Keats

e-Leigh Hunt: his literary and personal influence-John Hamilton Reynolds-James Rice-Cornelius Webb-Shelle

udent of St Bartholomew's, a merry fellow called Newmarch, having some tincture of poetry, were singled out as companions by Keats, with whom they used to discuss and compare verses, Keats taking always the tone of authority, and generally disagreeing with their tastes. He despised Pope, and admired Byron, but delighted especially in Spenser, caring more in poetry for the beauty of imagery, description, and simile, than for the interest of action or passion. Newmarch used sometimes to laugh at Keats and his flights,-to the indignation of his brothers, who came often to see him, and treated him as a person to be exalted, and destined to exalt the family name. Questions of poetry apart, continues Mr Stephens, he was habitually gentle and pleasant, and in his life steady and well-behaved-"his absolute devotion to poetry prevented his having any other taste or indulging in any vice." Another companion of Keats's early London days, who sympathized with his literary tastes, was a certain George Felton Mathew, the son of a tradesman whose family showed the young medical student some hospitality. "Keats and I," wrote in 1848 Mr Mathew,-then a supernumerary official on the Poor-Law Board, struggling meekly under the combined strain of a precarious income, a family of twelve children, and a turn for

re modelled timidly on the work of writers nearer his own time. His professedly Spenserian lines resemble not so much Spenser as later writers who had written in his measure, and of these not the latest, Byron[16], but rather such milder minstrels as Shenstone, Thomson, and Beattie, or most of all perhaps the sentimental Irish poetess Mrs Tighe; whose Psyche had become very popular since her death, and by its richness of imagery, and flowing and musical versification, takes a place, now too little recognised, among the pieces preluding the romantic movement of the time. That Keats was familiar with this lady's work is proved by his allusion to it in the lines, themselves ver

Shakspeare w

kly forw

ons-a ter

vibrates

tyrant tempe

ter's lips pour fort

rumpet Spe

rtial notes to

irgin ch

aise of spot

d warblings fro

y breathe, and tr

on either the 2nd or the 3rd of February, 1815, that the brothers Hunt were discharged after serving out the term of imprisonment to which they had been condemned on the charge of libelling the Prince Regent two years before. Young Cowden Clarke, like so many other friends of letters and of liberty, had gone to offer his respects to Leigh Hunt in Surrey jail; and the acquaintance thus begun had warmed quickly into friendship. Within a few days of Hunt's release, Clarke walked in from Enfield to call on him (presumabl

y as ever. One of the first books they attacked was a borrowed folio copy of Chapman's Homer. After a night's enthusiastic study, Clarke found when he came down to breakfast the next morning, that Ke

avell'd in the

ly states and

estern islan

in fealty to

de expanse ha

'd Homer ruled

er breathe it

apman speak out

ke some watche

lanet swims

Cortez when

the Pacific-a

h other with

on a peak

et could I never tell what men might mean.' Keats here for the first time approves himself a poet indeed. The concluding sestet is almost unsurpassed, nor can there be a finer instance of the alchemy of genius than the image of

k audacity, and a perfect sincerity, if not profoundness, of conviction. At last they were caught tripping, and condemned to two years' imprisonment for strictures ruled libellous, and really stinging as well as just, on the character and person of the Prince Regent. Leigh Hunt bore himself in his captivity with cheerful fortitude, and issued from it a sort of hero. Liberal statesmen, philosophers, and writers pressed to offer him their sympathy and society in prison, and his engaging presence, and affluence of genial conversation, charmed all who were brought in contact with him. Tall, straight, slender, and vivacious, with curly black hair, bright coal-black eyes, and 'nose of taste,' Leigh Hunt was ever one of the most winning of companions, full of kindly smiles and jests, of reading, gaiety, and ideas, with an infinity of pleasant things to say of his own, yet the most sympathetic and deferential of listeners. If in some matters he was far too easy, and especially in that of money obligations, which he shrank neither from receiving nor conferring,-only circumstances made him nearly always a receiver,-still men of sterner fibre than Hunt have more lightly abandoned graver convictions than his, and been far less ready to suffer for what they believed. Liberals could not but contrast his smiling steadfastness und

ol of polished artifice and restraint which had come in since Dryden, he was not less bent on its overthrow, and on the return of English poetry to the paths of nature and freedom. But he had his own conception of the manner in which this return should be effected. He did not admit that Wordsworth with his rustic simplicities and his recluse philosophy had solved the problem. "It was his intention," he wrote in prison, "by the beginning of next year to bring out a piece of some length ... in which he

