Front matter (continued 13)

Neither does the biographer seem to have made any attempt to get into touch with Keats’s young sister, who had been married long before this to an accomplished Spanish man of letters, Señor Valentine Llanos. He also was at various times involved in the political troubles of his country. Of his and his wife’s children, one attained distinction as an artist and assumed the name of Keats y Llanos. Keats had written to his sister once as a child gaily prophesying that they all, her brothers and herself, would live to have ‘tripple chins and stubby thumbs.’ She in fact fully attained the predicted length of days, and having lived to be well assured of the full and final triumph of her brother’s fame died less than thirty years ago at eighty-six. In mature life she had come into touch with one at least of her brother’s surviving familiars, that is with Severn at Rome, and with more than one of his admirers in a younger generation. Of these a good friend to her was Mr Buxton Forman, through whose initiative a Civil List pension was awarded her by Lord Beaconsfield. A subtle observer, the poet and humorist, Frederick Locker-Lampson, has left a rather disappointing though not unkindly impression of her as follows:—

Whilst I was in Rome Mr Severn introduced me to M. and Mme. Valentine de Llanos, a kindly couple. He was a Spaniard, lean, silent, dusky, and literary, the author of Don Esteban and Sandoval. She was fat, blonde, and lymphatic, and both were elderly. She was John Keats’s sister! I had a good deal of talk with her, or rather at her, for she was not very responsive. I was disappointed, for I remember that my sprightliness made her yawn; she seemed inert and had nothing to tell me of her wizard brother of whom she spoke as of a mystery—with a vague admiration but a genuine affection. She was simple and natural—I believe she is a very worthy woman.

Gaps and errors there thus were not a few in Monckton Milnes’s book when it appeared in two volumes in 1848. But it served its purpose admirably for the time being, and with some measure of revision for long afterwards. Distinguished in style and perfect in temper, the preface and introduction struck with full confidence the right note in challenging for Keats the character of ‘the Marcellus of the Empire of English song’; while the body of the book, giving to the world a considerable, though far from complete, series of those familiar letters, to his friends in which his genius shines almost as vividly as in his verse, established on full evidence the essential manliness of his character against the conception of him as a blighted weakling which both his friends and enemies had contrived to let prevail. Among the posthumous poems printed for the first time, the two longest, Otho and the Cap and Bells were not of his best, but masterpieces like La Belle Dame and The Eve of St Mark, with many miscellaneous things of high interest, were included. The reception of the book, though not, of course, unmixed, was in all quarters respectful, and the old tone of flippant contempt hardly made itself heard at all. I shall quote only one critical dictum on its appearance, and that is the letter in which the veteran Landor, in his highest style of urbanity and authority, acknowledged a copy sent him by the author:—

Dear Milnes,

On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks’ absence, I find your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets, excepting Shakespeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of the poetical character—fire, fancy, and diversity.... There is an effluence of power and light pervading all his works, and a freshness such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.

The book appeared just at the right moment, when the mounting enthusiasm of the young generation for the once derided poet was either gradually carrying the elders along with it or leaving them bewildered behind. Do readers remember how the simple soul of Colonel Newcome was perplexed by the talk of his son Clive and of Clive’s friends?—

He heard opinions that amazed and bewildered him: he heard that Byron was no great poet, though a very clever man ... that his favourite, Doctor Johnson, talked admirably, but did not write English; that young Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael; and that a young gentleman of Cambridge who had lately published two volumes of verses might take rank with the greatest poets of all. Doctor Johnson not write English! Lord Byron not one of the greatest poets of the world! Sir Walter a poet of the second order! Mr Pope attacked for inferiority and want of imagination; Mr Keats and this young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge, the chief of modern poetic literature! What were these new dicta, which Mr. Warrington delivered with a puff of tobacco smoke; to which Mr. Honeyman blandly assented, and Clive listened with pleasure?

Thackeray’s sketch of Clive and his companions scarcely suggests, nor was it meant to suggest, the characteristics of the special group of young artists in whom, almost contemporaneously with the appearance of Milnes’s book, the enthusiasm for Keats had begun to burn at its whitest heat. I refer of course to the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Of the three leaders of that movement, Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti, it is hard to say which, in the late ‘forties and early ‘fifties, declared himself first or most ardent in Keats-worship.10 Of Hunt’s exhibited pictures, one of the earliest showed the lovers in the Eve of St Agnes stealing past the sprawling porter and the sleeping bloodhound into the night; and of Millais’s earliest, one is from Isabella or the Pot of Basil, showing the merchant brothers and their sister and her lover at a meal in company (the well-known work, so queerly designed and executed with so much grip and character, now in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool). Rossetti had in these early days much less technical skill and training than either of his two associates. But from the first he was poet as well as painter, and instinctively and spiritually stood, we can well discern, much nearer to Keats than they did for all their enthusiasm.

