Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

6. Page 259. The Nymphs.' A mythological poem, on which Hunt was at this time engaged.

7. Page 259. 'Does Shelley go on telling strange stories of the death of kings?' Gilfillan, in his Gallery of Literary Portraits, tells the story of Shelley amusing himself and Hunt, when they were travelling in a stage coach, and startling an old lady travelling with them, by suddenly crying out to Hunt, For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.' King Richard II., iii. 2. 8. Page 261. I long to see Wordsworth's as well as to have mine in.' Haydon was painting his Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, and was introducing likenesses of his friends into the picture.

9. Page 262. 'Bertrand,' i. e., General Bertrand, who was one of Bonaparte's petty court at St. Helena.

10. Page 263. Jane Reynolds afterward married Thomas Hood. The Reynolds family lived in Little Britain, so quaintly sketched by Washington Irving.

11. Page 263. Hampton,' i. e., Little Hampton, a quiet watering place at the mouth of the Arun, on the south coast of Sussex, a little more than halfway between London and Portsmouth.

12. Page 265. 'Miss Taylor's essays in Rhyme.' Fanny Keats was fourteen years old at this time, and the Norwich ladies, Ann and Jane Taylor, were in the height of their popularity with young readers.

13. Page 266. 'Tell Dilke.' The Dilkes were friends living in Hampstead whom Reynolds had introduced to Keats. Charles Wentworth Dilke was at the time a clerk in the Navy Pay-Office, and a disciple of Godwin and warm friend of Hunt. Later he became a man of great consequence in the literary world as editor and chief owner of The Atheneum. The W. D. mentioned below is William Dilke, a younger brother, who had served in the Commissariat department. He was at this time about forty-two years old.

14. Page 268. 'Northern Poet.' See Wordsworth's Personal Talk, beginning

'I am not one who much or oft delight
To season my fireside with personal talk.'

15. Page 269. Hazlitt had just collected and published his The Round Table, which he first printed in The Examiner.

16. Page 271. You and Gleig.' Mr. Colvin makes this note: G. R. Gleig, son of the Bishop of Stirling: born 1796, died 1888: served

in the Peninsular War and afterwards took or ders. Chaplain-General to the Forces from 1846 to 1875: author of the Subaltern and many military tales and histories.'

17. Page 271. The two R's.' Reynolds and Rice.

[ocr errors]

18. Page 274, The little Song.' See headnote to Lines,' p. 37. The allusion just below in Adam's waking is to Paradise Lost, Book VIII., lines 478-484.

19. Page 275. Christie.' Jonathan H. Christie, a college friend of Lockhart, who took up Lockhart's quarrel with John Scott, fought the latter in a duel and killed him.

20. Page 277. 'Wells.' Charles J. Wells, a schoolmate of Tom Keats. See the Sonnet, p. 13, To a Friend who sent me some Roses.' The family of Wells lived in Featherstone Buildings, from which Letter 24 was written. 21. Page 277. 'Shelley's poem.' Laon and Cynthia, renamed The Revolt of Islam.

22. Page 277. The tragedy was Retribution, or the Chieftain's Daughter; the pantomime was Don Giovanni. The articles, as the postscript to this letter shows, did appear in The Champion.

23. Page 278. We played a concert.' A burlesque affair. Keats, his brothers and friends, were wont to entertain themselves with imitating musical instruments, vocally.

24. Page 278. Haydon's Autobiography, I. 384, gives a more detailed account of this sup per party. Ritchie, here referred to, Mr. Colvin tells us, was Joseph Ritchie, who started on a Government mission to Fezzan in September, 1818, and died at Morzouk the following November. An account of the expedition was published by his travelling companion, Captain G. F. Lyon, R. N.' Ritchie wrote a poetical Farewell to England, which was printed by A. A. Watts in his Poetical Album.

[ocr errors]

25. Page 278. Medal of the Princess, i... Princess Charlotte, who died November 6, 1817. 26. Page 278. Bob Harris,' the manager of Covent Garden Theatre.

27. Page 279. 'Miss Kent's.' Mr. Forman notes that the article was not by Miss Bessy Kent, Hunt's sister-in-law, but by Shelley, who used the initials E. K. for Elfin Knight.'

