may have come rather new to you, which must constantly be happening, notwithstanding that we read the same play forty times; e.g., the following never struck me so forcibly as at present:

urchins

Shall for the vast of night, that they may work,

All exercise on thee.

How can I help bringing to your mind the line

In the dark backward and abysm of time"

Shakespeare at once gives him an unapproachable standard, which prevents his thinking overmuch of his own productions, and at the same time keeps him from despondency. "I never quite despair and I read Shakespeare-indeed, I think I shall never read any other book much."1 It is in reference to Shakespeare that he realises a truth fully applicable to his own poetry that the "excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth". All through the year his study continues, and early in 1818 he is found turning again to Lear. And as once more he burns through the fierce dispute

Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay

the world of Spenser seems shadowy and dim.3 Later he writes, in words truer of himself than of the most learned commentator, "I have reason to be content, for, thank God, I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his very depths". The influence of other poets in turn grew and waned, but the genius of Shakespeare opened out a new world before

1 Letter to Haydon, 10th May, 1817. The passage goes on: "I am very near agreeing with Hazlitt that Shakespeare is enough for us". Earlier in the letter is another significant passage: "I remember your saying that you had notions of a good genius presiding over you. I have of late had the same thought, for things which I do are afterwards confirmed in a dozen features of propriety. Is it too daring to fancy Shakespeare this Presider?"

2 Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 28th Dec. 1817.

3 Sonnet On sitting down to read King Lear once again, vide p. 277.

Letter to John Taylor, 27th Feb. 1818.

his eyes, and the life which he saw in the pages of Shakespeare became as it were a part of his inner experience. And as his own life's tragedy drew to its close he turned, naturally, in his agony of mind to the majestic tranquillity of Shakespeare. His last poem, Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art, was written, with a touching suggestiveness, on a blank page in a copy of Shakespeare's poems facing The Lover's Complaint.

At the same time that he was finding in Shakespeare the greatest examples of the imaginative presentation of life, he was turning to Wordsworth not only as the one living poet who was fully conscious of the dignity of his vocation, but even more than this as the inspired commentator on the poetic faculty, who traced its growth in the mind of the poet, and interpreted its significance to the world. Wordsworth's influence was never a personal one. It began to be exerted fully a year before the two poets had met, and even after their acquaintance it remained unchanged in character; it was never cemented by the ties of friendship. Still less was it a literary influence. Keats gives expression more than once to his antipathy to the artistic method by which Wordsworth chose to present his faith. "We hate poetry," he writes, "that has a palpable design upon us. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul." To his eyes "the egotistical sublime" of Wordsworth contrasted unfavourably with "Shakespeare's great negative capability, his power of presenting uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without an irritable reaching after fact and reason". But just because much of Wordsworth's poetry seemed to be the studied expression of a definite philosophy of life and art rather than the cry of spontaneous emotion, it had all the more effect upon him. He stood in no need of further poetic inspiration; what he desired was the direction of his intellect, and there is continual evidence of the deep hold which the teaching of Wordsworth had gained over his mind. The Hymn to Pan might perhaps seem to Wordsworth "a pretty piece of paganism," yet it was Wordsworth's interpretation of Greek mythology which revealed to Keats the spirit which informed it. And Wordsworth

affected him, too, in his attitude to subjects with which he is supposed to have been generally unconcerned. It is rarely, for example, that he touches on the politics of the hour. Yet his criticism sent to his brother George, to whom he communicated all his thoughts, could only have come from the student of Wordsworth's greatest political utterances. "The motives of our worst men," he writes, "are Interest and of our best Vanity. We have no Milton, no Algernon Sidney. Governors in these days lose the title of man in exchange for that of Diplomat and Minister. . . . All these departments of Government have strayed far from Simplicity, which is the greatest of strength" . . . and he goes on to disjoin himself from the Liberal party in a denunciation of Napoleon as "one who has done more harm to the life of Liberty than any one else could have done". It is evident from this passage how the cheery Radicalism of Hunt has been tempered by the spirit of the Sonnets dedicated to National Independence and Liberty.1

Even more suggestive of the deep hold which the Wordsworthian creed had gained over his mind are the words in which he interprets to his brother, who is grieving with him over a common loss, the meaning of man's life in its relation with what is beyond.