Combining Italian blood and temperament with British upbringing, Rossetti added to his inherited and paternally inculcated knowledge and love of Dante a no less intense love and knowledge of English romance poetry, both that of the old ballads and that of the revival of 1800 and onwards. In boyhood and early youth waves of enthusiasm for different recent poets had swept over him one after another, first Shelley, then Keats, then Browning; but Keats, and next to Keats Coleridge, kept the strongest and deepest hold on him. When his first associates Hunt and Millais had parted from him on their several, widely divergent paths of public success and distinction, Rossetti became, in the comparative seclusion in which he chose to live, a powerful focus of romantic inspiration to younger men who came about him. He is reported to have urged upon William Morris that he should become a painter and not a poet, seeing that Keats had already done all there was to be done in poetry. Of all Keats’s poems, it was La belle dame sans Merci and The Eve of St Mark which most aroused the enthusiasm of Rossetti and his group. We have already seen how the latter fragment stands in our nineteenth-century poetry as a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between Chaucer and Morris. It was the task and destiny of Morris as a writer to give, by his abounding fertility and brooding delight in the telling of Greek and mediæval stories in verse, the most profuse and for the present perhaps the last expression to the pure romantic spirit in English narrative poetry: and to this effort Keats had given him the immediate impulse, though Chaucer was his ultimate great exemplar. Answering a congratulatory letter addressed to him by the veteran Cowden Clarke on the publication of the first volume of the Earthly Paradise, Morris speaks of ‘Keats for whom I have such a boundless admiration, and whom I venture to call one of my masters.’ I have quoted above (page 470) his emphatic later words to a like effect.

While the leaven was thus intensely working among a special group in England, an English poetess of quite other training and associations, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, paid in Aurora Leigh (1857) her well-known tribute to Keats in lines that are neither good as poetry nor accurate as fact, but in their chaotic way none the less passionately felt and haunting:—

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 accepted soul, I count it strange and hard to understand That nearly all young poets should write old.

Thus, between the effects of Monckton Milnes’s book and the enthusiasm of various groups of university men and poets and artists, the previously current contempt for Keats was from soon after the mid-century practically silenced and the battle for his fame, at least among the younger generation, won. He has counted for the last sixty years and more, alike in England and in America, as an uncontested great poet, whose works, collected or single, have been in demand in edition after edition. One of the earliest new issues was that edited in 1850 by Monckton Milnes, who continued nearly until the end, under his new style as Lord Houghton, to further by fresh editions and revisions the good work he had begun. Not only every professed critic and historian of our poetry, but nearly all our chief poets themselves, as Aubrey de Vere, James Russell Lowell, Matthew Arnold, Coventry Patmore, Swinburne, and latterly the present poet laureate, have been in various tones public commentators on Keats. All such comments have shed light upon his work in their degree. I can here only touch on a few special points and mention in their order a few of the contributions to the knowledge or appreciation of the poet which I think have helped the most.

One point to be remarked is that very few judges have seemed able to care equally for Keats and Shelley. A special devotion to Shelley, the poet who wedded himself in youth to a set of ready-made beliefs from Godwin, of which the chief was that all the miseries of the world were due to laws and institutions and could be cured by their abolition, who clothed these abstract beliefs in imagery of clouds and winds and ocean-streams, of meteor and rainbow and sunset and all things radiant and evanescent, and sang them to strains of music inimitably swift and passionate, seems incompatible with complete delight in the work of that other young poet who could hold fast no dogma spiritual or social, but found truth wherever his imagination could divine or create living and concrete beauty, and who, as to the sorrows of the world, was convinced that they were inherent in its very fabric and being, and yearned for knowledge and wisdom to assuage them but died before he had attained clearness or found his way. As between these two, Tennyson’s final and calm opinion is quoted by his son as follows:—‘Keats would have become one of the very greatest of all poets had he lived. At the time of his death there was apparently no sign of exhaustion or having written himself out; his keen poetical instinct was in full process of development at the time. Each new effort was a steady advance on that which had gone before. With all Shelley’s splendid imagery and colour, I find a sort of tenuity in his poetry.’ FitzGerald was much stronger on the same side, counting Shelley, to use his own words, as not worth Keats’s little finger. Matthew Arnold, who has said some memorably fine and just things about Keats, belittles the poetry of Shelley and even paradoxically prefers the prose of his essays and letters to his verse. With ardent Shelley-worshippers on the other hand full appreciation of Keats is rare. Swinburne, for one, has done little for Keats’s memory by the torrent of hyperbolical adjectives of alternate praise and blame which he has poured upon it. Mr William Rossetti, for whom Shelley is ‘one of the ultimate glories of our race and planet,’ has in his monograph on Keats, as I think, been icily unjust to his subject. And I can remember my admirable friend and colleague, Mr Richard Garnett of the British Museum, taking me roundly to task for the opinion, which I still stoutly hold, that the letters of Keats, with all their every-day humanity and fun and gossip, are in their wonderful sudden gleams and intuitions more vitally the letters of a poet than Shelley’s. But such preferences between two such contrasted geniuses and creators of beauty are perhaps inevitable, and have at any rate not prevented the equal and brotherly association of the two in the memorial house—the house in which Keats died—lately acquired and consecrated to their joint fame by representative English and Americans at Rome.

