in thick brown ringlets round a head diminutive for the breadth of the shoulders below it, while the smallness of the lower limbs, which in later life marred the proportion of his person, was not then apparent, any more than the undue prominence of the lower lip, which afterwards gave his face too pugnacious a character to be entirely pleasing, but at that time only completed such an impression as the ancients had of Achilles,-joyous and glorious youth, everlastingly striving.

After remaining some time at school his intellectual ambition suddenly developed itself: he determined to carry off all the first prizes in literature, and he succeeded: but the object was only obtained by a total sacrifice of his amusements and favorite exercises. Even on the half-holidays, when the school was all out at play, he remained at home translating his Virgil or his Fenelon : it has frequently occurred to the master to force him out into the open air for his health, and then he would walk in the garden with a book in his hand. The quantity of translations on paper he made during the last two years of his stay at Enfield was surprising. The twelve books of the " Æneid" were a portion of it, but he does not appear to have been familiar with much other and more difficult Latin poetry, nor to have even commenced learning the Greek language. Yet Tooke's "Pantheon," Spence's "Polymetis," and Lemprière's "Dictionary," were sufficient fully to introduce his imagination to the enchanted world of old mythology; with this, at once, he became intimately acquainted, and a natural consanguinity, so to say, of intellect, soon domesticated him with the ancient ideal life, so that his scanty scholarship supplied hin with a clear perception of classic beauty, and led the way to that wonderful reconstruction of Grecian feeling and fancy, of which his mind became afterwards capable. He does not seem to have been a sedulous reader of other books, but "Robinson Crusoe" and Marmontel's "Incas of Peru" impressed him strongly, and he must have met with Shakspeare, for he told a schoolfellow considerably younger than himself, "that he thought no one could dare to read Macbeth' alone in a house, at two o'clock in the morning."

On the death of their remaining parent, the young Keats's

were consigned to the guardianship of Mr. Abbey, a merchant. About eight thousand pounds were left to be equally divided among the four children. It does not appear whether the wishes of John, as to his destination in life, were at all consulted; but, on leaving school, in the summer of 1810, he was apprenticed, for five years, to Mr. Hammond, a surgeon of some eminence at Edmonton. The vicinity to Enfield enabled him to keep up his connection with the family of Mr. Clarke, where he was always received with familiar kindness. His talents and energy had strongly recommended him to his preceptor, and his affectionate disposition endeared him to his son. In Charles Cowden Clarke, Keats found a friend capable of sympathizing with all his highest tastes and finest sentiments, and in this genial atmosphere his powers gradually expanded. He was always borrowing books, which he devoured rather than read. Yet so little expectation was formed of the direction his ability would take, that when, in the beginning of 1812, he asked for the loan of Spenser's "Fairy Queen," Mr. Clarke remembers that it was supposed in the family that he merely desired, from a boyish ambition, to study an illustrious production of literature. The effect, however, produced on him by that great work of ideality was electrical: he was in the habit of walking over to Enfield at least once a week, to talk over his reading with his friend, and he would now speak of nothing but Spenser. A new world of delight seemed revealed to him: "he ramped through the scenes of the romance," writes Mr. Clarke, "like a young horse turned into a spring meadow :" he reveled in the gorgeousness of the imagery, as in the pleasures of a sense fresh-found: the force and felicity of an epithet (such, for example, as-" the sea-shouldering whale") would light up his countenance with ecstacy, and some fine touch of description would seem to strike on the secret chords of his soul and generate countless harmonies. This, in fact, was not only his open presentation at the Court of the Muses, (for the lines in imitation of Spenser,

"Now Morning from her Orient chamber came,

And her first footsteps touched a verdant hill," &c.,

are the earliest known verses of his composition,) but it was the great impulse of his poetic life, and the stream of his inspiration remained long colored by the rich soil over which it first had flowed. Nor will the just critic of the maturer poems of Keats fail to trace to the influence of the study of Spenser much that at first appears forced and fantastical both in idea and in expression, and discover that precisely those defects which are commonly attributed to an extravagant originality may be distinguished as proceeding from a too indiscriminate reverence for a great but unequal model. In the scanty records which are left of the adolescent years in which Keats became a poet, a Sonnet on Spenser, the date of which I have not been able to trace, itself illustrates this view :

Spenser a jealous honorer of thine,
A forester deep in thy midmost trees,

Did, last eve, ask my promise to refine

Some English, that might strive thine ear to please.
But, Elfin-poet! 'tis impossible

For an inhabitant of wintry earth

To rise, like Phoebus, with a golden quill,

Fire-winged, and make a morning in his mirth.

