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with uneasy satiety from present satisfaction to the memory of those happy hopes, to the thought of the dear delight they then derived from one single leaf of those laurels that now crowd in at the window, and which the hand is half inclined to push away to let in the fresh air of heaven.

The lines

As to my Sonnets-though none else should heed them,

I feel delighted still that you should read them,

occur in this Epistle, and several of these have been preserved besides those published or already mentioned. Some, indeed, are mere experiments in this difficult but attractive form of composition, and others evidently refer to forgotten details of daily life and are unmeaning without them. A few of unequal power and illustrative of the progress of genius should not be forgotten, while those contained in the first volume of his Poems are perhaps the most remarkable pieces in it. They are as noble in thought, rich in expression, and harmonious in rhythm as any in the language, and among the best may be ranked that "On first looking into Chapman's Homer." Unable as he was to read the original Greek, Homer had as yet been to him a name of solemn significance, and nothing more. His friend and literary counsellor, Mr. Clarke, happened to borrow Chapman's translation, and having invited Keats to read it with him one evening, they continued their study till daylight. He describes Keats's delight as intense, even to shouting aloud, as some passage of especial energy struck his imagination. It was fortunate that he was introduced to that heroic company through an interpretation which preserves so much of the ancient simplicity, and in a metre that, after all various

attempts, including that of the hexameter, still appears the best adapted, from its pauses and its length, to represent in English the Greek epic verse. An accomplished scholar may perhaps be unwilling, or unable, to understand how thoroughly the imaginative reader can fill up the necessary defects of any translation which adheres, as far as it may, to the tone and spirit of the original, and does not introduce fresh elements of thought, incongruous ornaments, or cumbrous additions; be it bald and tame, he can clothe and colour it be it harsh and ill-jointed, he can perceive the smoothness and completeness that has been lost; only let it not be, like Pope's Homer, a new work with an old name—a portrait, itself of considerable power and beauty, but in which the features of the individual are scarcely to be recognised. The Sonnet in which these his first impressions are concentrated, was left the following day on Mr. Clarke's table, that fully realising the idea of that form of verse expressed by Keats himself in his third Epistle, as—

swelling loudly

Up to its climax, and then dying proudly.

This Epistle is written in a bolder and freer strain thạn the others; the Poet in excusing himself for not having addressed his Muse to Mr. Clarke before, on account of his inferiority to the great masters of song, implies that he is growing conscious of a possible brotherhood with them; and his terse and true description of the various orders of verse, with which his friend has familiarised his mind-the Sonnet, as above cited-the Ode,

Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load,

the Epic,

and last,

of all the king,

Round, vast, and spanning all, like Saturn's ring,

The sharp, the rapier-pointed Epigram,—

betokens the justness of perception generally allied with redundant fancy.

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Hunt, who was regarded with ridicule, as the ma truth he was only their e while the unpopularity of ms liberal and cosmopolite politics was visited with indiscriminating injustice on all who had the happiness of his friendship or even the gratification of his society. In those days of hard opinion, which we of a freer and worthier time look back upon with indignation and surprise, Mr. Hunt had been imprisoned for the publication of phrases which, at the most, were indecorous expressions of public feeling, and became a traitor or a martyr according to the temper of the spectator. The heart of Keats leaped towards him in human and poetic brotherhood, and the earnest Sonnet addressed to him on the day he left his prison

riveted the connexion. Another on the story of Rimini was written about the same time :

Who loves to peer up at the morning sun,
With half-shut eyes and comfortable cheek,
Let him, with this sweet tale, full often seek
For meadows where the little rivers run;
Who loves to linger with that brightest one

Of Heaven-Hesperus-let him lowly speak
These numbers to the night, and starlight meek
Or moon, if that her hunting be begun.
He who knows these delights, and too is prone
To moralise upon a smile or tear,

Will find at once a region of his own,

A bower for his spirit, and will steer
To alleys, where the fir-tree drops its cone,
Where robins hop, and fallen leaves are sear.

The friends read and walked together, and wrote verses in competition on a given subject. "No imaginative pleasure," characteristically observes Mr. Hunt, "was left unnoticed by us or unenjoyed, from the recollection of the bards and patriots of old, to the luxury of a summer rain at our windows, or the clicking of the coal in winter time." Thus he became intimate with Hazlitt, Shelley, Haydon, and Godwin, with Mr. Basil Montague and his distinguished family, and with Mr. Ollier, a young publisher, himself a poet, who, out of sheer admiration, offered to publish what he had already written. The poem with which this volume commences was suggested to Keats by a delightful summer's-day, as he stood beside the gate that leads from the Battery, on Hampstead Heath, into a field by Caen Wood;

VOL. I.

C

and the last, "Sleep and Poetry," was occasioned by his sleeping in Mr. Hunt's pretty cottage, in the vale of Health, in the same quarter. These two pieces, being of considerable length, tested the strength of the young poet's fancy, and it did not fail. Yet it was to be expected that the apparent faults of Keats's style would be here more manifest than in his shorter efforts; poetry to him was not yet an Art ; the irregularities of his own and other verse were no more to him than the inequalities of that Nature, of which he regarded himself as the interpreter ;

For what has made the sage or poet write,

But the fair paradise of Nature's light?

In the calm grandeur of a sober line
We see the waving of the mountain pine,
And when a tale is beautifully staid,

We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade.

He had yet to learn that Art should purify and elevate the Nature that it comprehends, and that the ideal loses nothing of its truth by aiming at perfection of form as well as of idea. Neither did he like to regard poetry as a matter of study and anxiety, or as a representative of the struggles and troubles of the mind and heart of men. He said admirably that

a drainless shower

Of light is Poesy-'tis the supreme of power;
'Tis Might half-slumbering on its own right arm.

He thought that—

strength alone, though of the Muses born,

Is like a fallen angel-trees uptorn,

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