One great snare in judging of Keats is his variability of mood and opinion. The critic is apt to seize upon the expression of some one phase or attitude of mind that strikes him, and to theorize and draw conclusions from it as though it were permanent and dominant. The very excellence of what was best both in his poetry and himself is a second snare, tempting us to forget that after all he was but a lad, a genius and character not made but in the making. A third is the obvious and frankly avowed intensity of the sensuous elements in his nature. But the critic who casts these up against him should remember that it took the same capacity for sense-delights that inspired the rhapsodies on claret-drinking and nectarine-sucking in the letters, to inspire also, being spiritualized into imaginative emotion, the ‘blushful Hippocrene’ passage in the Nightingale ode or the feast of fruits, in all its pureness, of the revised Hyperion; and also that Keats, with his clear and sane self-consciousness, has rarely any doubt that the master bent within him was not his ‘exquisite sense of the luxurious’ but his love for the high things and thoughts which he calls ‘philosophy.’

It is a pity that the author of the one full and recent history of our poetry, the late Mr W.J. Courthope, should have been debarred from just appreciation of this poet alike by adopted dogma and by natural taste. Both led him to hold that the true power of poetry, the true test by which posterity must judge it, lies in the direct relations which it bears to the social and political activities of its period. That the re-awakening of the Western mind and imagination to nature and romance in the days of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars was a spiritual phenomenon not less important in human history than the wars themselves would have been a conception that his mind was incapable of entertaining. He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics. But of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a disillusion,—that the saving of the world from the grip of one great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in re-instating a number of ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less tyrannical. To that which lies behind and above politics and history, to the general destinies and tribulations of the race, he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only too acutely and tragically sensitive.

Turning to the chief real contributions to our appreciation and knowledge of Keats, I should give the first place to Matthew Arnold’s well-known essay11 of 1880. With his cunning art in the minting and throwing into circulation of phrases that cannot be forgotten, Arnold balanced the weaknesses against the strength of Keats’s work and character, blaming the gushing admirers who injured his memory by their ‘pawing and fondness,’ insisting on the veins of ‘flint and iron’ in his nature, insisting on his clear-sightedness, his lucidity, his perception of the vital connexion of beauty with truth and of both with joy, declaring that ‘no one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness,’ and clenching all, with reference to Keats’s own saying, ‘I think I shall be among the English poets after my death,’ by the comment, ‘he is, he is with Shakespeare.11 Almost simultaneously with Matthew Arnold’s essay, there appeared the very thoughtful and original study of Mrs F.M. Owen, in which were laid the foundations of a true understanding of Endymion as a parable of the experiences of a poet’s soul in its quest after Beauty.

The years 1883 and 1884 were great Keats years. In them there appeared the edition of the poems by the late W.T. Arnold, the first which contained a scholar’s investigations into the special sources of Keats’s poetic style and vocabulary: also the edition for the Golden Treasury Series by Francis Turner Palgrave, with a studiously collated text and a preface of more glowing and scarcely less just critical admiration than Matthew Arnold’s, only flawed, as I think, by a revival of that obsolete heresy of the ‘deadness’ of the Grecian mythology: and thirdly, the first issue of the late Mr Buxton Forman’s edition of the poetry and prose works together. All students know the results of this editor’s devoted and unremitting industry, maintained through a full quarter of a century, in the textual criticism of his author and in the publication and re-publication of editions containing every variant reading and every scrap of scattered prose or verse that could be recovered. To the same worker is due the unearthing and giving to the world of two groups of the poet’s letters which had been unknown to Monckton Milnes, the wholly admirable and delightful series addressed to his young sister, and the series, in great part distressing and deplorable, to Fanny Brawne. About 1887, I was myself able to put straight two matters that needed it by publishing the true text of the letters to America and by rectifying the current notion that the revised Hyperion had been a first draft. Before long came the essay of Mr Robert Bridges, passing the whole of Keats’s poetry under review, and dealing out judgments in a terse authoritative style to which, as one poet estimating another, he was fully entitled, and which at all moments commands interest and respect if it sometimes challenges contradiction. On some matters, and especially on the relations of Keats’s early poetry to Wordsworth, Mr Bridges has thrown a light too clear and convincing to be questioned.

