Just before the end Herbert gave to a friend who was visiting him a manuscript book, bidding him deliver it to Nicholas Ferrar to be made public or burned as that gentleman thought good. It was, as he described it, a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that had passed betwixt God and his soul, being the small volume of verse which was the labour and the fruit of his life. There is much to censure critically in the work, much that is frigid and fantastic; but at its best the note is rare and penetrating, with the tinkling purity of a silver sacring bell. Many have loved the book as a companion of the closet, and many still cherish it for its human comfort; all of us may profit from its pages if we can learn from them to wind ourselves out of the vicious fallacy of the present, and to make our own some part of Herbert's intimacy with divine things.

KEATS

IN its pleasures and its toils the case of the critic, I often think, is not unlike that of the adventurous traveller. Every author into whose life in turn he diverts his own is to him a new voyage of exploration. He comes back laden with memories, whether the land he has traversed be one in the highways of commerce and already trodden by many feet, or an island almost forgotten in far-off seas. Cities of men he visits, and walks in crowded streets, or sits by sheltered hearths. Again, it is a country of unpeopled solitudes, where things of loveliness waylay him, or monstrous forms startle and affright. There are recollections of homely comfort to reward his toil; and of high adventures, as when, like Balboa, he stands and looks out, the first of men, over the Infinite unknown Pacific; and there are ways of terror where he wanders alone on desolate frozen coasts and, far as the eye can reach, sees only ruinous death. All these visions and remembered emotions he carries to his desk, counting himself blessed if some happy chance of language or some unusual quickening of the blood shall enable him to convey to others though it be but a small part

of his experience. That good fortune, he feels, with all noble conquests, is reserved for the poets:

On First Looking Sute Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

It is the sonnet that to most people probably comes first to mind when Keats is named and his destiny remembered. There is about it the golden flush and wonder of youth-it was written in his twentieth year-and one catches in it also, or seems to catch, a certain quickness of breath which forebodes the rapture so soon quenched. The inspiration of unsoiled nature and of England's clear-voiced early singers is here mingled as in no other of our poets. And especially this inheritance of the Elizabethan age rediscovered in a later century will have a new significance to any one who has just gone through the

Keats.

poems in the volume edited by Mr. E. de Sélincourt.1

There is a good deal to commend in this scholarly edition of Keats; the text has been prepared with extreme accuracy, and the notes, properly placed at the end of the book, are thorough and apposite. Mr. de Sélincourt's interest has lain more particularly in the study of sources, and Keats, among the most derivative and at the same time original of English poets, offered him here a rich field. For one thing, he has exploded the silly myth of the Lemprière. To that dictionary (still a serviceable book, be it said, in its own way) Keats no doubt owed his acquaintance with many details of antiquity, but most of his information and all the colour and movement that made of those legends a living inspiration he got from the translations of Chapman and Sandys and from the innumerable allusions in Spenser and the other great Elizabethans. One might have surmised as much from his sonnet to Chapman's Homer without waiting for the present editor's erudition. To call him a Greek, as Shelley did explicitly and as Matthew Arnold once did by implication, is to miss the mark. "Keats was no scholar," says Mr. de Sélincourt aptly, "and of the literature in which the Greek spirit found true expression he could know nothing. But just as

1 The Poems of John Keats. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by E. de Sélincourt. New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1905.

it was through his devotion to Spenser that he became a poet, so was it through his kinship, both in spirit and taste, with the Elizabethans, that he became the poet of ancient Greece."

I am inclined to think that the essential kinship of Keats to "The fervid choir that lifted up a noise of harmony," as he called them, rests upon something even deeper than similarity of language and poetic method or than "natural magic," that it goes down to that faculty of vision in his mind which, like theirs, beheld the marriage of the ideas of beauty and death. As an editor concerned with the minutiae of the poet's manner, Mr. de Sélincourt may well be pardoned for overlooking this more essential relationship; his services are sufficiently great after every deduction. It is not a small thing, for instance, to find in the Glossary a careful tabulation of the sources from which Keats drew his extraordinary vocabulary, and from the first word, "a-cold," to see how constantly he borrowed from Shakespeare and Milton and the writers that lie between, and how deliberately he sought to echo "that large utterance of the early Gods." The curious thing is that in the end all this borrowing should produce the impression of a fine spontaneity. Just as we are discovering more and more in the spaciousness of the Elizabethans a literary inspiration from foreign lands, so the freedom of diction in Keats was in large measure the influence of a remote age-which may be taken as another