such brief passages as we have quoted above: the very soul of poetry breathes in them, and in a hundred others throughout the work: but read farther, and you will in almost every case be brought up by hardly tolerable blemishes of execution and of taste. Thus in the tale told by Glaucus, we find a line of strong poetic vision such as

"Exa's isle was wondering at the moon,"

standing alone in a passage of rambling and ineffective over-honeyed narrative; or again, a couplet forced and vulgar like this both in rhyme and expression

"I look'd-'twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe!
O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?"

is followed three lines farther on by a masterly touch of imagination and the heart:

"Cold, O cold indeed

Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed

The sea-swell took her hair."

One, indeed, of the besetting faults of his earlier poetry Keats has shaken off-his muse is seldom tempted now to echo the familiar sentimental chirp of Hunt's. But that tendency which he by nature shared with Hunt, the tendency to linger and luxuriate over every imagined pleasure with an over-fond and doting relish, is still strong in him. And to the weaknesses native to his own youth and temperament are joined others derived from an exclusive devotion to the earlier masters of English poetry. The creative impulse of the Elizabethan age, in its waywardness and lack of discipline and discrimination, not less than in its luxuriant strength and freshness, seems actually revived in him. He outdoes even Spenser in his proneness to let Invention ramble

and loiter uncontrolled through what wildernesses she will, with Imagination at her heels to dress if possible in living beauty the wonders that she finds there and sometimes Imagination is equal to the task and sometimes not: and even busy Invention herself occasionally flags, and is content to grasp at any idle clue the rhyme holds out to her :

-a nymph of Dian's Wearing a coronal of tender scions"

"Does yonder thrush,

Schooling its half-fledged little ones to brush
About the dewy forest, whisper tales?—

Speak not of grief, young stranger, or cold snails
Will slime the rose to-night."

Chapman especially among Keats's masters had this trick of letting thought follow the chance dictation of rhyme. Spenser and Chapman-to say nothing of Chatterton-had farther accustomed his ear to experimental and rash dealings with their mother tongue. English was almost as unsettled a language for him as for them; and he strives to extend its resources, and make them adequate to the range and freshness of his imagery, by the use of compound and other adjectival coinages in Chapman's spirit-'far-spooming Ocean', 'eye-earnestly', 'dead-drifting', 'their surly eyes browhidden', 'nervy knees', 'surgy murmurs'-coinages sometimes legitimate or even happy, but often fantastic and tasteless as well as by sprinkling his nineteenthcentury diction with such archaisms as 'shent', 'sith', and seemlihed' from Spenser, 'eterne' from Spenser and William Browne; or with arbitrary verbal forms, as 'to folly, to monitor', 'gordian'd up', to 'fragment up'; or with neuter verbs used as active, as to 'travel'

an eye, to 'pace' a team of horses, and vice versa. Hence even when in the other qualities of poetry his work is good, in diction and expression it is apt to be lax and wavering, and full of oddities and discords.

In rhythm Keats adheres in Endymion to the method he had adopted in Sleep and Poetry, deliberately keeping the sentence independent of the metre, putting full pauses anywhere in his lines rather than at the end, and avoiding any regular beat upon the rhyme. Leigh Hunt thought Keats had carried this method too far, even to the negation of metre. Some later critics have supposed the rhythm of Endymion to have been influenced by the Pharonnida of Chamberlayne: a fourth-rate poet remarkable chiefly for two things, for the inextricable trailing involution of his sentences, exceeding that of the very worst prose of his time, and for a perverse persistency in ending his heroic lines with the lightest syllables-prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions-on which neither pause nor emphasis is possible'.

But Keats, even where his verse runs most diffusely, rarely fails in delicacy of musical and metrical ear, or in variety and elasticity of sentence structure. There is

1 The following is a fair and characteristic enough specimen of Chamberlayne :

"Upon the throne, in such a glorious state

As earth's adored favorites, there sat

The image of a monarch, vested in

The spoils of nature's robes, whose price had been

A diadem's redemption; his large size,

Beyond this pigmy age, did equalize

The admired proportions of those mighty men

Whose cast-up bones, grown modern wonders, when

Found out, are carefully preserved to tell

Posterity how much these times are fell

From nature's youthful strength."

nothing in his treatment of the measure for which precedent may not be found in the work of almost every poet who employed it during the half-century that followed its brilliant revival for the purposes of narrative poetry by Marlowe. At most, he can only be said to make a rule of that which with the older poets was rather an exception; and to seek affinities for him among the tedious by-ways of provincial seventeenth-century verse seems quite superfluous.

As the best criticism on Keats's Endymion is in his own preface, so its best defence is in a letter he wrote six months after it was printed. "It is as good," he says, "as I had power to make it by myself." Hunt had warned him against the risks of a long poem, and Shelley against those of hasty publication. From much in his performance that was exuberant and crude the classical training and now ripening taste of Shelley might doubtless have saved him, had he been willing to listen. But he was determined that his poetry should at all times be the true spontaneous expression of his mind. "Had I been nervous," he goes on, "about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice, and trembled over every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble. I will write independently. I have written independently without judgment. I may write independently and with judg ment hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself." How well Keats was able to turn the fruits of experience to the benefit of his art, how swift the genius of poetry in him was to work out, as he says, its own salvation, we shall see when we come to consider his next labours.

CHAPTER VI.

Northern Tour-The Blackwood and Quarterly reviews-Death of Tom Keats-Removal to Wentworth Place-Fanny Brawne-Excursion to Chichester-Absorption in Love and PoetryHaydon and Money Difficulties-Family CorrespondenceDarkening Prospects-Summer at Shanklin and Winchester-Wise Resolutions-Return from Winchester. [June 1818October, 1819.]

WHILE Keats in the spring of 1818 was still at Teignmouth, with Endymion on the eve of publication, he had been wavering between two different plans for the immediate future. One was to go for a summer's walking tour through Scotland with Charles Brown. "I have many reasons," he writes to Reynolds, "for going wonder-ways; to make my winter chair free from spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape disquisitions on poetry, and Kingston-criticism; to promote digestion and economize shoe-leather. I'll have leather buttons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, over the hills we go.' If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them." A fortnight later we find him inclining to give up this purpose under an over-mastering sense of the inadequacy of his own attainments, and of the necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to sustain the flight of poetry: