This is not written with the least atom of purpose to forestall criticisms, of course, but from the desire I have to conciliate men who are competent to look, and who do look with a zealous eye, to the honour of English literature.

"The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thicksighted thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages.

"I hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness; for I wish to try once more before I bid it farewell."

The man who, while still in the early twenties, could write in this way of himself and his work, had clearly more to learn from himself than from the noisy abuse of his critics.

V

T was during this momentous year, 1818, which saw the publication of "Endymion"

the "Quarterly" upon it, that the shadows began to gather thick and fast about Keats's path. He and his two brothers had always been deeply attached to one another. The family circle was now broken up by the

marriage of George and his emigration to America. Then, in company with his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, John started on an expedition through the Lake Country and into Western Scotland; over-exertion and exposure brought on fever and inflammation of the throat; and when he reached Inverness his condition was so serious that the doctor who was called in ordered him to abandon his tour and return at once to London. The nine days' sea-passage was to some extent restorative; but the seeds of the disease which was presently to prove fatal had none the less been sown. On his arrival in London he found fresh trouble awaiting him. His other brother, Tom, who had been ailing for some time, had now developed consumption, and was lying alarmingly ill at their Hampstead lodgings. For the next few months his time and energies were mainly devoted to the sad task of watching and nursing, a task which he fulfilled with the tenderest solicitude, and which naturally told disastrously upon his own enfeebled health. Tom died towards the close of the year, leaving a great void in his brother's heart. Life now grew very dark about him; his old buoyancy failed; anxiety, sorrow, sickness, and physical languor filled his spirit with gloom.

One of Keats's greatest poems, the splendid "Ode to a Nightingale," will be read with deepened interest when it is connected with the poet's condition at the time when it had its birth. Suggested, Lord Houghton tells us, "by the continual song of the bird that . had built

her nest close to the house" where he was then living, and which often threw Keats into a sort of trance of tranquil pleasure," this was composed in the spring of 1819, and Haydon records that "as we were one evening walking in the Kilburn meadows, he repeated it to me, before he put it to paper, in a low, tremulous undertone, which affected me extremely." In the third stanza, it will be observed, the poet directly recalls his brother's illness and death as a central illustration of his sad thought of general human vicissitude and decay. It has often been noted as a singular feature of the poem that it contrasts the transitory lot of the individual man with the permanent life of the nightingale conceived as an immortal bird,” not 77 born for death "—that is, not as an individual but as a race or type. This has been pronounced a fallacy; and in the strictly logical sense a fallacy of course it is. But it is a perfectly true as well as striking expression of the poet's mood and feeling; and, as such, it is really no more open to criticism thán is Tennyson's contrast in " The Brook" between the passing generations of men, who "come and go," and the brook itself, which goes on for ever." The supreme beauty of two stanzas in particular-the fifth and the seventh-will appeal to every sympathetic reader.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk :
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burnt mirth !
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies ;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards : Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in emblamed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild ;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves ;
And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Darkling I listen; and for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy !

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.