When in 1892 the late Mr William Sharp compiled his Life of Joseph Severn from the vast, almost unmanageable mass of papers in the possession of the artist’s family (I had had them previously through my hands and can realize the difficulty of the task), he furnished valuable new material for our knowledge both of the life of Keats and of his after life in the opinions of men. Coming down to more recent years, we have the admirable editorial work of Professor de Sélincourt, as good, I think, as has been bestowed on any English poet, carrying out to the farthest point the researches initiated by W.T. Arnold, and illuminating the text throughout with the comments and illustrations of a keen scholar in classical and English literature. Nor can I leave unmentioned the several lectures by two successive Oxford professors of poetry, that of Mr A.C. Bradley on Keats’s letters and that of Mr. J.W. Mackail on his poetry. From these two minds, ripened in daily familiarity with the best literatures of the world, we have, after a hundred years, praise of Keats which almost makes Shelley’s seating of him among ‘Inheritors of unfulfilled renown’ seem like an irony,—praise more splendid than he would have hoped for had he lived to fulfil even the most daring of his ambitions. A special point in Mr Mackail’s work is to make clear how strong had been upon Keats the influence of the Divine Comedy, his pocket companion on his Scottish tour, and how in Hyperion, written in the next months after his return, there appears here and there, amid the general Miltonic strain of the verse, a quality of thought and vision drawn straight from and almost matching Dante. Lastly, there has recently come from America a tribute of quite another kind, showing how for purposes of systematic study Keats has been thought worthy of an apparatus hitherto only bestowed on the great classics of literature: I refer to the elaborate and monumental Concordance to his poems lately issued from Cornell University.

And must not, it may be asked, all this labour spent upon Keats’s memory and remains, all this load of editing and re-editing and commentary and biography and scholiast-work laid upon a poet who declared that all poems ought to be understood without any comment,—must it not by this time have fairly smothered, or is it not at least in danger of smothering, Keats himself and his poetry? Naturally in the course of my own work I have asked myself this question with qualms, bethinking myself of Tennyson’s phrase about swamping the sacred poets with themselves. The answer is,—No, such a poet can carry any weight we may choose to lay upon him, and more: he can never be smothered, inasmuch as he has both given the world something it can nevermore cease to want and suggested the existence within him of a power, quenched before its time, to give it something much more and greater yet. If the result of all our commentaries should be to provoke a reaction among readers, and to make them crave for a naked text both of the poems and letters and insist upon being left alone with that and their own meditations upon it,—well, so much the better. Every reader of the English tongue that has the works of Keats often enough in his hands, with or without comment, will find his life enriched with much of the best that poetry can do for human life, with achievements, very near to perfection, of that faculty which is the essential organ of poetry,—to which all others, spiritual and intellectual, are in poetry subordinate,—the faculty of imagination transfusing the vital beauty and magic and secret rhythm of things into the other magic and beauty and rhythm of words. Over and above this, he will find himself living in the familiarity of a great and lovable spirit, dowered at birth with capacities for joy and misery more intense almost than any of which we have record, and retaining its lovableness to the last in spite of circumstances that gave misery too cruelly the upper hand.

But, again the objector may ask, is it so certain that in the coming time the desire of readers for what Keats has to give them will survive without abatement? Have not the last three years been an utterly unprecedented, overwhelming and transforming experience for mankind? Will not the new world after the war be a new world indeed, on the one hand filled, nay, gorged, with recollections of doing and undergoing, of endurance and adventure, of daring and suffering and horror, of hellishness and heroism, beside which all the dreams of bygone romance must forever seem tame and vapid; and on the other hand straining with a hungry forecast towards a future of peace and justice such as mankind has not known before, which it will be its tremendous task to try and establish? Will not this world of so prodigiously intensified experiences and enlarged hopes and besetting anxieties require and produce new poets and a new poetry of its own that shall deal with the realities it has gone through and those it is striving for, and put away and cease to care for the old dreams and thrills and glamours of romance? Have we not in fact witnessed the first-fruits of this new tremendous stimulus in the cloud of young poets who have appeared—too many of them alas! only to perish—since the war began?

And again the answer is, No. However changed the world, work like that of Keats is not what it will ever let perish. The thrills and glamours which pass away are only those of the second-rate and the second-hand sort that come in and go out with literary fashion; not those which have sprung from and struck deep into the innermost places of the spirit. Doubtless there will arise and is arising a new poetry which will be very different from any phase of poetry produced by the romantic revolution and the generations that followed and nourished themselves on it. The new poetry may not be able fully to share Keats’s inspiring conviction of the sovereign, the transcendental truth of whatsoever ideas the imagination seizes as beauty. It may perhaps even abjure the direct search for beauty as its primary aim and impulse. But no matter: provided that its organ be the imagination, working with intensity on whatever themes the genius of the age may dictate, it cannot but achieve some phase, some incarnation, of beauty by the way. But gains like those which were made for the human spirit by the poetry of which Keats was one of the chief masters will never be lost again. Those who care for poetry at all must always care for those refreshing and inspiring draughts, as I have called them, from the innermost wells of antiquity, of nature, and of romance, those meditations of mingled joy and sorrow that search into the soul of things. Moreover they will never cease to interest themselves in the question,—If only this great spirit had survived, what would have been those unwritten poems of which he saw in the sky the cloudy symbols, of which he felt the pressure and prescience forcing the blood into his brain or bringing about his heart an awful warmth ‘like a load of immortality,’ and the perishing of which unborn within him was one of the two great haunting distresses of his dying days?

