POEMS QUOTED IN PAGE HIS POETRY J OHN KEATS was born at the end of October (the 31st is the date usually given, though this is not absolutely certain) 1795. His father, Thomas Keats, a Westcountry man, had begun his life in London as an ostler; had married his master's daughter; and had presently become manager of his father-in-law's business at the sign of the "Swan and Hoop" in Finsbury Pavement. It was there that the future poet first saw the light. Inquiry into the ancestry of a great writer will often help to explain his genius by revealing the presence of unusual intellectual powers, akin in nature to his own, in the stock from which he sprang. The case of Keats furnishes a striking exception to the rule. His father is said to have been a man of sound good sense and business ability; his mother, we are told, was clever, lively, and extremely fond of pleasure; but in neither of his parents, nor, so far as we know, in any other member of his family, were any traces to be found of that rare poetic faculty with which John Keats was mysteriously endowed at his birth. It is indeed one of the most curious paradoxes in literary history that a poet whose whole soul was filled with a passionate love of beauty, and whose taste turned instinctively, as if through natural affinity, to the romance of the Middle Ages and the wonderland of Greek fable and song, should have been born into conditions so singularly out of harmony with his temperament and ideals. Thomas Keats, having raised himself in the world by his thrift and industry, was ambitious for his children, and would willingly have sent his three sons-John, and his younger brothers, George and Tom-to Harrow. But as this design would have entailed an expenditure beyond his means, they were placed instead at a private school kept by the Rev. John Clarke at Enfield, near London. Here John remained some six years, and here he received the whole of his regular education, which, while excellent so far as it went, did not of course carry him a great distance along the road of scholarship. During the earlier portion of his time at Enfield he gave no sign of any special interest in intellectual things. He was simply a boy among the boys, high-spirited, affectionate, good at all kinds of out-door exercises, and immensely popular among his companions, who, with the unfailing sense which boys commonly have for an unusually strong personality, seem to have regarded him as a natural leader.] Indeed, the qualities of his character which first made themselves manifest were such as appeared to point to future achievements in fields very far removed from that in which his great work was to be done. We have the testimony of those who knew him well at the time that, though one might easily have predicted his greatness, it would hardly have been of literary greatness that one would have thought in connection with him. "He was not," one of his schoolmates, Edward Holmes, afterwards said, "attached to books. His penchant was for fighting. He would fight any one-morning, noon, and night"; it is even on record that on a certain memorable occasion he wanted to fight one of the ushers who had boxed his brother Tom's ears. This extraordinary pugnacity, the fits of vehement passion which sometimes seized and shook him, the strangely rapid changes of mood which resulted from his extreme sensibility to all outward impressions, combined to make him a marked figure in the school. Many years after he had been laid to rest in his Italian grave, and when the writer himself was an old man, his school-fellow and friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the headmaster, said of him: "He was not merely the favourite of all, like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him." It is well worth while to lay stress on the fact that Keats inspired all who came into contact with him at Enfield as a thoroughly manly little fellow because, as we shall see, there presently grew up about him a legend, which has not even yet by any means been destroyed, that as a |