press.' There is much in the poems here collected, to prove the unquestioned genius of the author; but, beyond the circle of ardent friends and admirers, which comprised most of the most remarkable minds of the period, it had scarcely a purchaser.' The apathy of the public galled the irritable spirit of Keats. 'He attributed his want of success to the favourite scape-goat of unhappy authors, an inactive publisher, and incurred the additional affliction of a breach of his friendship with Mr. Ollier.' The poems, however, were not altogether published in vain ; they attracted the favourable notice of Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, and led to their offering advantageous terms for a poem, which, it was understood, he was about to write. This was Endymion,' and that the subject was one over which the mind of the young poet had long brooded, is evident from the repeated allusions he makes in the first poem in his little volume, to this story:

Where had he been, from whose warm head outflew

That sweetest of all songs, that ever new,

That aye refreshing, pure deliciousness,

Coming ever to bless

The wanderer by moonlight, to him bringing

Shapes from the invisible world, unearthly winging

From out the middle air

Ah! surely he had burst our mortal bars,
Into some wondrous region had he gone
To search for thee, divine Endymion.'

*

Queen of the wide air; thou most lovely queen
Of all the brightness that mine eyes have seen!
As thou exceedest all things in thy shine,

So every tale does this sweet tale of thine!'

It was probably with a view to devote his undivided energies to his poem, that Keats wholly abandoned his uncongenial profession; and at the suggestion of Haydon, who perhaps felt a just anxiety for the welfare of a keenly-susceptible young man, lately introduced into the society of some literary, but very gay young persons, he quitted London, early in 1817, to nurse his health, and brace his powers, by undistracted study.' He settled first at Carisbrook; and his letters from thence give us a vivid picture of the eagerness with which he pursued his task. 'I find I cannot live without poetry-without eternal poetry,' he says, in one of these. Indeed, his excitable imagination so acted upon him, that, in a subsequent letter, he says, 'I went

to the Isle of Wight, thought so much about poetry, so long together, that I could not get to sleep at night. By this means, in a week or so, I became not over capable in my upper stories, and set off, pell mell, for Margate; *** another thing, I was too much in solitude, and obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as the only resource.'Endymion' was at length finished, in November, at Burford Bridge, and Keats returned and passed the winter of 1817-18, at Hampstead, gaily enough among his friends,' who now consisted of many who took a kind and judicious interest in his welfare, and some who led him into excesses, which, injurious to any one, must have been, peculiarly so to a young man hereditarily predisposed to consumption, and of singular mental excitability

'His health does not seem to have prevented him from indulging somewhat in that dissipation which is the natural outlet for the young energies of ardent temperaments, unconscious how scanty a portion of vital strength had been allotted him; but a strictly regulated and abstinent life would have appeared to him pedantic and sentimental. He did not, however, to any serious extent, allow wine to usurp on his intellect, or games of chance to impair his means, for, in his letters to his brothers, he speaks of having drunk too much as a rare piece of joviality, and of having won £10 at cards as a great hit. His bodily vigour too must, at this time, have been considerable, as he signalised himself, at Hampstead, by giving a severe drubbing to a butcher, whom he saw beating a little boy, to the enthusiastic admiration of a crowd of bystanders. Plain, manly, practical life on the one hand, and a free exercise of his rich imagination on the other, were the ideal of his existence his poetry never weakened his action, and his simple, every-day habits never coarsened the beauty of the world within him.'-Ib. p. 74.

'A strictly regulated and abstinent life,' from earliest youth, did not, however, impede the genius of Milton in its upward flight; nor can we imagine that Wordsworth would have written finer poems had he, though even as a rare piece of joviality,' drank too much.

There is something very mournful to us in the anxious letters which Keats addresses to his publishers and friends, previous to the publication of his Endymion.' His wish to have his portrait prefixed, which Haydon 'would do with all his art and heart; then the exulting remark to his brother, I have sent my first book to the press,' and that 'to my surprise, it was to be published in quarto;' and then his auxious corrections, and suggestions to his publisher, all prove how deeply he staked his fame on its success. Meanwhile he was not idle. Many of his sonnets, and those fine lines on Robin Hood

'No, those days are gone away,'

were written about this time. The sonnets of Keats

deed, very fine; that noble one on reading Chapman's 'Homer,' is well known; the following in a different mood is full of sweet and graceful imagery :

'To one who has been long in city pent,

'Tis very sweet to look into the fair

And open face of heaven,-to breathe a prayer,
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.