28. Page 279. Mr. Abbey.' Mr. Richard Abbey, a tea-merchant, one of the guardians of the Keats family. See above, p. xv.

[ocr errors]

29. Page 283. See a lively refutation of this conjecture of Hunt's, and a general statement of the relations of the Cockney school' with the Edinburgh critics in Lang's The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, I. 150-155.

30. Page 285. 'As the old song says.' Mr. Forman here quotes the 'old song,' which is 'Sharing Eve's Apple,' given in the Appendix, p. 248, on Mr. Forman's authority as by Keats. Mr. Colvin merely indicates a break. It is quite possible that Keats in the jesting mood with which his letter opens, wrote these nonsense lines and, in Scott's fashion, palmed them off as an 'old song.'

31. Page 285. For the sum of twopence.' See the head-note to 'Robin Hood,' p. 41.

32. Page 287. Mr. Robinson.' Henry Crabbe Robinson. This delightful diarist does not record this visit, nor in the two or three references to Keats speak as if he knew him. In an entry for December 8, 1820, he records reading some of Keats's poems, and adds: There are a force, wildness, and originality in the works of this young poet which, if his perilous journey to Italy does not destroy him, promise to place him at the head of the next generation of poets.'

33. Page 293. Haydon had written with enthusiasm about a seal with a true lover's knot and the initials W. S., found in a field at Stratford-on-Avon.

34. Page 293. 'Dentatus' was the subject of a picture by Haydon.

35. Page 295. Claude's Enchanted Castle.' Mr. Colvin has this interesting note: "The famous picture now belonging to Lady Wantage, and exhibited at Burlington House in 1888. Whether Keats ever saw the original is doubtful (it was not shown at the British Institution in his time), but he must have been familiar with the subject as engraved by Vivarès and Woollett, and its suggestive power worked in his mind until it yielded at last the distilled poetic essence of the "magic casement passage in the "Ode to a Nightingale." It is interesting to note the theme of the Grecian Urn ode coming in also amidst the " unconnected subject and careless verse" of this rhymed epistle.'

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

36. Page 296. Posthumous works.' Haydon had written Keats: When I die I'll have Shakespeare placed on my heart, with Homer in my right hand and Ariosto in the other, Dante at my head, Tasso at my feet, and Corneille under my -.'

37. Page 300. Worsted stockings.' Keats hints at the neighborhood of the children of the Postman Bentley, at whose house in Wellwalk he lodged.

38. Page 306. The opposite,' i. e., a leaf with the name and from the Author.' 39. Page 315. A scrap of paper.' The book was a copy of Endymion,' and Keats had left

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]
[ocr errors]

43. Page 328. 'Slip-shod Endymion.' John Scott wrote of the poem in The Morning Chronicle, October 3, 1818: That there are also many, very many passages indicating both haste and carelessness I will not deny; nay, I will go further, and assert that a real friend of the author would have dissuaded him from immediate publication.'

44. Page 338. 'I have scarce any hopes of him.' Thomas Keats died a few hours later, on the same day this letter was written, As noted in the biographical sketch, Keats now removed to Wentworth Place.

45. Page 339. This thin paper.' Mr. Colvin notes: A paper of the largest folio size, used by Keats in this letter only, and containing some eight hundred words a page of his writing.'

46. Page 340. Her daughter senior.' Fanny Brawne, of whom this is the first mention in the letters.

47. Page 354. 'Henrietta Street,' the residence of Mrs. Wylie.

48. Page 355. The silk tassels,' Mr. Colvin explains, were the gift of Georgiana Keats.

49. Page 366. 'Am I all wound with Browns.' Mr. Colvin reminds the reader of the origin of the phrase in Caliban's mouth :

'Sometimes am I

All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues Do hiss me into madness.'

The little Brown boys, brothers of Charles Armitage Brown, are the 'Boys' referred to above, p. 364.

50. Page 368. This discreet notice of Reynolds's parody appeared with some alteration in The Examiner, April 26, 1819.

51. Page 378. James Elmes was the editor of Annals of the Fine Arts, in which first appeared the Ode to a Nightingale.' See p. 144. 52. Page 383. 'An oriental tale of a very beautiful color.' Mr. Forman, on the authority of Dr. Reinhold Köhler, Librarian of the Grand

ducal Library of Weimar, identifies the story, which is a variant of the Third Calender's story in The Arabian Nights, as the 'Histoire de la Corbeille,' in the Nouveaux Contes Orientaux of the Comte de Caylus.