In letting speculation wander in this field, we are brought up by many problems as to what kind of manhood could have followed a youth like that of Keats, had he had better fortune and had the conditions and accidents of his life been such as to fortify his bodily constitution instead of sapping it. Youth, especially half-trained youth, is always subject to such storms and strains as those which Keats experienced with a violence proportionate to the fervour of his being. To the sane and sweet, the manly and courageous, elements in his character we have found his friends bear unanimous evidence, amply supported by the self-revelation of his letters. But self-revealed also we see the morbid, the corroding elements which lay beneath these, just as beneath his vigorous frame and gallant bearing there lay the bodily susceptibilities that with ill-luck enabled lung disease to fasten on and kill him. What must under any conditions have made life hard for him was the habitual inner contention and disquiet of his instincts and emotions in regard to that most momentous of human matters, love. When he lets his mind dwell on the opposed extremes of human impulse and experience, from the vilest to the most exalted, which the word-of-all-work, love, is used to cover, he is more savagely perplexed and out of conceit with life than from any other cause or thought whatever.12 The ruling power in himself, as he declares over and over again, was the abstract passion for beauty, the love of the principle of beauty in all things. But even in the poem specially designed to embody and celebrate that passion, in Endymion, we find his conception of realized and sexual human love to be mawkish and unworthy. When the actual experience befalls himself, he falls utterly and almost ignominiously a slave, at once enraptured and desperately resentful, to the jealous cravings which absorb and paralyse all his other faculties. Would ripened manhood or a happier experience have been able to bring health and peace to his spirit on this supremely vital matter and to turn him into a poet of love, love both human and transcendental, such as at the outset he had longed and striven to be?

Again, along with his admirable capacity for loyal devotion and sympathy in friendship, we find in him capacities of quite another kind, capacities for disillusionment and for seeing through and chafing at human and social shams and pretensions and absurdities; and we ask ourselves, would this strain in him, which we find expressed with a degree of pettish and premature cynicism, for instance in the Cap and Bells and in some of his later letters, have matured with time into a power either of virile satire or genial, reconciling comedy?

And once more, would that haunting, that irrepressible sense of the miseries of the world which we find breaking through from time to time amid the beauty of the odes, or the playfulness and affectionate confidences of the letters, or dictating that tragical return against himself and his achievements in the revised Hyperion,—could it and would it with experience have mellowed into such compassionate wisdom as might have made him one of the rare great healers and sages among the poets of the world?

Such speculations are as vain as they are inevitable. Let us indulge ourselves at any rate by remembering that it is the greatest among his successors who have held the most sanguine view as to the powers that were in him. Here are more words of Tennyson’s,—‘Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us. There is something magic and of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything which he wrote.’ Leaving with these words the question of what he might have done, and looking only at what he did, it is enough for any man’s glory. The days of the years of his life were few and evil, but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship shines eternally.

1 Everyone knows Wordsworth’s beautiful sonnet of God-speed to him. Haydon went to call on the great man, who had always been kind to him, as he passed through London, and except for two unfortunately chosen words, is at his very best in this picture of their parting:—‘After a quarter of an hour I took my leave, and as I arose he got up, took his stick, with that sidelong look of his, and then burst forth that beautiful smile of heart and feeling, geniality of soul, manly courage and tenderness of mien, which neither painter nor sculptor has ever touched. It was the smile of a superior creature who would have gathered humanity under the shelter of its wings and while he was amused at its follies would have saved it from sorrow and sheltered it from pain.’ (Life of B. R. Haydon, ed. Taylor, ii, 321.)

2 John Sterling, Essays and Tales, ii, 53.

3 Carefully edited, it is believed by Cyrus Redding, formerly an employé of the house.

4 Noctes Ambrosianæ, ii, 146: from Blackwood for December, 1828.

5 Quarterly Review, April 1833, page 81. The article was long supposed to be by Lockhart himself, but Mr Prothero has proved that it was by Croker.

6 In W. Smith’s Standard Library, exactly reprinted from the Galignani edition. America had in this matter been in advance of England, an edition of the poet’s works having appeared at Buffalo in 1834.

7 Essays and Tales, p. clxviii.

8 Notes on Gilfillan’s Literary Portraits: Collected Works, xi, 393. It is fair to add that twelve years later De Quincey went a good way in recantation of this outburst.

