Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

All

scarcely kick to come up to the top. I know very well 'tis all nonsense. In a short time I hope I shall be in a temper to feel sensibly your mention of my book. In vain have I waited till Monday to have any interest in that, or any thing else. I feel no spur at my brother's going to America, and am almost stony-hearted about his wedding. All this will blow over. I am sorry for is having to write to you in such a time—but I cannot force my letters in a hotbed. I could not feel comfortable in making sentences for you. I am your debtor; I must ever remain so; nor do. I wish to be clear of my rational debt : there is a comfort in throwing oneself on the charity of one's friends 'tis like the albatross sleeping on its wings. I will be to you wine in the cellar, and the more modestly, or rather, indolently, I retire into the backward bin, the more Falerne will I be at the drinking. There is one thing I must mention: my brother talks of sailing in a fortnight; if so, I will most probably be, with you a week before I set out for Scotland. The middle of your first page should be sufficient to rouse me. What I said is true, and I have dreamt of your mention of it, and my not answering it has weighed on me since. If I come, I will bring your letter, and hear more fully your sentiments on one or two points. I will call about the Lectures at Taylor's, and at Little Britain, to-morrow. Yesterday I dined with Hazlitt, Barnes and Wilkie, at Haydon's. The topic was the Duke of Wellingtonvery amusingly pro-and-con'd. Reynolds has been getting much better; and Rice may begin to crow, for he got a little so-so at a party of his, and was none the worse for it the next morning. I hope I shall soon see you, for we must have many new thoughts and feelings to analyze, and to discover whether a little more knowledge has not made us more ignorant.

Yours affectionately,

JOHN KEATS.

LONDON, June 10, 1818.

MY DEAR BAILEY,

I have been very much gratified and very much hurt by your letters in the Oxford Paper; because, independent of that unlawful and mortal feeling of pleasure at praise there is a glory

in enthusiasm; and because the world is malignant enough to chuckle at the most honorable simplicity. Yes, on my soul, my dear Bailey, you are too simple for the world, and that idea makes me sick of it. How is it that, by extreme opposites, we have, as it were, got discontented nerves? You have all your life (I think so) believed every body. I have suspected every body. And, although you have been so deceived, you make a simple appeal. The world has something else to do, and I am glad of it. Were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarchal coronation-on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. I should not, by rights, speak in this tone to you, for it is an incendiary spirit that would do so. Yet I am not old enough or magnanimous enough to annihilate self-and it would, perhaps, be paying you an ill compliment. I was in hopes, some little time back, to be able to relieve your dullness by my spirits-to point out things in the world worth your enjoyment-and now I am never alone without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death— without placing my ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose. Perhaps if my affairs were in a different state I should not have written the above-you shall judge: I have two brothers; one is driven, by the "burden of society," to America; the other, with an exquisite love of life, is in a lingering state. My love for my brothers, from the early loss of our parents, and even from earlier misfortunes, has grown into an affection, “ passing the love of women." I have been ill-tempered with them, I have vexed them,-but the thought of them has always stifled the impression that any woman might otherwise have made upon me. I have a sister too; and may not follow them either to America or to the grave. Life must be undergone; and I certainly derive some consolation from the thought of writing one or two more poems before it ceases.

I have heard some hints of your retiring to Scotland. I should like to know your feeling on it: it seems rather remote. Perhaps Gleig will have a duty near you. I am not certain whether I shall be able to go any journey, on account of my brother Tom and a little indisposition of my own. If I do not, you shall see me soon, if not on my return, or I'll quarter myself on you next winter. I had known my sister-in-law some time before she was

my sister, and was very fond of her. I like her better and better. She is the most disinterested woman I ever knew—that is to say, she goes beyond degrees in it. To see an entirely disinterested girl quite happy is the most pleasant and extraordinary thing in the world. It depends upon a thousand circumstances. On my word it is extraordinary. Women must want imagination, and they may thank God for it; and so may we, that a delicate being can feel happy without any sense of crime. It puzzles me, and I have no sort of logic to comfort me: I shall think it over. I am not at home, and your letter being there I cannot look it over to answer any particular-only, I must say I feel that passage of Dante. If I take any book with me it shall be those minute volumes of Carey, for they will go into the aptest corner.

