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tive genius. In Keats, on the contrary, the originality in the use of his scanty materials, his expansion of them to the proportions of his own imagination, and above all, his field of diction and expression extending so far beyond his knowledge of literature, is quite inexplicable by any of the ordinary processes of mental education. If his classical learning had been deeper, his seizure of the full spirit of Grecian beauty would have been less surprising; if his English reading had been more extensive, his inexhaustible vocabulary of picturesque and mimetic words could more easily be accounted for; but here is a surgeon's apprentice, with the ordinary culture of the middle classes, rivalling in æsthetic perceptions of antique life and thought the most careful scholars of his time and country, and reproducing these impressions in a phraseology as complete and unconventional as if he had. mastered the whole history and the frequent variations of the English tongue, and elaborated a mode of utterance commensurate with his vast ideas.

The artistic absence of moral purpose may offend many readers, and the just harmony of the colouring may appear to others a displeasing monotony, but I think it impossible to lay the book down without feeling that almost every line of it contains solid gold enough to be beaten out, by common literary manufacturers, into a poem of itself. Concentration of imagery, the hitting off a picture at a stroke, the clear decisive word that brings the thing before you and will not let it go, are the rarest distinctions of the early exercise of the faculties. So much more is usually known than digested by sensitive youth, so much more felt than understood, so much more perceived than methodised, that diffusion is fairly

permitted in the earlier stages of authorship, and it is held to be one of the advantages, amid some losses, of maturer intelligence, that it learns to fix and hold the beauty it apprehends, and to crystallise the dew of its morning. Such examples to the contrary, as the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, are rather scholastic exercises of men who afterwards became great, than the first-fruits of such genius, while all Keats's poems are early productions, and there is nothing beyond them but the thought of what he might have become. Truncated as is this intellectual life, it is still a substantive whole, and the complete statue, of which such a fragment is revealed to us, stands perhaps solely in the temple of the imagination. There is indeed progress, continual and visible, in the works of Keats, but it is towards his own ideal of a poet, not towards any defined and tangible model. All that we can do is to transfer that ideal to ourselves, and to believe that if Keats had lived, that is what he would have been.

Contrary to the expectation of Mr. Shelley, the appreciation of Keats by men of thought and sensibility gradually rose after his death, until he attained the place he now holds among the poets of his country. By his side too the fame of this his friend and eulogist ascended, and now they rest together, associated in the history of the achievements of the human imagination; twin stars, very cheering to the mental mariner tost on the rough ocean of practical life and blown about by the gusts of calumny and misrepresentation, but who, remembering what they have undergone, forgets not that he also is divine.

Nor has Keats been without his direct influence on the

poetical literature that succeeded him. The most noted, and perhaps the most original, of present poets, bears more analogy to him than to any other writer, and their brotherhood has been well recognised, in the words of a critic, himself a man of redundant fancy, and of the widest perception of what is true and beautiful, lately cut off from life by a destiny as mysterious as that which has been here recounted. Mr. Sterling writes:-" Lately, I have been reading again some of Alfred Tennyson's second volume, and with profound admiration of his truly lyric and idyllic genius. There seems to me to have been more epic power in Keats, that fiery beautiful meteor; but they are two most true and great poets. When we think of the amount of the recognition they have received, one may well bless God that poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether it be crowned by all mankind, or left alone in its own magic hermitage.”*

And this is in truth the moral of the tale. In the life which here lies before us, as plainly as a child's, the action of the poetic faculty is most clearly visible: it long sustains in vigour and delight a temperament naturally melancholy, and which, under such adverse circumstances, might well have degenerated into angry discontent; it imparts a wise temper and a courageous hope to a physical constitution doomed to early decay, and it confines within manly affections and generous passion a nature so impressible that sensual pleasures and sentimental tenderness might easily have enervated and debased it. There is no defect in the picture which the exercise of this power does not go far to remedy, and no excellence which it does not elevate and extend.

Sterling's Essays and Tales, p. clxviii.

One still graver lesson remains to be noted. Let no man, who is in anything above his fellows, claim, as of right, to be valued or understood: the vulgar great are comprehended and adored, because they are in reality in the same moral plane with those who admire; but he who deserves the higher reverence must himself convert the worshipper. The pure and lofty life; the generous and tender use of the rare creative faculty; the brave endurance of neglect and ridicule; the strange and cruel end of so much genius and so much virture; these are the lessons by which the sympathies of mankind must be interested, and their faculties educated, up to the love of such a character and the comprehension of such an intelligence. Still the lovers and scholars will be few still the rewards of fame will be scanty and illproportioned no accumulation of knowledge or series of experiences can teach the meaning of genius to those who look for it in additions and results, any more than the numbers studded round a planet's orbit could approach nearer infinity than a single unit. The world of thought must remain apart from the world of action, for, if they once coincided, the problem of Life would be solved, and the hope, which we call heaven, would be realised on earth. And therefore men

"Are cradled into poetry by wrong:

They learn in suffering what they teach in song."

www.

APPENDIX.

No. I.

KEATS ON KEAN AND SHAKSPEARE.

Champion, Sunday, Dec. 21, 1817.

MR. KEAN.—“In our unimaginative days,”-Habeas Corpus'd as we are out of all wonder, curiosity, and fear;-in these fireside, delicate, gilded days, these days of sickly safety and comfort, we feel very grateful to Mr. Kean for giving us some excitement by his old passion in one of the old plays. He is a relict of romance; a posthumous ray of chivalry, and always seems just arrived from the camp of Charlemagne. In Richard he is his sword's dear cousin; in Hamlet his footing is germain to the platform. In Macbeth his eye laughs siege to scorn; in Othello he is welcome to Cyprus. In Timon he is of the palace-of Athensof the woods, and is worthy to sleep in a grave "which once a day with its embossed froth, the turbulent surge doth cover."

For all these was he greeted with enthusiasm on his reappearance in Richard; for all these his sickness will ever be a public misfortune. His return was full of power. He is not the man to "bate a jot." On Thursday evening he acted Luke in "Riches," as far as the stage will admit, to perfection. In the hypocritical self-possession, in the caution, and afterwards the pride, cruelty, and avarice, Luke appears to us a man incapable of imagining to the extreme heinousness of crimes. To him they are mere magic

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