his, could have ever entirely escaped from the preponderance of sense in his character and writings; but a year or two more of reflection and emotion must have led him to the determinate and deliberate adoption of a creed of some sort or other, if it had been no other than the wretched one, that all creeds are worthless; and this would have been an immense accession to his mental power. A man without a belief is like a man without a backbone. Keats made the very common mistake of preferring the true to the good; for his rejection of all opinions was nothing more than his refusal to accept of any but such as seemed demonstrably true. Had he lived to think and feel more deeply than he did; had his thoughts and feelings been more ordinarily occupied than they were, about the interests and mysteries of the immortal spirit, despair must have chased him from the regions of indifference, Goodness would probably have asserted her superiority over formal Truth, to which she is the only guide; and, finally, commanded by her, he would have chosen some star to steer by, although compelled to do so in the full assurance that it was, at best, but an approximation to the, perhaps, undiscoverable pole of absolute verity.

Our next extract shall be one in which mere onesidedness of vision and defect of human love demand to be regarded as more than ordinary universality of mind and elevation of feeling. The letter is to his brother in America, who had recently been married :

"Notwithstanding your happiness and your recommendations, I hope I shall never marry; though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk, though the carpet were made of silk, and the curtain of the morning clouds, the chairs and sofas stuffed with cygnet's down, the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Windermere, I should not feel, or rather my happiness should not be so fine; and my solitude is sublime. Then, instead of what I have described, there is a sublimity to welcome me home, the roaring of the wind is my wife, and the stars through my window panes are my children. The mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things I have, stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. An amiable wife and sweet children, I contemplate as parts of that beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone, than the shapes of Ethic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a king's bodyguard. Then tragedy with sceptered pall, comes sweeping by.' According to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily, or throw my whole being into Teio

The Charmian Fever.

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lus, and repeating those lines, 'I wander like a lost soul along the Stygian bank, staying for waftage.' I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone. Those things, combined with the opinion I have formed of the quality of women, who appear to me as children, to whom I would rather give a sugarplum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in."

Let our readers judge whether this letter indicates a mind above or below the enjoyment of domestic relationships. The most excellent notion that Keats can form to himself of a wife is 66 a beautiful creature," who is capable of being rendered more tempting to sense, by silken carpets, feather-stuffed sofas, Burgundy, and a lodging at Ambleside. With such views, the young poet did very well to remain contented with the roaring of the wind for his wife; but he ought not to have held up his power of being so easily satisfied, as a mark of distinction beyond those who, while they are awake to all the wonder and beauty of material nature, are cognizant likewise of the deeper and more religious worth of humanity, and alive to the " ever new delight" which arises out of woman's harmonizing contrasts with man, and out of her delicate and love-producing subordination to him.

A short period before his death, Keats fell violently in love. In his letters we have a few vivid glimpses of the young lady. Here are two which shew that the lover was faithful to what seems to have been his ideal, at the time when he was "fancy free."

"She is not a Cleopatra, but at least a Charmian; she has a rich eastern look, she has fine eyes and manners, when she comes into the room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess; she is too fine and conscious of herself to repulse any man that may address her, from habit she thinks that nothing particular; I always find myself more at ease with such a woman."

"She is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way, for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things-the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical, and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron, and the Charmian, hold the first place in our minds. In the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me.'

This last sentence though it sounds very like nonsense, is, nevertheless, an important one. It is obvious that when Keats wrote it, the first alternative would have seemed preferable to

the second. Indeed, his subsequent story shews beyond doubt that "the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical," vastly outweighed, in the poet's practical estimation, the "unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal." "This Charmian," whatever the fair qualities of mind and heart of which she may have been possessed, soon engrossed the whole of Keats' being, simply by the peculiar character of her personal attractions.

Mr. Milnes has perceived the liability of Keats' nature to the charge that we are now making against it, and he defends him upon the plea of youth, and an ardent temperament. Could we have convinced ourselves of the validity of this plea, our readers should have heard nothing of the present complaint; but we are persuaded that the quality under discussion was vitally inherent in the nature of Keats; that is to say, that it not only affected his life and writings, but entered into his ideal of what was desirable. A man is to be judged not so much by what he outwardly is, as by what he wishes to become. Let Keats be judged out of his own mouth: "I have been hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious and a love for philosophy. Were I calculated for the former, I should be glad; but as I am not" (his health was then breaking down) "I shall turn all my soul to the latter."

Mr. Milnes tells us that

"Keats' 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 of how scanty a portion of vital strength had been allotted to him; but a strictly reguÎated 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 drank too much as of a piece of rare jovialty," &c.

