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the last of a band of great collectors has been able to recover; and in the result we can accompany Keats through the glad and sad and mad and bad hours of his short and marvellous life as we have never been able to do before under the guidance of a single biographer. We are still left in the dark, it is true, as to Keats's race and descent. Whe

d consumption. It is from his mother that Keats seems to have inherited his impetuous and passionate nature. There is the evidence of a certain wholesale tea-dealer-the respectability of whose trade may have inclined him to censoriousness-to the effect that, both as girl and woman, she "was a person of unbridled temperament, and that in her later years she fell into loose ways, and was no credit to the family." That she had other qualities besides those mentioned by the tea-dealer is shown by the passionate affection that existed between her and her son John. "Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be kept quiet d

ng so presented him with the key that unlocked the unsuspected treasure of his genius. There is only one person, indeed, in all the Keats circle to whom one is more passionately grateful than to Cowden Clarke: that is Fanny Brawne. Keats no doubt had laboured to some purpose-occasionally, to fine purpose-with his genius before the autumn of 1818, when he met Fanny Brawne

ts consequences. The meeting with Fanny took place, as I have said, in the autumn of 1818. During the winter Keats continued to write Hyperion, which he seems already to have begun. In January 1819 he wrote The Eve of St. Agnes. During the spring of that year, he wrote the Ode to Psyche, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the Ode to a Nightingale, and La Belle Dame sans Merci. In the autumn he finished Lamia, and wrote the Ode to Autumn. To the same year belongs the second greatest of his sonnets, Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art. In other words, practically all the fine g

giana. His famous declaration of independence of them-that he would rather give them a sugar-plum than his time-was essentially a cynicism in the exhausted-Don-Juan mood. Hence, Keats was almost doomed to fall in love with provocation rather than with what the Victorians called "soul." His destiny was not to be a happy lover, but the slave of a "minx." It was not a slavery without dignity, however. It had the dignity of tragedy. Sir Sidney Colvin regrets that the love-letters of Keats to Fanny were ever published. It would be as reasonable, in my opinion, to regret the publication of La Belle Dame sans Merci. La Belle Dame sans Merci says in literature mere

put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her-I see her-I hear her.... O that I could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to

man of genius. Had Sir Sidney fully grasped the part played by Fanny Brawne as, for good or evil, the presiding genius of Keats as a poet, he would, I fancy, have found a different explanation o

il thee, kni

palely l

led Keats to alter this in the version h

ail thee, w

is that Keats, who in this poem wrote his own biography as an unfortunate lover, came in a realistic mood to dislike "knight-at-arms" as a too romantic image of himself. He decided, I conjecture, that "wretched wight" was a description nearer the bitter truth. Hence his emendation. The other alterations also seem to me to belong to Keats rather than to Hunt. T

of beauty, his tremulous and swooning sensitiveness in the presence of nature and women, his morbidness, his mawkishness, his fascination as by serpents, on the other. But in the resultant portrait, it is a too respectable and virile Keats that emerges. Keats was more virile as a man than is generally understood. He does not owe his immortality to his virility, however. He owes it to his servitude to golden images, to his citizenship of the world of the senses, to his bondage to physical love. Had he lived longer he might have invaded other worlds. His recasting of Hyperion opens with a cry of distrust in the artist who is con

atthew A

d in another sentence: "In what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare." One may disagree with this-for in natural magic Keats does not rank even with Shelley-and, at the same time, feel that Matthew Arnold gives Keats too little rather than too much appreciation. He divorced Keats's poetry too gingerly from Keats's life. He did not sufficiently realize the need for understanding all that passi

and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up, without the training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our feelings and upon the express

bandoned himself to the sensations of love and the sensations of an artist like a voluptuary. The best of his work is day-dreams of love and art. The degree to which his genius fed itself upon art and day-dreams of art is suggested by the fact that the most perfect of his early poems, written at the age of twenty, was the sonnet on Chapman's Homer, and that the most perfe

ph uprising

's pebbly margi

ike the younges

ipping hand s

y began to p

n there they are made, as it were, to match the furniture. It is the same in all his best poems. Keats's imagination lived in castles, and he loved the properties, and the men and women were among the properties. We may forget the names of Porphyro and Madeline, but we do not forget the background of casement and a

lined palace

palace has a

r Madeline. His attitude to beauty-the secret and immortal beauty-is one of "love shackled with vain-loving." It is desire of an almost bodily kind. Keats's work, indeed, is in large measure simply the beautiful expression of bodily desire, or of something of the same nature as bodily desire. His conception of love was almost entirely physical. He was greedy for it to the point of green-sickness. His intuition told him that passion so entirely physical had in it something fatal. Love in his poems is poisonous and secret in its beauty. It is passion for a La

wers run

nd purple

n

pil

k slow journey

rded el

less in his later poems. It becomes overcast. His gr

Ghost as Johnny Keats"-the Johnny Keats who had allowed himself to be "snuffed out by an article." As a schoolboy he had been fond of fighting, and as a man he had his share of militancy. He had a quite health

shut her wil

kisse

s?" he writes t

t we must temper the imagination, as the critics say, with judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number, that both eyes might have fair play, and to speak trul

doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody)." It suggests that Keats retained at least a certain share of good spirits, in spite of the Quarterly an

e, which, indeed, is not full but pale and thin, without showing any bone-her shape is very graceful, and so are her movements-her arms are good, her hands bad-ish-her feet tolerable-she is not seventeen [nineteen?]-but she is ignorant monstrous in her behaviour, fly

is, as I have already said, that it was after his meeting with Fanny Brawne that he grew, as in a night, into a great poet. Let us not then abuse Keats's p