in his letter to Clarke of the 17th of December 1816, a poem now identified with "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," there are what we may term lunar traces throughout the early volume of Poems. Even in the poor little poem To Some Ladies, which is not even carefully finished up to its own Tom Moorish standard, seeing that the second quatrain lacks a rhyme,— even in this we have talk of "Cynthia's face, the enthusiast's friend." In the Epistle to George Felton Mathew we read

in happy hour

Came chaste Diana from her shady bower,

and in the Epistle to George Keats there are the really admirable verses about the poet and what he sees beside the mere moon in heaven

Ah, yes! much more would start into his sight—

The revelries and mysteries of night :

And should I ever see them, I will tell you

Such tales as needs must with amazement spell you.

Again in the Epistle to Clarke

When Cynthia smiles upon a summer's night,
And peers among the cloudlet's jet and white,
As though she were reclining in a bed

Of bean blossoms, in heaven freshly shed.

Once more in the Sonnet to George Keats

Cynthia is from her silken curtains peeping
So scantly, that it seems her bridal night,
And she her half-discover'd revels keeping.

And the Hecate character of the moon is clearly enough

alluded to in the two lines closing the Sonnet to

And when the moon her pallid face discloses,

I'll gather some by spells, and incantation.

Indeed Keats may almost be said to have made the moon and her lover his own,-so much so that Browning, in one of his two tributes to Keats, conveys a whole romanceful of meaning in a word, the word even in those glorious trochaics from One Word More:

What, there's nothing in the moon note-worthy?
Nay-for if that moon could love a mortal,
Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy)
All her magic ('tis the old sweet mythos)

She would turn a new side to her mortal,

Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman-
Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace,

Blind to Galileo on his turret,

Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats-him, even!

Had Keats never passed out of the lunar phase he would still have produced a book far more remarkable than Chamberlayne's Pharonnida, a poem which bears a certain resemblance to Endymion, and which, I think, had been read by the modern poet (see page 265 of this volume); and much of even the 1817 volume must perforce have been remembered; but it is the volume published in 1820 that assures him a seat among the immortals.

Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave refers in his Golden Treasury to Keats as "a poet deserving the title 'mar

vellous boy' in a much higher sense than Chatterton," and says that Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth would have left "poems of less excellence and hope' than Keats has left "had their lives been closed at twenty-five." Such was Keats's enthusiasm for Chatterton that I feel sure he would have been the first to wish Mr. Palgrave to be reminded that the Bristol boy really was a boy in the strictest sense, having won for himself at the hands of Keats the proud title of "the most English of poets except Shakespeare" by a truly prodigious mass of work all done before he was eighteen years old-an age he never attained. The comparison with Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth holds; but it is only fair to ask on behalf of Chatterton what Keats would have left had he failed to attain eighteen instead of twenty-six years. I think the real marvel of Keats is best touched on by Mrs. Browning in Book I of Aurora Leigh:

By Keats's soul, the man who never stepped

In gradual progress like another man,
But, turning grandly on his central self,
Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years
And died, not young,—(the life of a long life,
Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear
Upon the world's cold cheek to make it burn

For ever ;) by that strong excepted soul,

I count it strange and hard to understand

That nearly all young poets should write old; ...

What is really notable is that he who had produced

practically nothing as a boy, who between the ages of

twenty and twenty-five had been through so much sorrow and anguish tending to stop his work, should yet have written within those five years such a body of poetry, so suddenly rising to the highest excellence of expression and the most startling imaginative capacity, and this out of poetic beginnings scarcely removed from the common-place.

That Keats himself was always at the very antipodes of common-place, we have ample evidence in the various recollections of his childhood, boyhood, and youth; in the facts of his life; and in the excellently recorded physiognomy. In every authentic portrait, he is a marked man'; and there is scarcely an act on record that does not express individuality and character.

By all who really knew Keats he seems to have been greatly beloved,-one of the surest proofs of the nobility of his character. His devotion to his mother and his brothers, taking practical forms, his paternal solicitude for his young orphan sister, his readiness to assist friends from his own slender resources, his promptness to protect the weak and oppressed, his enthusiasm for the good, the beautiful, and the true, and his contempt for everything that was mean, sordid, or hollow, are all qualities which find, more or less, a balanced expression in his writings and his acts. His words and his life

1

See Addenda to the Preface for remarks on the portraits of Keats.

speak for him fully in the following volumes; for the reminiscences which follow his own writings form a biography of the most vivid kind taken in connexion with his own letters; and truly of a more lovable character it would be hard indeed to find living records such as these. The fluctuation of his nobler qualities under premature physical decay is one of the saddest spectacles in the history of literature; but, although his friends had all somewhat to bear with when the hand of death was upon him, the main stream of his life remained noble and beautiful to the last. In the records that relate to the times when he was between twenty and twenty-three years of age, and in his letters even later than those times, there is a splendid elasticity corresponding with the "fine compactness of person" which he is said to have had. That his forces were rather volcanic and intermittent than sustained and resistant the melancholy result showed; and however much or little prophetic truth may have been in Coleridge's wellknown utterance "there is death in that hand,” the final verdict will probably be that this noble nature, with all its male vigour, had not the due proportion of patient stolid resistance to make head against a dire combination of misfortunes.

Hunt in his admirable remarks upon The Eve of St. Agnes points to the fainting of Porphyro at sight of Madeline as the one flaw in the poem, and apologizes for it on the score of the poet's enfeebled state of health