Claude's Enchanted Castle,1 and I pleased with my remembrance of it.

wish you may be The Rain is come

on again—I think with me Devonshire stands a very poor chance. I shall damn it up hill and down dale, if it keep up to the average of six fine days in three weeks. Let me have better news of you.

Tom's remembrances to you.
Your affectionate friend,

Remember us to all.

JOHN KEATS.

Dear Reynolds! as last night I lay in bed,
There came before my eyes that wonted thread
Of shapes, and shadows, and remembrances,
That every other minute vex and please :

Things all disjointed come from north and south,-
Two Witch's eyes above a Cherub's mouth,
Voltaire with casque and shield and habergeon,
And Alexander with his nightcap on;

Old Socrates a-tying his cravat,

And Hazlitt playing with Miss Edgeworth's cat;
And Junius Brutus, pretty well so so,
Making the best of's way towards Soho.

Few are there who escape these visitings,-
Perhaps one or two whose lives have patent wings,
And thro' whose curtains peeps no hellish nose,
No wild-boar tushes, and no Mermaid's toes;
But flowers bursting out with lusty pride,
And young Æolian harps personify'd ;
Some Titian colours touch'd into real life,-
The sacrifice goes on; the pontiff knife
Gleams in the Sun, the milk-white heifer lows,
The pipes go shrilly, the libation flows:

A white sail shows above the green-head cliff,

1 The famous picture now belonging to Lady Wantage, and exhibited at Burlington House in 1888. Whether Keats ever saw the original is doubtful (it was not shown at the British Institution in his time), but he must have been familiar with the subject as engraved by Vivarès and Woollett, and its suggestive power worked in his mind until it yielded at last the distilled poetic essence of the "magic casement passage in the Ode to a Nightingale. It is interesting to note the theme of the Grecian Urn ode coming in also amidst the "unconnected subject and careless verse of this rhymed epistle.

Moves round the point, and throws her anchor stiff; The mariners join hymn with those on land.

You know the Enchanted Castle,-it doth stand Upon a rock, on the border of a Lake, Nested in trees, which all do seem to shake From some old magic-like Urganda's Sword. O Phoebus! that I had thy sacred word To show this Castle, in fair dreaming wise, Unto my friend, while sick and ill he lies!

You know it well enough, where it doth seem
A mossy place, a Merlin's Hall, a dream;
You know the clear Lake, and the little Isles,
The mountains blue, and cold near neighbour rills,
All which elsewhere are but half animate;
There do they look alive to love and hate,

To smiles and frowns; they seem a lifted mound
Above some giant, pulsing underground.

Part of the Building was a chosen See,
Built by a banish'd Santon of Chaldee;
The other part, two thousand years from him,
Was built by Cuthbert de Saint Aldebrim;
Then there's a little wing, far from the Sun,
Built by a Lapland Witch turn'd maudlin Nun;
And many other juts of aged stone
Founded with many a mason-devil's groan.

The doors all look as if they op'd themselves
The windows as if latch'd by Fays and Elves,
And from them comes a silver flash of light,
As from the westward of a Summer's night;
Or like a beauteous woman's large blue eyes
Gone mad thro' olden songs and poesies.

See! what is coming from the distance dim!
A golden Galley all in silken trim !
Three rows of oars are lightening, moment whiles
Into the verd'rous bosoms of those isles;
Towards the shade, under the Castle wall,
It comes in silence,-
-now 'tis hidden all.
The Clarion sounds, and from a Postern-gate
An echo of sweet music doth create

A fear in the poor Herdsman, who doth bring
His beasts to trouble the enchanted spring,-
He tells of the sweet music, and the spot,
To all his friends, and they believe him not.

O that our dreamings all, of sleep or wake,
Would all their colours from the sunset take:
From something of material sublime,

Rather than shadow our own soul's day-time
In the dark void of night. For in the world
We jostle, but my flag is not unfurl'd
On the Admiral-staff,-and so philosophise
I dare not yet! Oh, never will the prize,
High reason, and the love of good and ill,
Be my award! Things cannot to the will

Be settled, but they tease us out of thought; en
Or is it that imagination brought

Beyond its proper bound, yet still confin'd,
Lost in a sort of Purgatory blind,
Cannot refer to any standard law

Of either earth or heaven? It is a flaw
In happiness, to see beyond our bourn,—
It forces us in summer skies to mourn,
It spoils the singing of the Nightingale.