It is impossible to 'scape from toil

O' the sudden, and receive thy spiriting:

The flower must drink the nature of the soil

Before it can put forth its blossoming:

Be with me in the summer days, and I

Will for thine honor and his pleasure try."

A few memorials remain of his other studies.

Chaucer evi

dently gave him the greatest pleasure: he afterwards complained of the diction as 66 annoyingly mixed up with Gallicisms," but at the time when he wrote the Sonnet, at the end of the tale of "The Flower and the Leaf," he felt nothing but the pure breath of nature in the morning of English literature. His friend Clarke, tired with a long walk, had fallen asleep on the sofa with a book in his hand, and when he woke, the volume was enriched with this addition,

"This pleasant tale is like a little copse:" &c.*

The strange tragedy of the fate of Chatterton, "the marvelous Boy, the sleepless soul that perished in its pride," so disgraceful to the age in which it occurred, and so awful a warning to all others of the cruel evils which the mere apathy and ignorance of the world can inflict on genius, is a frequent subject of allusion and interest in Keats's letters and poems, and some lines of the following invocation bear a mournful anticipatory analogy to the close of the beautiful elegy which Shelley hung over another early grave.

"O Chatterton! how very sad thy fate!
Dear child of sorrow-son of misery!

How soon the film of death obscured that eye
Whence Genius mildly flashed, and high debate.
How soon that voice, majestic and elate,
Melted in dying numbers! Oh! how nigh
Was night to thy fair morning. Thou didst die
A half-blown flow'ret which cold blasts amate.t
But this is past thou art among the stars
Of highest Heaven to the rolling spheres
Thou sweetly singest: nought thy hymning mars,
Above the ingrate world and human fears.
On earth the good man base detraction bars
From thy fair name, and waters it with tears."

Not long before this, Keats had become familiar with the works of Lord Byron, and indited a Sonnet, of little merit, to him in December, 1814

Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody!
Attuning still the soul to tenderness,

As if soft Pity, with unusual stress,

Had touched her plaintive lute, and thou, being by,

Hadst caught the tones, nor suffered them to die.

O'ershading sorrow doth not make thee less

Delightful thou thy griefs dost dress
With a bright halo, shining beamily,

* See the "Literary Remains.”
† Amate.-Affright. Chaucer.

As when a cloud the golden moon doth veil,
Its sides are tinged with a resplendent glow,
Through the dark robe oft amber rays prevail,
And like fair veins in sable marble flow;
Still warble, dying swan! still tell the tale,
The enchanting tale, the tale of pleasing woe."

Confused as are the imagery and diction of these lines, their feeling suggests a painful contrast with the harsh judgment and late remorse of their object, the proud and successful poet, who never heard of this imperfect utterance of boyish sympathy and respect.

The impressible nature of Keats would naturally incline him to erotic composition, but his early love-verses are remarkably deficient in beauty and even in passion. Some which remain in manuscript are without any interest, and those published in the little volume of 1817, are the worst pieces in it. The world of personal emotion was then far less familiar to him than that of fancy, and indeed it seems to have been long before he descended from the ideal atmosphere in which he dwelt so happily, into the troubled realities of human love. Not, however, that the creatures even of his young imagination were unimbued with natural affections; so far from it, it may be reasonably conjectured that it was the interfusion of ideal and sensual life which rendered the Grecian mythology so peculiarly congenial to the mind of Keats, and when the "Endymion" comes to be critically considered, it will be found that its excellence consists in its clear comprehension of that ancient spirit of beauty, to which all outward perceptions so excellently ministered, and which undertook to ennoble and purify, as far as was consistent with their retention, the instinctive desires of mankind.

Friendship, generally ardent in youth, would not remain without its impression in the early poems of Keats, and a congeniality of literary dispositions appears to have been the chief impulse to these relations. With Mr. Felton Mathew,* to whom his first published Epistle was addressed, he appears to have enjoyed a

* A gentleman of high literary merit, now employed in the administration of the Poor Law.