compare the rhythm of a poem written in it to one of those designs in hangings or wall-papers which are made up of two different patterns in combination: a rigid or geometrical ground pattern, with a second, flowing or free pattern winding in and out of it. The regular or ground-pattern, dividing the field into even spaces, will stand for the fixed or strictly metrical divisions of the verse into equal pairs of rhyming lines; while the flowing or free pattern stands for its other divisions-dependent not on metre but on the sense-into clauses and periods of variable length and struct

s sche fresh

r was browded

ak, a yerd? l

arden as the

p and down, a

loures, party w

il garland fo

gel hevenlych

f the enjambement, or way of letting the sense flow over from one line to another, without pause or emphasis on the rhyme-word. Others show an opposite tendency, especially in epigrammatic or sententious passages, to clip their sentences to the pattern of the metre, fitting single propositions into single lines or couplets, and letting the stress

wine, of honey,

on the pile of

s receive, and hu

mounted squadr

cite's name they

ell,' they shou

e left, and thrice

use, not uncommon also with the E

ntlemen, strange

st of poor d

e not frighted;

s, a little h

late and control the other element entirely. The sentence-structure loses its freedom: and periods and clauses, instead of being allowed to develope themselves at their ease, are

fields of pur

whiten in the

ourse of wand'ri

nets through th

d, beneath the m

s that shoot ac

ists in gross

pinions in th

tempests on t

ebe distil the

st true master of the heroic couplet had been Dryden, on whom the verse of Rimini is avowedly modelled. The result is an

this, would be

gh, and kiss

ruly, was he

ttentions of th

me he took no

asing, to sec

t, in turn, i

owers, her taste

her sweet si

ide was rouse

ase him, after

er lute to som

rlando, or

ak, or how by

might know whe

of them, that to G. F. Mathew, is dated Nov. 1815: when Rimini was not yet published, and when it appears Keats did not yet know Hunt personally. He may indeed have known his poem in MS., through Clarke or others. Or the likeness of his work to Hunt's may have arisen independently: as to style, from a natural affinity of fee

not without agreeable passages of picturesque colour and description, but for the rest, the pleasant creature does but exaggerate in this poem the chief foible of his prose, redoubling his vivacious airs where they are least in place, and handling the great passions of the theme with a tea-party manner and vocabulary that are intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any departure from

ell of lovely

st, and bosom'

would he think,

then, and perfe

st things the

oman in a

attempt to add a familiar lenity of style to variety of movement in this metre, Shelley, it need not be said, was in no da

ontemporary British poets, or pretenders to the poetical title, to a session, or rather to a supper. Some of those who present themselves the god rejects with scorn, others he cordially welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. Moore and Campbell fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof, Coleridge and Wordsworth chidden and dismissed. The criticisms are not more short-sighted than those even of just and able men commonly are on their contemporaries. The bitterness of the 'Lost Leader' feeling to which we have referred accounts for much of Hunt's disparagement of the Lake writers, while in common with all liberals he was prejudiced against Scott as a conspicuous high Tory and friend to kings. But

as subject. So far as opinions were concerned, those of Keats had already, as we have seen, been partly formed in boyhood by Leigh Hunt's writings in the Examiner. Hunt was a confirmed sceptic as to established creeds, and supplied their place with a private gospel of cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his own sunny temperament, and partly by the hopeful doctrines of eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural sympathy of generous youth for Hunt's liberal and optimistic view of things, and he had a mind naturally unapt for dogma:-ready to entertain and appreciate any set of ideas according as his imagination recognised their beauty or power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth. In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Ke

lopes. In the summer of 1816 he seems to have spent a good deal of his time at the Vale of Health, where a bed was made up for him in the library. In one poem he dilates at length on the associations suggested by the busts and knick-knacks in the room; and the sonnet beginning, 'Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there', records pleasantly his musings as he walked home from his friend's ho

memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity a

of earth is

he said; and when he came to

nter morning,

ught a s

ent on in a dilatation on the dumbness of Natur

hree sisters with whom Keats was also intimate, and the eldest of whom afterwards married Thomas Hood. His earliest poems show him inspired feelingly enough with the new romance and nature sentiment of the time. One, Safie, is an indifferent imitation of Byron in his then fashionable Oriental vein: much better work appears in a volume published in the year of Keats's death, and partly prompted by the writer's relations with him. In a lighter strain, Reynolds wrote a musical entertainment which was brought out in 1819 at what is now the Lyceum theatre, and about the same time offended Wordsworth with an anticipatory parody of Peter Bell, w