66

53. Page 399. 'Hunt's triumphal entry into London.' Mr. Forman makes the following note on this passage: Henry Hunt, of Manchester Massacre fame, ended an imprisonment of two years and a half on the 30th of October, 1822, and made an entry into London" on the 11th of November, 1822; but the trial of which his imprisonment was the issue had not taken place till the spring of 1820; and the entry alluded to by Keats was one which took place between the massacre and the trial.'

54. Page 413. From Sr. G. B.'s, Lord Ms.' Sir George Beaumonts and Lord Musgraves.

55. Page 416. The Cave of despair.' Spenser's Cave of Despair was the subject of the picture (see Letter 141) with which Severn won the Royal Academy premium.

56. Page 438. Lucy Vaughan Lloyd.' The name under which Keats proposed to publish 'The Cap and Bells.' See p. 216.

57. Page 446. Without making any way.' Mr. Colvin appends this note: The Maria Crowther had in fact sailed from London, September 18 contrary winds holding her in the Channel, Keats had landed at Portsmouth for a night's visit to the Snooks of Bedhamp ton.'

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF KEATS'S POEMS

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

XI. On first Looking into Chapman's
Homer.

XII. On leaving some friends at an early hour.

XIII. Addressed to Haydon.

XIV. Addressed to the same.

XV. On the Grasshopper and Cricket.
XVI. To Kosciusko.

XVII. 'Happy is England.'
Sleep and Poetry.

II. ENDYMION: | A POETIC ROMANCE. | By
JOHN KEATS. THE STRETCHED METRE
OF AN ANTIQUE SONG.' | LONDON: | PRINTED
FOR TAYLOR AND HESSEY, | 93, FLEET
STREET, 1818.

III. LAMIA | ISABELLA, | THE EVE OF ST. AGNES, AND OTHER POEMS. BY JOHN KEATS, AUTHOR OF ENDYMION. LONDON: | PRINTED FOR TAYLOR AND HESSEY, | FLEET STREET | 1820.

Lamia.

Isabella; or the Pot of Basil.
The Eve of St. Agnes.
Ode to a Nightingale.

Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Ode to Psyche.
Fancy.

Ode [ Bards of Passion and of Mirth'].
Lines on the Mermaid Tavern.

Robin Hood. To a Friend.
To Autumn.

Ode on Melancholy.

Hyperion: a Fragment.

IV. LIFE, LETTERS AND LITERARY REMAINS OF JOHN KEATS. EDITED BY RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES [AFTERWARD LORD HOUGHTON].

[The following were incorporated in the biographical portion.]

[blocks in formation]

464

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF KEATS'S POEMS

[blocks in formation]

The Eve of St. Mark.

[ocr errors]

To Fanny: Physician Nature! let my spirit blood.'

Stanzas: In a drear-nighted December.' Sonnets:

'Oh, how I love on a fair summer's eve.' 'To a Young Lady who sent me a laurel crown.'

'After dark vapours have oppress'd our plains.'

Written on the Blank space at the end of Chaucer's Tale of The Floure and the Lefe. On the Sea.

On Leigh Hunt's poem The Story of Rimini. 'When I have fears that I may cease to be.' To Homer.

Written in answer to a sonnet.

To J. H. Reynolds.

Το

[ocr errors]

Time's sea hath been five years

at its slow ebb.'

To Sleep.

On Fame.

Another on Fame.

'Why did I laugh to-night?'

A Dream, after reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca.

'If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd.'

'The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone.' 'I cry your mercy-pity-love! — aye, love.' The Last Sonnet.

V. THE LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS:
Acrostic: Georgiana Augusta Wylie.
At Teignmouth.

Mrs. Cameron and Ben Nevis.
The Devon Maid.

A Little Extempore.
The Gadfly.

The Human Seasons.

To Thomas Keats.
A Party of Lovers.
A Song about Myself.
Two or Three Posies.

« AnteriorContinuar »