Reynolds is getting, I may say, robust. His illness has been of service to him. Like every one just recovered, he is high-spirited. I hear also good accounts of Rice. With respect to domestic literature, the "Edinburgh Magazine," in another blow-up against Hunt, calls me "the amiable Mister Keats," and I have more than a laurel from the "Quarterly Reviewers," for they have smothered me in "Foliage." I want to read you my "Pot of Basil." If you go to Scotland, I should much like to read it there to you, among the snows of next winter. My brother's remembrance to you.

Your affectionate friend,
JOHN KEATS.

"Foliage" was a volume of poems chiefly classical, just published by Mr. Leigh Hunt. It contained the following sonnets to Keats. The "Edinburgh Magazine" was Blackwood's, and had begun the series of articles on the "Cockney School," to which further allusion will be made.

SONNET TO JOHN KEATS.

'Tis well you think me truly one of those
Whose sense discerns the loveliness of things;
For surely as I feel the bird that sings

Behind the leaves, or dawn as it up grows,
Or the rich bee rejoicing as he goes,
Or the glad issue of emerging springs,
Or overhead the glide of a dove's wings,
Or turf, or tree, or, midst of all, repose:
And surely as I feel things lovelier still,
The human look, and the harmonious form
Containing woman, and the smile in ill,

And such a heart as Charles's,* wise and warm,-
As surely as all this, I see, ev'n now,

Young Keats, a flowering laurel on your brow.

ON RECEIVING A CROWN OF IVY FROM THE SAME.

A crown of ivy! I submit my head.

To the young hand that gives it—young, 'tis true,
But with a right, for 'tis a poet's too.

How pleasant the leaves feel! and how they spread
With their broad angles, like a nodding shed

Over both eyes! and how complete and new,

.

As on my hand I lean, to feel them strew

My sense with freshness-Fancy's rustling bed!
Tress-tossing girls, with smell of flowers and grapes
Come dancing by, and downward piping cheeks,
And up-thrown cymbals, and Silenus old
Lumpishly borne, and many trampling shapes,—
And lastly, with his bright eyes on her bent,
Bacchus-whose bride has of his hand fast hold.

ON THE SAME.

It is a lofty feeling and a kind,

Thus to be topped with leaves ;--to have a sense

Of honor-shaded thought—an influence

As from great Nature's fingers, and be twined

With her old, sacred, verdurous ivy-bind,

*Charles Cowden Clarke.

As though she hallowed with that sylvan fence
A head that bows to her benevolence,

'Midst pomp of fancied trumpets in the wind.
"Tis what's within us crowned.

And kind and great

Are all the conquering wishes it inspires,—
Love of things lasting, love of the tall woods,
Love of love's self, and ardor for a state

Of natural good befitting such desires,

Towns without gain, and haunted solitudes.

Whatever extravagance a stranger might find in these verses, was probably justified to the Poet by the author's friendship, and in the Preface to "Foliage" there is, among other ingenious criticisms, a passage on Shakspeare's scholarship, which seems to me to have more than an accidental bearing on the kind of classical knowledge which Keats really possessed. "Though not a scholar," writes Mr. Hunt, "he needed nothing more than the description given by scholars, good or indifferent, in order to pierce back at once into all the recesses of the original country. They told him where they had been, and he was there in an instant, though not in the track of their footing;-Battendo l'ali verso l'aurea fronde. The truth is, he felt the Grecian mythology not as a set of school-boy common-places which it was thought wrong to give up, but as something which it requires more than mere scholarship to understand—as the elevation of the external world and of accomplished humanity to the highest pitch of the graceful, and as embodied essences of all the grand and lovely qualities of nature. His description of Proserpine and her flowers, in the Winter's Tale,' of the characteristic beauties of some of the Gods in Hamlet,' and that single couplet in the Tempest,'

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

6

Ye nymphs called Naiads of the wandering brooks,
With your sedged crowns and ever harmless looks,'

are in the deepest taste of antiquity, and show that all great poets look at themselves and the fine world about them in the same clear and ever-living fountains."

Every word of this might have applied to Keats, who, at this time, himself seems to have been studying Shakspeare with the greatest diligence. Captain Medwin, in his "Life of Shelley,"

« НазадПродовжити »