is all I care for, all I live for.' Perhaps it is this waiting mood,
a kind of electrically charged expectancy which draws its
own desire to itself out of the universe, that Mr. Bridges means
when he speaks of Keats' 'unbroken and unflagging earnest-
ness, which is so utterly unconscious and unobservant of itself
as to be almost unmatched.' In its dependence on a kind of
direct inspiration, the fidelity to first thoughts, it accounts,
perhaps, for much of what is technically deficient in his poetry..
When Keats gave his famous counsel to Shelley, urging
him to 'load every rift with ore,' he expressed a significant
criticism, both of his own and of Shelley's work. With Shelley,
even though he may at times seem to become vague in
thought, there is always an intellectual structure; Keats,
definite in every word, in every image, lacks intellectual
structure. He saw words as things, and he saw them one at a
time. 'I look upon fine phrases like a lover,' he confessed,
but with him the fine phrase was but the translation of a thing
actually seen by the imagination. He was conscious of the
need there is for the poet to be something more than a crea- :
ture of sensations, but even his consciousness of this necessity
is that of one to whom knowledge is merely an aid to flight.
"The difference,' he says, in a splendid sentence, 'of high sen-
sations, with and without knowledge, appears to me this:
in the latter case we are continually falling ten thousand
fathoms deep, and being blown up again, without wings, and
with all the horror of a bare-shouldered creature; in the former
case our shoulders are fledged, and we go through the same
air and space without fear.' When Keats wrote poetry he
knew that he was writing poetry; naturally as it came to him,
he never fancied that he was but expressing himself, or putting
down something which his own mind had realised for its own
sake. 'The imagination,' he tells us, in a phrase which has
become famous, 'may be compared to Adam's dream — he
awoke and found it truth.' Only Keats, unlike most other
poets, never slept, òr, it may be, never awoke. Poetry was

literally almost everything to him; and he could deal with it so objectively, as with a thing outside himself, precisely because it was an almost bodily part of him, like the hand he wrote with. 'If poetry,' he said, in an axiom sent to his publisher, 'comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.' And so, continually, eagerly, instinctively, yet in a way unconsciously, he was lying in wait for that winged, shy guest, the 'magic casements' always open on the 'perilous seas.' 'The only thing,' he said, 'that can ever affect me personally for more than one short passing day is any doubt about my powers for poetry: I seldom have any; and I look with hope to the nighing time when I shall have none.' His belief that he should be among the English poets after his death' meant more to him, undoubtedly, than such a conviction usually means, even to those most careful of fame. It was his ideal world, the only aspect of spiritual things which he ever saw or cared to see; and the thought of poetry, apprehended for its own sake as the only entirely satisfying thing in the world, imprisoned him as within a fairy ring, alone with his little circle of green grass and blue sky.

'To load every rift with ore': that, to Keats, was the essential thing; and it meant to pack the verse with poetry, with the stuff of the imagination, so that every line should be heavy with it. For the rest, the poem is to come as best it may; only once, in 'Lamia,' with any real skill in narrative, or any care for that skill. There, doubtless, it was the passing influence of Dryden which set him upon a kind of experiment, which he may have done largely for the experiment's sake; doing it, of course, consummately. 'Hyperion' was another kind of experiment; and this time, for all its splendour, less personal to his own style, or way of feeling. 'I have given up "Hyperion," he writes; 'there were too many Miltonic inversions in it Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or, rather, artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to

other sensations.' He asks Reynolds to pick out some lines from 'Hyperion,' and put a mark, x, to the false beauty, proceeding from art, and 1, 2, to the true voice of feeling. It is just then that he discovers Chatterton to be 'the purest writer in the English language.' A little later he decides that 'the marvellous is the most enticing, and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers,' and so decides, somewhat against his inclination, he professes, to 'untether Fancy, and to let her manage for herself.' 'I and myself cannot agree about this at all,' is his conclusion; but 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' follows, and that opening of 'The Eve of St. Mark,' which seems to contain the germ of both Rossetti and Morris, going, as it does, so far along the road that Chatterton had opened up and then wilfully closed. It was just because Keats was so much, so exclusively possessed by his own imagination, so exclusively concerned with the shaping of it into poetry, that all his poems seem to have been written for the sake of something else than their story, or thought, or indeed emotion. Even the odes are mental picture added to mental picture, separate stanza added to separate stanza, rather than the development of a thought which must express itself, creating its own form. Meditation brings to him no inner vision, no rapture of the soul; but seems to germinate upon the page in actual flowers and corn and fruit.

