CHAPTER XVI.

KEATS, LAMB, AND COLERIDGE.

Charles Cowden Clarke. Keats and Shelley. - Mr. Monckton Milnes's Letters and Remains of Keats.—“ Other-worldliness."Armitage Brown.-Keats and Lamb. - Wordsworth on Shakspeare.-Milton dining.-Keats and Byron.-Keats in Italy.His death and personal appearance.-"Foliage."-The Indicator. -Tasso's Aminta.—Foolish ignorance of business.—Mr. Lockhart. -Personal appearance of Lamb.-Character of his genius.—His bon-mots and imaginarg notices of his friends.-Person of Coleridge.-Character of his genius.-Coleridge and Hazlitt.-Coleridge's conversation and daily habits.

AND now to speak of Keats, who was introduced to me by his schoolmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, a man of a most genial nature, and corresponding poetical taste, admirably well qualified to nourish the genius of his pupil.

I had not known the young poet long, when Shelley and he became acquainted under my roof. Keats did not take to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him. Shelley's only thoughts of his new acquaintance were such as regarded his bad health, with which he sympathized, and his poetry, of

which he has left such a monument of his admiration in Adonais. Keats, being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a sort of natural enemy. Their styles in writing also were very different; and Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with ordinary flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of Hyperion, was so far inferior in universality to his great acquaintance, that he could not accompany him in his dædal rounds with nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own hands. I am bound to state thus much; because, hopeless of recovering his health, under circumstances that made the feeling extremely bitter, an irritable morbidity appears even to have driven his suspicions to excess; and this not only with regard to the acquaintance whom he might reasonably suppose to have had some advantages over him, but to myself, who had none; for I learned the other day, with extreme pain, such as I am sure so kind and reflecting a man as Mr. Monckton Milnes would not have inflicted on me could he have foreseen it, that Keats at one period of his intercourse with us suspected both Shelley and myself of a wish to see him undervalued! Such are the tricks which constant infelicity can play with the most noble natures. For Shelley, let Adonais answer. For myself, let every word answer which I uttered about

him, living and dead, and such as I now proceed to repeat. I might as well have been told, that I wished to see the flowers or the stars undervalued, or my own heart that loved him.

But it was sickness, and passed away. It appears, by Mr. Milnes's book, that all his friends dissatisfied him in the course of those trials of his temper; and my friend, Mr. Milnes (for that distinguished person honours me with his friendship, and can afford the objection), will allow me to say, that those Letters and Remains of the young poet were not among his happiest effusions, nor wanting to supply a certain force of character to his memory. That memory possessed force enough already for those who were qualified to discern it; and those who were not, hardly deserved to have their own notions of energy flattered at the poet's expense. He was already known to have personally chastised a blackguard, and to have been the author of Hyperion;

"That large utterance of the early gods."

What more could have been necessary to balance the trembling excess of sensibility in his earlier poems? The world has few enough incarnations of poets themselves in Arcadian shapes, to render necessary any deterioration of such as it has the luck to possess.

But perhaps my own personal feelings induce me

to carry this matter too far. In the publication alluded to is a contemptuous reference (not by Mr. Milnes) to a paper in the Examiner on the season of Christmas. I turned to it with new feelings of anxiety; and there, besides finding no warrant for such reference (unless a certain tone of self-complacency, so often regretted in this autobiography, can have justified it), I had the good fortune to be compensated with discovering a phrase, which reminded me of one of the most consolatory passages of my life. I hope I am not giving fresh instance of a weakness which I suppose myself to have outgrown; much less appropriating an invention which does not belong to me; but an accomplished authoress one day (Mrs. Jameson), at the table of my friend Barry Cornwall, quoted the term "otherworldliness" from Coleridge. I said Coleridge was rich enough not to need the transference to him of other men's property; and that I felt so much honoured by the supposition in this instance, that I could not help claiming the word as my own. If Coleridge, indeed, used it before me, I can only say that I was not aware of it, and that my own reflections, very much accustomed to that side of speculation, would have suggested an identical thought. And I should be glad if any reader would tell me in what part of his writings it is to be found.

Now, one of my reasons for alluding to this circum

stance is, that a stranger once came up to me in company, and said he had to thank me for a great benefit done him by a single word in one of my papers. I inquired, with no little interest, what it was; and he said it was the word in question ;— probably in the passage just quoted. He told me it had relieved him, by one flash of light, from a long load of mistake and melancholy; for it had shown him the real character of those aspirations after heaven in a certain class of minds (his teachers), which are as grossly self-seeking as the earthliest, and even set it up as a merit and a sanctification.

Keats appears to have been of opinion, that I ought to have taken more notice of what the critics said against him. And perhaps I ought. My notices of them may not have been sufficient. I may have too much contented myself with panegyrizing his genius, and thinking the objections to it of no ultimate importance. Had he given me a hint to another effect, I should have acted upon it. But in truth, as I have before intimated, I did not see a twentieth part of what was said against us; nor had I the slightest notion, at that period, that he took criticism so much to heart. I was in the habit, though a public man, of living in a world of abstractions of my own; and I regarded him as of a nature still more abstracted, and sure of renown. Though