We repeat, that we do not believe Keats' dissipation, such as it was, to have been the spontaneous outbreak of the "young energies of an ardent temperament." To us, Keats seems to have pursued the pleasures and temptations of sense, rather than to have been pursued by them. We often find him feasting coolly over the imagination of sensual enjoyment. "Talking of pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my mouth a nectarine. Good God! how fine! it went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy-all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified strawberry." He sometimes aspires to be thought a tippler, gamester, &c., but it is with the air of an unripe boy, awkwardly feigning the irregularities of a man.

The Transitional State.

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We have not noticed one-fourth of the passages which we had marked for quotation, as corroborating our views upon this point; but one proof is as good as a thousand, and we are glad to turn from this part of our task to the more agreeable duty of shewing the truth of our assertion that the mind of Keats, before its withdrawal from the world, was upon the eve of a great intellectual and moral alteration.

It must be remembered that our present purpose is to examine the character of Keats, solely in order to the illustration of his poetry, and of the species of poetry to which it belongs. Otherwise we should have gone more fully into the circumstances whereby the moral agency of young Keats is partly unburthened of the responsibility of much temporarily defective feeling, and erroneous thought. As it is, we can only take a hasty glance at two or three of those circumstances. "His mother, a lively and intelligent woman, was supposed to have prematurely hastened the birth of John by her passionate love of amusement, though his constitution at first gave no signs of the peculiar debility of a seventh month's child." Keats was, moreover, unfortunate, we venture to think, in some of the friends, who by their powers and their reputations were calculated to exert the greatest influence upon him, at the most susceptible period of his life. Extremely clever, "self-educated" men are not often otherwise than very ill adapted to form the standard of moral taste in a young man, unless, indeed, it be by antagonism. We fancy that we hear the voice of some of Keats' distinguished preceptors, in such sentences as the following, "Failings I am always rather rejoiced to find in a man than sorry for it, they bring us to a level." John Keats was, however, so vastly superior to even the most gifted of his really intimate friends, that their influence, as far as it was undesirable, could not have endured. It was, in fact, rapidly waning, when he was removed from its sphere by his visit to Italy. Here are a few glimpses of an emphatically transitional state:

"I have, of late, been moulting, not for fresh feathers and wings; they are gone; and in their stead I hope to have a pair of sublunary legs. I have altered not from a chrysalis into a butterfly, but the contrary."

"The most unhappy hours in our lives are those in which we recollect times past to our own blushing. If we are immortal, that must be the hell. If I must be immortal, I hope it will be after taking a little of that watery labyrinth,' in order to forget some of my schoolboy days, and others since then."

"A year ago I could not understand in the slightest degree Raphael's cartoons; now I begin to read them a little."

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"From the time you left us our friends say I have altered so completely I am not like the same person. Some think I have lost that poetic fire and ardour they say I once had; the fact is, I perhaps have, but instead of that I hope I shall substitute a more thoughtful and quiet power. I am more contented to read and think, but am seldom haunted with ambitious thoughts. I am scarcely contented to write the best verses for the fever they leave behind. I want to compose this without fever: I hope I shall one day."

The following sentences are addressed to his friend Mr. J. K. Reynolds :

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"One of the first pleasures I look to is your happy marriage-the more so since I have felt the pleasure of loving a sister-in-law. I did not think it possible to become so much attached in so short a time; things like these, and they are real, have made me resolve to have a care of my health." "We can see horribly clear, in the works of such a man, (Burns,) his whole life, as if we were God's spies. What were his addresses to Jean in the latter part of his life, I should not speak to you-yet why not? You are not in the same case-you are in the right path, and you shall not be deceived. I have spoken to you against marriage, but it was general. The prospect to me, in those matters, has been so blank that I have not been unwilling to die.”

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These words, it is true, were written before the "Charmian” fever overtook him, but they are enough to show that it must have been a fever only, and not the final decision and devotion of his being. The next quotation we make is very curious,—

"I said if there were three things superior in the modern world they were 'The Excursion,' 'Haydon's Pictures,' and 'Hazlitt's Depth of Taste." Not thus speaking with any poor vanity that works of genius were the first things in this world. No! for that sort of probity and disinterestedness that such men as Bailey possess, does hold and grasp the tip-top of any spiritual honours that can be paid to anything in this world; and, moreover, having this feeling at this present come over me in its full force, I sat down to write to you with a grateful heart in that I had not a brother who did not feel and credit me for a deeper feeling and devotion for his uprightness than for any mark of genius however splendid."

This is a peculiarly uncomfortable passage. It is the phrase of a man who has abandoned a lower order of thought and feeling without having attained anything more than a foretaste of the higher order for which the sacrifice has been made. "The Excursion" looks as if it did not well know what to do in the novel society of "Haydon's Pictures" and "Hazlitt's Depth of Taste," and the morality of the passage is uneasily arrayed in