9 See Byron’s Collected Works, Prose, iii, 46, note.

10 See particularly Chaps. iv and v of Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

11 First published in T.H. Ward’s Selections from the English poets, and re-printed in the second series of Essays in Criticism (1892). To this essay I possess a curious postscript in a note of Arnold’s written a few years later to myself. I had thought his treatment of Endymion too slighting. His answer shows how fastidiousness could prevail in him over judgment. ‘If Keats,’ he writes, ‘had left nothing but Endymion, it would have alone shown his remarkable power and have been worth preserving on that account: but when he has left plenty which shows it much better I cannot but wish Endymion away from his volume.’

12 See the bitter comment on a passage in Burton’s Anatomy quoted in Mr Buxton Forman’s Complete Works of J. K. iii, 268, where Keats runs his head against the problem with which Plato had tried to deal in his myth of the two Aphrodites, Pandêmos and Urania. ‘The word-of-all-work, love,’ is a phrase of George Eliot’s.

APPENDIX

I. The Alexander fragment (page 33). Here is the text:—

Whenne Alexandre the Conqueroure was wayfayringe in y^e londe of Inde, there mette hym a damoselle of marveillouse beautie slepynge uponne the herbys and flourys. He colde ne loke uponne her withouten grete plesance, and he was welle nighe loste in wondrement. Her forme was everyche whytte lyke y^e fayrest carvynge of Quene Cythere, onlie thatte y^t was swellyd and blushyd wyth warmthe and lyffe wythalle.

Her forhed was as whytte as ys the snowe whyche y^e talle hed of a Norwegian pyne stelythe from y^e northerne wynde. One of her fayre hondes was yplaced thereonne, and thus whytte wyth whytte was ymyngld as y^e gode Arthure saythe, lyke whytest lylys yspredde on whyttest snowe; and her bryght eyne whenne she them oped, sparklyd lyke Hesperus through an evenynge cloude.

Theye were yclosyd yn slepe, save that two slauntynge raies shotte to her mouthe, and were theyre bathyd yn sweetenesse, as whenne by chaunce y^e moone fyndeth a banke of violettes and droppethe thereonne y^e silverie dewe.

The authoure was goynge onne withouthen descrybynge y^e ladye’s breste, whenne lo, a genyus appearyd—‘Cuthberte,’ sayeth he, ‘an thou canst not descrybe y^e ladye’s breste, and fynde a simile thereunto, I forbyde thee to proceede yn thy romaunt.’ Thys, I kennd fulle welle, far surpassyd my feble powres, and forthwythe I was fayne to droppe my quille.

This queer youthful passage in a would-be Caxton or Wynkyn de Worde spelling seems scarcely worth taking trouble about, but I thought it worth while to try and trace what reading Keats must have been fresh from when he wrote it, and consulted both Prof. Israel Gollancz and Mr Henry Bradley, with the result stated briefly in the text. At first I had thought Keats must have drawn his idea from some one of the many versions of the great mediæval Alexander romance—especially considering that in all forms of that romance a flight into the skies and a trip under the sea are regular incidents, and might later have suggested the parallel incidents in Endymion. But neither in the version which Keats is most likely to have known, the English Alisaunder as published in Weber’s collection of metrical romances, 1810, nor indeed, I believe, in any other, is there any incident closely parallel to this of the Indian maiden; although love and marriage generally come into the story towards the close. In the English version there is a beautiful Candace who declares her passion for the hero: he puts her off for the time being, but goes disguised as an ambassador to her court, where he is recognized and imprisoned. Among things derived from the main mediæval cycle, the nearest approach to such an idea as Keats was working on is to be found in the Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo, book ii, canto i, stanzas 6, 21-29; but here the beauty is a lady of Egypt whom Boiardo calls Elidonia. His description of the great painted hall of the giant Agramante at Biserta, adorned with pictures of the life and deeds of Alexander, closes with the following:—

In somma, ogni sua guerra ivi è dipinta Con gran richezza e bella a riguardare. Poscia che fu la terra da lui vinta, A due grifon nel ciel si fè portare, Col scudo in braccia e con la spada cinta; Poi dentro un vetro si cala nel mare, E vede le balene e ogni gran pesce E campa e ancor quivi di fuor n’esce. Da poi che vinto egli ha ben ogni cosa, Vedesi lui che vinto è dall’ amore, Perchè Elidonia, quella graziosa, Co’ suoi begli occhi gli ha passato il core—

And then ensues the history of their loves and of the hero’s death.