Dear Reynolds! I have a mysterious tale,
And cannot speak it: the first page I read
Upon a Lampit rock of green sea-weed
Among the breakers; 'twas a quiet eve,
The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave
An untumultuous fringe of silver foam
Along the flat brown sand; I was at home
And should have been most happy,-but I saw
Too far into the sea, where every maw

The greater on the less feeds evermore.—
But I saw too distinct into the core

Of an eternal fierce destruction,

And so from happiness I far was gone.

Still am I sick of it, and tho' to-day,

I've gather'd young spring-leaves, and flowers gay Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,

Still do I that most fierce destruction see,

The Shark at savage prey,-the Hawk at pounce,—

The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce,

Ravening a worm,-Away, ye horrid moods!

Moods of one's mind! You know I hate them well.

You know I'd sooner be a clapping Bell

To some Kamtschatkan Missionary Church,

Than with these horrid moods be left i' the lurch.

XLVII. TO BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON.

Wednesday, [Teignmouth, April 8, 1818].

My dear Haydon-I am glad you were pleased with my nonsense, and if it so happen that the humour takes me when I have set down to prose to you I will not gainsay it. I should be (God forgive me) ready to swear because I cannot make use of your assistance in going through Devon if I was not in my own Mind determined to visit it thoroughly at some more favourable time of the year. But now Tom (who is getting greatly better) is anxious to be in Town-therefore I put off my threading the County. I purpose within a month to put my knapsack at my back and make a pedestrian tour through the North of England, and part of Scotland-to make a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue that is to write, to study and to see all Europe at the lowest expence. I will clamber through the Clouds and exist. I will get such an accumulation of stupendous recollections that as I walk through the suburbs of London I may not see them-I will stand upon Mount Blanc and remember this coming Summer when I intend to straddle Ben Lomond-with my soul !-galligaskins are out of the Question. I am nearer myself to hear your "Christ" is being tinted into immortality. Believe me Haydon your picture is part of myself-I have ever been too sensible of the labyrinthian path to eminence in Art (judging from Poetry) ever to think I understood the emphasis of painting. The innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of beauty. I know not your many havens of intenseness-nor ever can know them but for this I hope not you achieve is lost upon me1: for when a Schoolboy the abstract Idea I had

1 Sic: probably, as suggested by Mr. Forman, for "I hope what you achieve is not lost upon me.'

I

of an heroic painting-was what I cannot describe. saw it somewhat sideways, large, prominent, round, and colour'd with magnificence—somewhat like the feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra. Or of Alcibiades leaning

on his Crimson Couch in his Galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the Sea. That passage in Shakspeare is finer than this

See how the surly Warwick mans the Wall.

I like your consignment of Corneille-that's the humour of it-they shall be called your Posthumous Works.1 I don't understand your bit of Italian. I hope she will awake from her dream and flourish fair-my respects to her. The Hedges by this time are beginning to leafCats are becoming more vociferous-young Ladies who wear Watches are always looking at them. Women about forty-five think the Season very backwardLadies' Mares have but half an allowance of food. It rains here again, has been doing so for three days-however as I told you I'll take a trial in June, July, or August next year.

I am afraid Wordsworth went rather huffd out of Town-I am sorry for it-he cannot expect his fireside Divan to be infallible—he cannot expect but that every man of worth is as proud as himself. O that he had not fit with a Warrener2—that is dined at Kingston's. I shall be in town in about a fortnight and then we will have a day or so now and then before I set out on my northern expedition-we will have no more abominable Rowsfor they leave one in a fearful silence-having settled the

1 The English rebels against tradition in poetry and art at this time took much the same view of the French dramatists of the grand siècle as was taken by the romantiques of their own nation a few years later; and Haydon had written to Keats in his last letter, "When I die I'll have Shakspeare placed on my heart, with Homer in my right hand and Ariosto in the other, Dante at my head, Tasso at my feet, and Corneille under my

2 "He hath fought with a Warrener" :-Simple in Merry Wives, I. iv.