"The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is a vale of tears,' from which we are redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven. What a little circumscribed notion! Call the world, if you please, the vale of Soul-making. Then you will find out the use of the world. . . . I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read-I will call the human heart the horn-book used in that schooland I will call the child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its horn-book. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make

1 Journal Letter, Oct. 1818. Keats's political sympathies are with the Wordsworth of 1801-5 and not, of course, with the Wordsworth of the time at which he writes. Cf. the Sonnets dedicated to National Independence and Liberty, passim, but especially Nos. iv., xiii., xiv., xv.

it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways." This passage might well be taken as a commentary on Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality, which, as Bailey tells us, "he was never weary of repeating". In Wordsworth, indeed, he saw a poet who, like himself, had drawn his first inspiration from the beauty of nature, but had only become conscious of

how exquisitely

The external world is fitted to the mind

after a deep and sympathetic study of humanity. Through a profound contemplation on the mysteries of being Wordsworth had at last attained to a resolution of the conflicting elements in his nature, in an impassioned philosophy in which "thought and feeling are one". This resolution was never attained by Keats, but he realised that the greatest poetry sprang from the desire for it, if not from its attainment; and both in his letters and in his poems there are continual signs that he was turning to Wordsworth for help and guidance. Even that famous ejaculation, "O for a life of sensations rather than of Thoughts," which has so often been made the text for a denunciation of his unbridled sensuousness, bears a totally different construction when it is viewed in its context, in its true place in the development of his thought.

holiness of the heart's What the Imagination

"I am certain of nothing but of the affections, and the truth of imagination. seizes as Beauty, must be Truth-whether it existed before or not --for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty. . . . The Imagination may be compared with Adam's dream, he awoke and found it truth. I am more zealous in this affair because I have never been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning-and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest philosopher ever arrived at truth without setting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a

1 Journal Letter, April, 1819.

life of sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is a vision in the form of youth, 'a shadow of reality to come." 1

It must be remembered that this letter is addressed to Bailey, an ardent Wordsworthian with whom but a few months before Keats had been studying in the Excursion the poet's superb vindication before an unbelieving age of the value of the emotions in the attainment of the highest truth. The passage is thus a passionate exaltation of that part of Wordsworth's creed with which Keats had, doubtless, most natural sympathy, the belief that we

do well to trust

Imagination's light when reason's fails.

In writing to a friend whose orthodoxy might lead him, perhaps, to accept Wordsworth's theory of imagination with some reserve, he tends in the natural spirit of controversy to overstate his case, and to throw too much weight upon the emotions as opposed to the reason. But this does not express, even for Keats, more than one side of the truth (and the very form in which his desire is couched is itself a recognition that the life of sensation apart from thought is impossible for any true poet); it can therefore only be judged aright side by side with those of his utterances which show him to be fully conscious of those other qualities of mind and heart which give to imagination its body—an insight into human life and a sympathy with its sufferings, together with an extensive knowledge by widening speculation to ease the "burden of the mystery "2 "Wordsworth," he writes, in a letter whose whole spirit is that of a

1 Letter to Bailey, 22nd Nov. 1817. It should be remembered that Keats had no exact logical training and cannot therefore be expected to be accurate in his use of philosophical terminology. The word intuition would express his meaning far more truly than sensation. He is, obviously, contrasting what Milton calls the discursive and intuitive reason-or the manner of attaining the truth characteristic of the philosopher-by consecutive reasoning, and the poet's immediate apprehension of it.

2 Letter to Reynolds, May, 1818. Mr. Robert Bridges (Introduction to Keats's Poems: Muses' Library) has pointed out the analogy of thought between this letter and Wordsworth's Lines on Tintern Abbey: cf. also notes to Sleep and Poetry. The Excursion, the last poem which the casual reader of Keats would expect him to admire, was to him one of "the three things to rejoice at in this age". Letter to Haydon, January, 1818.