But Keats in his hospital days knew no Italian, and could only have heard of such a passage in Boiardo through Leigh Hunt. So I think the derivation of his fragment from any of the regular Alexander romances must be given up, and the source indicated in the text be accepted, namely the popular fabliau of the Lai d’Aristote (probably in Way’s rimed version), where the thing happens exactly as Keats tells it, and whence the idea of the sudden encounter with an Indian maiden probably lingered in his mind till he revived it in Endymion. As for the sources of the attempt at voluptuous description, it is a little surprising to find Milton’s ‘tallest pine hewn on Norwegian hills’ remembered in such a connexion: other things are an easily recognizable farrago from Cymbeline,—

‘Cytherea, How bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily, And whiter than the sheets!’

from Venus and Adonis,—

‘A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow;’ ‘Teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white;’

from Lucrece,—

—‘the morning’s silver-melting dew;’

from Twelfth Night,

—‘like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets;’

and so forth. Prof. Gollancz suggests that ‘Cuthberte’ as the name of the author is a reminiscence from the ‘Cuddie’ of Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calendar, and that the ‘good Arthure’ may also be some kind of Spenserian reference: but I suspect ‘Arthure’ here to be a mis-transcription (we have no autograph) for ‘authoure.’

II. Verses written by Brown and Keats after visiting Beauly Abbey (p. 295).—The text, of which there exist two separate transcripts, is as follows. I have printed in italics the lines which Keats, as he told Woodhouse, contributed to the joint work.

On Some Skulls in Beauly Abbey, near Inverness

I shed no tears; Deep thought or awful vision, I had none By thousand petty fancies I was crossed. Wordsworth.

And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by. Shakspeare.

1 In silent barren Synod met Within these roofless walls, where yet The shafted arch and carved fret Cling to the Ruin The Brethren’s Skulls mourn, dewy wet, Their Creed’s undoing. 2 The mitred ones of Nice and Trent Were not so tongue-tied,—no, they went Hot to their Councils, scarce content With Orthodoxy But ye, poor tongueless things, were meant To speak by proxy. 3 Your Chronicles no more exist Since Knox, the Revolutionist Destroy’d the work of every fist That scrawl’d black letter Well! I’m a Craniologist And may do better. 4 This skull-cap won the cowl from sloth Or discontent, perhaps from both And yet one day, against his oath He tried escaping For men, tho’ idle may be loth To live on gaping. 5 A Toper this! he plied his glass More strictly than he said the Mass And lov’d to see a tempting lass Come to Confession Letting her absolution pass O’er fresh transgression. 6 This crawl’d thro’ life in feebleness Boasting he never knew excess Cursing those crimes he scarce could guess Or feel but faintly With prayer that Heaven would cease to bless Men so unsaintly. 7 Here’s a true Churchman! he’d affect Much charity and ne’r neglect To pray for Mercy on th’ elect But thought no evil In sending Heathen, Turk and Scot All to the Devil! 8 Poor Skull! Thy fingers set ablaze, With silver saint in golden rays, The Holy Missal, thou didst craze ‘Mid bead and spangle While others passed their idle days In coil and wrangle. 9 Long time this sconce a helmet wore, But sickness smites the conscience sore, He broke his sword and hither bore His gear and plunder Took to the cowl—then rav’d and swore At his damn’d blunder! 10 This lily-coloured skull with all The teeth complete, so white and small Belonged to one whose early pall A lover shaded. He died ere Superstition’s gall His heart invaded. 11 Ha! here is ‘undivulged crime!’ Despair forbad his soul to climb Beyond this world, this mortal time Of fever’d badness Until this Monkish Pantomime Dazzled his madness! 12 A younger brother this! a man Aspiring as a Tartar Khan But, curb’d and baffl’d he began The trade of frightening It smack’d of power! and how he ran To deal Heaven’s lightning! 13 This idiot-skull belonged to one, A buried miser’s only son Who, penitent ere he’d begun To taste of pleasure And hoping Heaven’s dread wrath to shun Gave Hell his treasure. 14 Here is the forehead of an Ape A robber’s mask—and near the nape That bone—fie on’t, bears just the shape Of carnal passion Ah! he was one for theft and rape In Monkish fashion! 15 This was the Porter!—he could sing Or dance, or play—do anything And what the Friars bade him bring They ne’er were balked of; Matters not worth remembering And seldom talk’d of. 16 Enough! why need I further pore? This corner holds at least a score, And yonder twice as many more Of Reverend Brothers, ’Tis the same story o’er and o’er They’re like the others!

III. List of Books in Keats’s Library compiled by Richard Woodhouse.—This list, of great interest to all students of Keats, is in the possession of Mr J.P. Morgan, to whom I am much indebted for allowing it to be transcribed for my use. I give it verbatim, without attempting (though it would be an attractive bibliographical exercise) to identify particular editions.

Wordsworth’s Poems 8vo 2 Vol.

