may not be equally apparent. Artists, indeed, have often proposed to themselves great subjects, but they have too often neglected to make great tasks of them. This would not have been the case with Keats, who, we see, looked upon six years' practice of expression, after he had already spent several years at it, and had attained therein to astonishing excellence, as a moderate apprenticeship to the Muses, and a necessary completion of his poetical minority. "His life is in his writings, and his poems are his works indeed," says Mr. Milnes of the poet; and with especial truth, of Keats. The external events of his history were not remarkable, and may be given in few words. His father was a person in the employ of Mr. Jennings, "the proprietor of large livery stables on the Pavement in Moorfields." His mother was the daughter of Mr. Jennings; he had two brothers and a sister. The three brothers seem, in their boyhood, which was spent at a good second class school, to have been chiefly notable for their attachment to pugilistic amusements. John's "indifference to be thought well of as a good boy," was as remarkable as his facility in getting through the daily tasks of the school, which never seemed to occupy his attention, but in which he was never behind the others. His skill in all manly exercises, and the perfect generosity of his disposition, made him extremely popular. "After remaining some time at school, his intellectual ambition suddenly developed itself; he determined to carry off all the first prizes in literature, and he succeeded." He left school, however, with "little Latin and less Greek." The twelve books of the Æneid seem to have constituted the bulk of his Latin reading. His acquaintance with the Greek Mythology, of which he afterwards made such abundant use, was derived chiefly from "Lemprière's Dictionary." His parents both died while he was young, and his share of the property left by them amounted to about two thousand pounds; enough to have kept any one but a poet out of pressing pecuniary difficulty for some time; but we hear of Keats being obliged to borrow money soon after he had attained his majority. On leaving school, John, without having his wishes consulted, was apprenticed by his guardian to a surgeon at Edmonton, where Mr. Cowden Clark became his neighbour and friend. Mr. Clark introduced him to the poet Spenser, whose writings at once exerted the most powerful, and as the readers of Keats know, the most lasting effect upon the mind of the embryo poet. Chaucer was his next passion, and for a short period he seems to have been pleased with the writings of Lord Byron. In 1817, Keats, being just then come of age, published his first volume of The Great Event of his Life. 85 poems, which exhibited much of unmistakeable promise, and some performance. His most palpable acquisition in consequence of this publication was the acquaintance of Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Haydon, Godwin, Bazil Montague, Hazlitt, and some others of distinguished literary standing. This first volume attracted little or no attention from the Reviewers. The nature of the reception of his second publication, "Endymion," is well known, although happily for the credit of poets, it turns out that the reading public has been grossly mistaken in the effect which, somehow or other, has been stupidly supposed to have been produced upon Keats by that reception. John Keats died of inevitable consumption; and the book before us proves past doubt that Blackwood and the Quarterly Review have not the dishonour of having hastened the poet's death by one day. Visits to Scotland, Devonshire, and the Isle of Wight, were made by Keats during the years 1817 and 1818. In 1819, the great"event". of his life began to transpire; we mean the love-affair, of which something has already been said. Concerning this matter we have very few details, and from what we can gather it seems that the emotion did not arrive at its height until Keats was removed from its cause, by his journey to Italy in the autumn of 1820. We quote the following letter, less for its own deep and almost terribly painful interest than because it shows that Keats, contrary to what might be supposed by his writings, was capable of an intense passion, and that he had, therefore, within him what must subsequently have given his poetry a significance and substance that are not to be found in the works which he lived to produce : "NAPLES, Nov. 1, 1820. "MY DEAR BROWN,-Yesterday we were let out of quarantine, during which my health suffered more from bad air and the stifled cabin than it had done the whole voyage. The fresh air revived me a little, and I hope I am well enough this morning to write you a short calm letter-if that may be called one in which I am afraid to speak of what I would fainest dwell upon. As I have gone thus far into it, I must go on a little; perhaps it may relieve the load of wretchedness that presses upon me. The persuasion that I shall see her no more, will kill me. My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die— I cannot bear to leave her. Oh God! God! God! everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk-lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her: I see her-I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her for a moment. This was the case when I was in England. I cannot recollect, without shuddering, the time that I was a prisoner at Hunt's, and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead all day. Then there was a good hope of seeing her again. Now! Oh that I could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her-to receive a letter from her; to see her hand-writing would break my heart-even to hear of her any how, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do? where can I look for consolation or ease? If I had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me. Indeed, through the whole of my illness, both at your house and at Kentish Town, this fever has never ceased wearing me out. When you write, which you will do immediately, write to Rome, (poste restante,) if she is well and happy, put a mark thus +; if * * * * 66 My dear Brown, for my sake, be her advocate for ever. I cannot say a word about Naples; I do not feel at all concerned in the thousand novelties around me; I am afraid to write to her. I should like her to know that I do not forget her. Oh! Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast: it surprises me that the human heart is capable of bearing and containing so much misery. Was I born for this end? God bless her, and her mother, and my sister, and George and his wife, and you, and all!” The closing scenes of Keats' life are given in the most vivid and heart-rending manner, by the letters of Keats, and of his friend Mr. Severn, the artist, who was with him to the last hour, and who devoted himself to the dying poet in a way that deserves the renown which Mr. Milnes record will confer upon him. But upon these scenes we willingly drop the curtain, for the painfulness of them is unmixed. The "Remains," which occupy the greater part of Mr. Milnes' second volume, are of great interest, as illustrating the growth, and suggesting the limits of the poet's power; but they are, for the most part, of little permanent literary value. Before we speak of them in detail, we shall make a few remarks upon some unexamined peculiarities of that school of modern poetry which is best represented by Keats; namely, the sensual and self-conscious. This school has been the offspring of that extraordinary cultivation of the critical faculties which is the grand distinguishing characteristic of our times. It would be manifest upon reflection, if we did not know the fact from history, that the best periods of art and criticism are never coincident. The critical period is as necessarily subsequent to the best period of the art or arts criticised, as the artistical age is necessarily subsequent to, and not coincident with the age of the emotion, which is by art depicted and embalmed. Great results of art have always been the product of the general movement of a nation or a time; and such a movement could The Critical and Artistic Eras. 87 not possibly co-exist in its integrity with that advanced stage of the development of consciousness, which is the first requisite of a profound criticism. An analytical spirit, fatal to the production, though conducive, under certain circumstances, to the enjoyment of the highest art, is the life of criticism. Criticism, in modern times, has attained to an unprecedented excellence; and this has been the result of an unprecedented development of consciousness. Into the question of the general absence of faith, which is the cause, and too often the consequence of such consciousness, we must not enter, although it is closely allied to our subject. The habit of consciousness exists, and we should make the best of it. We are fully aware of its many evils, and of the desirableness of a revolution in the spirit of the time; and we are persuaded that that spirit is essentially self-destructive; but it must become more conscious before it can become less so; let us not, then, endeavour to stifle the critical spirit, which now everywhere prevails; that would not be the way to amend: on ne retrograde point vers le bien: the work which is on hand, though, for the time, we should have been happier and better had it never commenced, must now be finished: Nature, man and his works and his history are undergoing an examination, which is being prosecuted with amazing diligence and insight; the heat of the investigation will not cease while the fuel lasts; but that cannot be for ever; the critical spirit must turn at length to self-examination; the necessity of doing something more than contemplating that which has been done will be seen and felt; and it is confidently to be hoped that the world will then advance anew, and with steadier and straighter steps, for the long pause which will have been taken by it, in order to view and understand the direction and validity of all its former ways. Although the same period cannot be at once critical and artistical in the highest degree, criticism and true art are, nevertheless, by no means incompatible with each other, up to a certain point. Wordsworth, Goethe, and Coleridge, have been the offspring of our intensely critical era; and there are few, we imagine, who would at present venture to deny the claim of these poets to a high place among the poets who are for all time. Nor have these writers, by any accident of retirement or peculiar studies, been withdrawn from the influence of the prevailing spirit; they themselves have performed the part generally taken by the first poets of the age; they themselves have been the leading instruments of the age's tendency; and, as such, they have acquired a peculiarity which is worthy of our notice: they seem to have attained to the limits of the critical region of the mind, to have beheld the promised land beyond, and to have become inspired by the prospect; so that it is true generally of the best poets of later years, that their Muse has been the daughter of Hope, and not of Memory. The published works of Keats seem indeed to constitute an exception to this remark: we have, however, read an interesting fragment of his which enables us to deny the exceptional nature of this case. The fragment, which we regret that Mr. Milnes has not printed, consists of a kind of introduction to Hyperion, in which Keats, in the name of the world, bids farewell to the Grecian Mythology, and to its spirit. There is no document to inform us, and it is difficult to judge from the fragment itself, whether it was written before or after the publication of that part of Hyperion which is in the possession of the public. The question of time, however, does not affect the interest of this production as showing that Keats had begun to feel the necessity of looking to the future for his subject and inspiration. To take up the thread of our subject where we dropped it, to run our eye over the life of Keats-By the word sensual, when we apply it to an entire school of poetry, we wish to be understood as speaking of a separate activity of sense, whatever may be the sphere in which it acts. The effect of sensuousness is produced when a strong passion of the mind finds its adequate expression in strong imagery of the senses. Deduct the passion, and you destroy the sensuous, and leave the sensual. Sensuousness, in an entire poem, is rhythm, or harmony; according as the poem is narrative and continuous, or picturesque and dramatic. Take away the passion, and the separate images, constituting, with their connexion, the general rhythmus or harmony, drop as beads from a string, into an inorganic heap, or lie, as beads when the string is more carefully withdrawn, in an order which seems vital only so long as it is unexamined. Such a piece of inorganism is the following "Ode to Apollo,” which we extract from the "Remains," not because it is the best of them, but because it will best serve our purpose : "In thy western halls of gold, When thou sittest in thy state, Heroic deeds, and sang of fate, : With fervour seized their adamantine lyres, "Here Homer with his nervous arms But what creates the most intense surprise, |