Who is more happy, when, with heart's content,
Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair
Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair
And gentle tale of love, and languishment?
Returning home at evening, with an ear

Catching the notes of Philomel-an eye
Watching the sailing cloudlets' bright career;
He mourns that day so soon has glided by:
E'en like the passage of an angel's tear

That falls through the clear ether silently.'

In spring Endymion' was published, 'inscribed to the memory of Thomas Chatterton,' and with a very characteristic preface, in which occurs the following deprecatory, but, as he feared, prophetic sentence. It is just that this youngster should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that while it is dwindling, I may be plotting and fitting myself for verses fit to live;' and he concludes by mournfully expressing his hope, that I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness.'

The reader is, doubtless, well aware of the torrent of ridicule with which the critics, especially of Blackwood's' and the Quarterly,' assailed this wild but beautiful poem. It could not have been from mere blindness to its merits, for the very opening line, a line now among our most popular quotations, and by many who quote it assigned to Wordsworth,

'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,'

stamped it with the true imprimatur of genius; but it was as the friend of Leigh Hunt and Shelley, that Keats was attacked with malignant personality, and told by those very men who exulted that Burns had left the spade and the plough, to 'go back to his gallipots!'

A wild and bewildering, and most unequal poem is this 'Endymion; but, then, there are passages in it scarcely to be

excelled by some of our greatest poets. The opening is very

'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower of quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days

Yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.'

Very fine this too, how Cynthia

Unobserved steals unto her throne,

And there she sits most meek, and most alone;

As if she had not pomp subservient ;

As if thine eye, high Poet! was not bent
Towards her with the Muses in thine heart;
As if the ministering stars kept not apart,
Waiting for silver footed messages.

O moon! the oldest shades 'mong oldest trees,
Feel palpitations when thou lookest in:

O moon! old boughs lisp forth a holier din,
The while they feel thine airy fellowship.
Thou dost bless everywhere, with silver lip
Kissing dead things to life. The sleeping kine,
Couched in thy brightness, dream of fields divine:
Innumerable mountains swell and rise,
Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes;

And yet thy benediction passeth not
One obscure hiding-place, one little spot

Where pleasure may be sent the nested wren

Has thy fair face within its tranquil ken.

*

The mighty deep,

The monstrous sea is thine-the myriad sea,

O moon! far spreading ocean bows to thee,
And Tellus feels her forehead's cumbrous load.'

The pictorial power of Keats in this poem is wonderful. The bower of Adonis, with its 'serene Cupids watching silently,' its mingled flowers clustering round him, and the 'four lily stalks' twining to make him a coronal, resembles a subject by Titian. So does the description of the wild revellers, bounding down from the light blue hills, crowned with green leaves, and faces

all on flame,' with the Nymphs and Satyrs dancing around the car of Bacchus.

And then in different style, how majestic a picture is this!

'Forth from a rugged arch in the dust below,
Came mother Cybele! alone,-alone,—
In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown
About her majesty, and front death pale,

With turrets crowned. Four maned lions hale
The sluggish wheels; solemn their toothed jaws,
Their surly eyes brow hidden; heavy paws
Uplifted drowsily, and nervy tails

Cowering their tawny brushes. Silent sails
The shadowy queen athwart.'

The chief fault of Endymion' is the want of human interest, its undramatic character; so that the Carian shepherd, and his goddess love, his sister Peona, and the various mythological personages that take part, pass before us like beautiful pictures, which we admire, but feel no sympathy with. Of the two golden keys, which Gray in his fine ode represents Nature giving to the true poet, Keats received, indeed, the one which unlocked to him all the treasures of imagination, but that which

'Oped the sacred source of sympathetic tears,'

was denied him. This is even more apparent in his subsequent poems. Isabella, or the Pot of Basil,' for instance, which he set about soon after Endymion' went to press, is certainly far inferior to his earlier productions, and the reason may easily be found in the character of the story, which depends for all its interest-like many more of Boccacio's stories-upon the simple pathos with which it is told.

After the publication of Endymion,' Keats set off with his friend Mr. Brown on a pedestrian tour to the Lakes, and into Scotland and its islands. The narrative of this journey is given with much spirit, in his letters to his friends. As might be expected, the Isle of Staffa, and Fingal's Cave, delighted the excitable poet beyond all the mere common wonders of hill, dale, or mountain. Here is part of a poem, scribbled at the conclusion of a letter to his brother, improvised indeed. It is worthy transcription, as a specimen of his singular ease and terseness of versification, as well as a proof of how, in addition to his earlier favourites, he dwelt upon Milton's minor poems:

'Not Aladdin magian

Ever such a work began;
Not the wizard of the Dee
Ever such a dream could see;