me inc

ing verse for d

only was he one of the warmest friends Keats had, entertaining from the first an enthusiastic admiration for his powers, as a sonnet written early in their acquaintance proves[18], but also one of the wisest, and by judicious advice more than once saved him from a mistake. In connection with the name of Reynolds among Keats's associates must be mentioned that of his inseparable friend James Rice, a young solicitor of literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or worse in health, but always, in K

ea

n of promise,

t may

for the work of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his weak moments[19]. For some years afterwards Webb served as press-reader in the printing-office of Messrs Clowes, being charged especially with the revision of the Quar

to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him, and adds the comment: "Keats, being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a sort of natural enemy." "He was haughty, and had a fierce hatred of rank," says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his pride had not been aroused by anticipation, Keats had a genius for friendship, but towards Shelley we find him in fact maintaining a tone of reserve, and even of something like moral and intellectual patronage: at first, no doubt, by way of defence against the possibility of social or material patronage on the other's part: but he should soon have learnt better than to apprehend anything of the kind fro

Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,' and while as usual sunk deep in debt, was perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence-for he was in truth a man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of the gifts of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he possessed completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely exalted pitch of feeling and aspiration. "Never," wrote he about this time, "have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me.... They came over me, and shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God." But for all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of genius, the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties which it is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to Haydon: its vital gifts of choice and of creation, its magic power of working on the materials offered it by experience, its felicity of touch and insight, were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an occasional bold conception, or a touch of craftsmanship caught from greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid siege to immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of true heroic art but of rodomontade. Even in drawing from the Elgin marbles, Haydon fail

it of thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour and protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for deliverance from 'pecuniary emergencies', and the like. "I always rose up from my knees," he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, "with a refreshed fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling that sent me streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of life." And he was prone to hold himself up as a model to his friends in both particulars, lecturing them on faith and conduct while he

up, and I cannot forbear

now on earth a

ud, the catar

llyn's summi

eshness from A

e, the violet

e, the chain fo

steadfastness

d than Raphae

its there are

ehead of the

ll give the wor

lses. Hear y

rkings in th

, ye nations,

my well-wishes to him." Haydon suggested moreover what I cannot but think the needless and regrettable mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out the words after 'workings' in the last line but one. The poet, however, accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision. Two other sonnets, which Keats wrote at this time, after visiting the Elgin marbles with his new friend, are indifferent poetically, but do credit to his

ind him writing, for George to send her, the first draft of the lines beginning, 'Hadst thou lived in days of old,' afterwards amplified and published in his first volume[20]. Through the Wylies Keats became acquainted with a certain William Haslam, who was afterwards one of his own and his brothers' best friends, but whose character and person remain indistinct to us; and through Haslam with Joseph Severn, then a very young and struggling student of art. Severn was

of Tom Keats at Enfield, and was now living with his family in Featherstone buildings. He has been described by those who knew him as a sturdy, boisterous, blue-eyed and red-headed lad, distinguished in those days chiefly by an irrepressible spirit of fun and mischief. He was only about fifteen when he sent to John Keats the present of roses ack

e feet: the figure compact and well-turned, with the neck thrust eagerly forward, carrying a strong and shapely head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair: the features powerful, finished, and mobile: the mouth rich and wide, with an expression at once combative and sensitive in the extreme: the forehead not high, but broad and strong: the eyebrows nobly arched, and eyes hazel-brown, liquid-flashing, visibly inspired-"an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." "Keats was the only man I ever met who seemed and looked conscious of a high calling, except Wordsworth." These words are Haydon's, and to the same effect Leigh Hunt:-"the eyes mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth

to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and unaffected. If the conversation did not interest him he was apt to draw apart, and sit by himself in the window, peering into vacancy; so that the window-seat came to be recognized as his place. His voice was rich and low, and when he joined in

aternal fire-side occupations. Poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air. It was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read: a time of literary excitement, expectancy, and discussion, such as England has not known since. In such an atmosphere Keats soon found himself induced to try his fortune and his powers with the rest. The encouragement of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. It was Leigh Hunt who first brought him before the world in print, publishing without comment, in the Examiner for the 5th of May, 1816, his sonnet beginning, 'O Solitude! if I with thee must dwell,' and on the 1st of December in the same year the sonnet on Chapman's Homer. This Hunt accompanied by some prefatory remarks on the poetical promise of its author, associating with his name those of She

veliness have

ander out i

incense do w

t to meet th

hs soft-voiced a

ets bringing

nks, and vio

f Flora in h

eft delights as

ever bless

e when under

ger sought, I

ry, seeing I

r offerings, a

the old pagan world, and of gratitude for present friendship, the y