intimate friends, that their influence, as far as Taste.' Not thus speaking with any poor vanity it was undesirable, could not have endured. that works of genius were the first things in this It was, in fact, rapidly waning, when he was world. No! for that sort of probity and disinterestedness that such men as Bailey possess, does removed from its sphere by his visit to Italy. hold and grasp the tip-top of any spiritual honors Here are a few glimpses of an emphatically that can be paid to anything in this world; and, moreover, having this feeling at this present come over me in its full force, I sat down to write to you with a grateful heart in that I had not a brother who did not feel and credit me for a deeper feeling and devotion for his uprightness than for any mark of genius however splendid." transitional state : "I have, of late, been moulting, not for fresh feathers and wings; they are gone; and in their stead I hope to have a pair of sublunary legs. I have altered not from a chrysalis into a butterfly, but the contrary." "The most unhappy hours in our lives are those in which we recollect times past to our own blush-It "A year ago, to read them a little." From the time you left us our friends say I have altered so completely I am not like the same person. Some think I have lost that ** * ** poetic fire and ardor they say I once had; the fact is, I perhaps have, but instead of that I hope I shall substitute a more thoughtful and quiet power. I am more contented to read and think, but am seldom haunted with ambitious thoughts. I am scarcely contented to write the best verses for the fever they leave behind. I want to compose this without fever; I hope I shall one day." This is a peculiarly uncomfortable passage. is the phrase of a man who has abandoned lower order of thought and feeling without. having attained anything more than a foretaste of the higher order for which the sacrifice has been made. "The Excursion" looks as if it did not well know what to do in the novel society of "Haydon's Pictures," and "Hazlitt's Depth of Taste," and the morality of the passage is uneasily arrayed in the self-conscious and somewhat melo-dramatic sublimity of the wording; such phrases as, "does hold and grasp the tip-top of any spiritual honors," and "in that I had not a brother," &c., being assuredly very unusual modes of language when employed in the enunciation of the ordinary truth,-that an honest man is the noblest work of God. The next, and the longest quotation we The following sentences are addressed to shall make, is valuable on its own account, his friend Mr. J. K. Reynolds: "One of the first pleasures I look to is your happy marriage-the more so since I have felt the pleasure of loving a sister-in-law. I did not think it possible to become so much attached in so short a time; things like these, and they are real, have made me resolve to have a care of my health." * * * We can see horribly clear, in the works of such a man, (Burns,) his whole life, as if we were God's spies. ** * * What were his addresses to Jean in the latter part of his life, I should not speak to you-yet why not? You are not in the same case-you are in the right path, and you shall not be deceived. I have spoken to you against marriage, but it was general. The prospect to me, in those matters, has been so blank that I have not been unwilling to die." These words, it is true, were written before as well as for the manner in which it illustrates the transitional and improving condition of Keats' mind. In it Keats falls into the vulgar impiety of juxta-posing our Saviour and Socrates, but we fancy that there is also in it an earnestness of heart, an inquisitiveness of intellect, and a deep thirst for, and even foretaste of, a higher region of existence than has as yet been attained by the writer; all of which, working together, must ere long have awakened him to a perception of the weakness of much that he was mistaking for strength, to a knowledge of the ruinous false hood and real narrow-mindedness of views which he had as yet maintained with a complacent faith in the liberality they conferred upon their holders, and to a conviction of the necessity of meekly submitting all his facul ties to an external oracle, if it were only in order to their complete artistical cultivation. "I have this moment received a note from Haslam, in which he writes that he expects the death of his father, who has been for some time in a state of insensibility; I shall go to town to-morrow to see him. This is the world-thus we cannot one opinion. Yet in this may I not be free from sin, may there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the alertThough a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be ness of the stoat or the dexterity of the deer? hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel. By a superior being our reasonings may take the This is the very thing in which consists poetry, and same tone; though erroneous, they may be fine. if so, it is not so fine a thing as philosophy, for the same reason as an eagle is not so fine a thing as truth. Give me this credit-do you not think I strive to know myself? Give me this credit, and you will not think that on my own account I repeat the lines of Milton 'How charming is divine philosophy, Nor harsh nor crabbed as dull fools suppose, expect to give away many hours to pleasure; circumstances are like clouds, continually gathering and bursting, while we are laughing. The seed of trouble is put into the wide arable land of events; while we are laughing it sprouts, it grows, and suddenly bears a poisonous fruit which we must pluck. Even so we have leisure to reason on the misfortunes of our friends; our own touch us too nearly for words. Very few men have ever arrived at a complete disinterestedness of mindvery few have been interested by a pure desire of the benefit of others. In the greater part of the benefactors of humanity some meretricious motive has sullied their greatness, some melo-dramatic "No, not for myself, feeling grateful as I do to scenery has fascinated them. From the manner have got into a state of mind to relish them propin which I feel Haslam's misfortune I perceive how erly. Nothing ever becomes real till it is exfar I am from any humble standard of disinterest-perienced; even a proverb is no proverb to you edness; yet this feeling ought to be carried to its highest pitch, as there is no fear of its ever injuring society. In wild nature the hawk would lose his breakfast of robins, and the robin his of worms; the lion must starve as well as the swallow. The greater part of men make their way with the same instinctiveness, the same unwandering eye from their purposes, the same animal eagerness as the hawk: the hawk wants a mate, so does man; look at them both, they set about it and procure one in the same manner; they want both a nest--they both set about one in the same manner. The noble animal man for his amusement smokes a till life has illustrated it. I am afraid that your anxiety for me leads you to fear the violence of my temperament, continually smothered down; for that reason I did not intend to have sent you the following sonnet, but look over the two last pages, and see if I have not that in me which will bear the buffets of the world. It will be the best comment on my sonnet; it will show you that it was written with no agony, but that of ignorance; with no thirst, but that of knowledge when pushed to the point; though the first steps to it were through my human passions, they went away, and I wrote with my mind, and perhaps, I may confess, a little bit of my heart. 66 'Why did I laugh to-night? no voice will tell, Oh darkness! darkness, ever must I moan The above sonnet is remarkably fine and of extreme interest. "The cloudy porch that opens on the sun" of Christianity is therein expressed. The entire passage is often made up of such misgivings as are valuable, moreover, as an illustration of the laborious introspection which must have been constantly exercised by the mind of Keats. |