Keats' sense of form, if by form is meant perfection rather of outline than of detail, was by no means certain. Most poets work only in outline: Keats worked on every inch of his surface. Perhaps no poet has ever packed so much poetic detail into so small a space, or been so satisfied with having done so. Metrically, he is often slipshod; with all his genius for words, he often uses them incorrectly, or with but a vague sense of their meaning; even in the 'Ode to a Nightingale' he will leave lines in which the inspiration seems suddenly to flag; such lines as

"Though the dull brain perplexes and retards,'

which is nerveless; or

'In ancient days by emperor and clown,'

where the antithesis, logically justifiable, has the sound of an antithesis brought in for the sake of rhyme. In the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' two lines near the end seem to halt by the way, are not firm and direct in movement:

"Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st.'

That is slipshod writing, both as intellectual and as metrical structure; and it occurs in a poem which is one of the greatest lyrical poems in the language. We have only to look closely enough to see numberless faults of this kind in Keats; and yet, if we do not look very closely, we shall not see them; and, however closely we may look, and however many faults we may find, we shall end, as we began, by realising that they do not essentially matter. Why is this?

Wordsworth, who at his best may seem to be the supreme master of poetical style, is often out of key; Shelley, who at his best may seem to be almost the supreme singer, is often prosaic: Keats is never prosaic and never out of key. To read Wordsworth or Shelley, you must get in touch with their ideas, at least apprehend them; to read Keats you have only to surrender your senses to their natural happiness. You have to get at Shelley's or Wordsworth's point of view; but Keats has only the point of view of the sunlight. He cannot write without making pictures with his words, and every picture has its own atmosphere. Tennyson, who learnt so much from Keats, learnt from him something of his skill in making pictures; but Tennyson's pictures are chill, conscious of themselves, almost colourless. The pictures of Keats are all aglow with colour, not always very accurate painter's colour, but colour which captivates or overwhelms the senses. 'The Eve of St. Agnes' is hardly more than a description of luxurious things: 'lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon,' a bed, with

'blanched linen, smooth and lavender'd,' moonlight through painted windows, 'warmed jewels'; yet every word throbs with emotion, as the poet'grows faint' with the lover. Tennyson's 'Palace of Art' is full of pictures, each in its frame, or of statues, each in its niche; but the pictures and statues are no more than decorations in a house of thought, somewhat too methodically arranged there. To Keats, the thing itself and the emotion were indistinguishable; he never saw without feeling, and he never felt without passion. That is why he can call up atmosphere by the mere bewitchment of a verse which seems to make a casual statement; because nothing, with him, can be a casual statement, nothing can be prosaic, or conceived of coldly, apart from that 'principle of beauty in all things' which he tells us that he had always loved, and which to him was the principle of life itself.

GEORGE DARLEY (1795-1846) 1

DARLEY has said more explicit things about himself, in a single letter to Miss Mitford, than any one else has ever said about him. 'My whole life has been an abstraction - such must be my works': that is his final summing up; yet, as he thinks of the fierce critical work to which so much of his time was abandoned, he defines himself as 'like one of Dante's sinners, floating and bickering about in the shape of a fiery tongue, on the Slough of Despond.' 'A heat of brain mentally Bacchic,' he finds in himself, and he admits: 'I have seldom the power to direct my mind, and must only follow it'; and the mind itself he calls 'occasional, intermittent, collapsive.'

Every phrase is a self-revelation, and there is little more to be said. Imagination, of a kind, he had, as the incoherent

1 (1) The Errors of Ecstasie, 1822. (2) The Labours of Idleness, prose and verse, 1826. (3) Sylvia, 1827. (4) Nepenthe, privately printed, 1835. (5) Thomas à Becket, 1840. (6) Ethelstan, 1841. (7) Poetical Works, 1908.