Fairfax’s Tasso 5 ” 1 ” bound

Petrarch’s Sonnets and Odes ” 1 ”

Hazlitt’s Principles of Human action ” 1 ”

Drayton’s Poems (Edn. Jno. Smethwick) ” 1 ”

Chaucer’s Poems 12mo 7 ”

Hunt’s Descent of Liberty 8vo 1 ”

Dante’s Inferno by Carey ” 2 ” bound

Herrick’s Poems ” 1 ”

Burton’s Anat. of Melancholy ” 2 ” bound

Aikin’s History of the year 12mo 1 ” bound

Potter’s Grecian Antiqs 8vo 2 ”

Adam’s Roman L ” 1 ”

Davies’ Celtic Researches ” 1 ”

Spelman’s Xenophon ” 1 ” bound

Vertot’s Roman Revolutions (F) ” 3 ” bound

Lady Russell’s Letters 12mo 2 ”

Bacon’s Essays ” 1 ”

Boyle’s Reflections ” 1 ”

Cowley’s Essays ” 1 ”

Locke’s Conduct ” 1 ”

Clarendon’s Essays 12mo 1 ”

Bacon’s Essays 8vo 1 ” bound

French Prayer Book 18mo 1 ” bound

Erasmus’ Moriae Encomium 36mo 1 ” bound

French Rabelais 12mo 1 ” bound

Ovid’s Metamorphoses 18mo 1 ”

Ariosto da Boschino ” 6 ”

Coleridge, Lamb and Lloyd 8vo 1 ” bound

Prayer Book folio 1 ” bound

Southwell’s Bible ” 1 ” bound

Chaucer (black Letter) ” 1 ”

Levy’s Roman History (1686) ” 1 ” bound

Auctores Mythographi Latini 4to 1 ” bound

Siècle de Louis XIV (Voltaire) 12mo 5 ”

Raleigh’s Hist. of the World folio 1 ” bound

Guzman d’Alfarache ” 1 ” bound

Les Oeuvres d’Amboise ” 1 ” bound

Ciceronis Orationes 8vo 1 ” bound

Lemprière’s Class. Dict. ” 1 ”

An Atlas ” 1 ” bound

Ben Johnson & Beaumont & Fletcher ” 4 ”

Rime di Petrarcha 12mo 1 ” bound

Ainsworth’s Dict. 8vo 1 ” bound

Z. Jackson’s Illus. of Shakespeare ” 1 ”

Carew, Suckling, Prior, Congreve, Black-more,

more, Fenton, Granville and Malden ” 1 ” bound

Ovidii Metamorphoseon ” 1 ” bound

Bailey’s Dictionary ” 1 ” bound

Hunt’s Juvenilia ” 1 ” bound

Fencing familiarized ” 1 ” bound

Aminta di Tasso 12mo 1 ” bound

Burton (abridged) 8vo 1 ”

Poetae minores Graeci ” 1 ” bound

Greek Grammar ” 1 ” bound

Terentii Comedia ” 1 ” bound

Bishop Beveridge’s Works ” 1 ” bound

Old Plays (5th Vol. with Reynolds) ” 6 ”

Bible 12mo 1 ” bound

Conducteur à Paris ” 1 ”

Horatii Opera ” 1 ” bound

Burns’s Poems 18mo 1 ” bound

Mickle’s Lusiad ” 1 ” bound

Palmerin of England 8vo 4 ” bound

Vocabulaire Italien Franc ” 1 ” bound

Baldwin’s Pantheon ” 1 ” bound

Oeuvres de Molière 12mo 6 ”

Dict. Phil. de Voltaire ” 14 ”

Essai sur les Moeurs de do. ” 8 ”

Nouv. Héloise (Rousseau) ” 4 ”

Emile (Rousseau) ” 3 ”

Description des Antiques 8vo 1 ”

Spectator (1st lost) 8vo 7 ” bound

Shakespeare (6th lost) 12mo 7 ”

Marmontel’s Incas (3rd lost) ” 2 ” bound

Hist. of K. Arthur (2nd lost) 18mo 1 ”

Odd Vol. of Spencer—damaged

Names of friends to whom Keats had either given or lent certain works.

1 Mr B. Bailey 10 Miss Keats

2 Mrs Brawne 11 Mrs Jones

3 Mr S. Brawne 12 ” Mancur

4 ” Browne 13 ” Reynolds

5 ” Clark 14 ” Rice

6 ” Dilke 15 ” Richards

7 ” Haslam 16 ” Severn

8 ” Hessey 17 ” Taylor

9 ” Hunt 18 ” Woodhouse

INDEX

Abbey, Mrs Richard, in charge of Fanny Keats, 147, 337, 338

Abbey, Richard, trustee for the Keats family, 16, 83, 147, 338, 340, 354, 365, 529

on Mrs T. Keats, 6-7

Abbot, The (Scott), 476

Achilles, Homeric character of, Keats’s admiration for, 147

Acis and Galatea (Handel’s libretto), Song in, compared with passage in Endymion, 225

Adam’s Dreams (Paradise Lost), Keats’s debt to, 154-5

Aders family, 483

Adonais (Shelley), Blackwood parody on, 519

Enthusiasm for at Cambridge (1829), 520, 527

Poetic form of, 517

Preface to, on the effect of hostile reviews on Keats, 517

Reprint of (1829), 527

Tribute of to Keats, 483, 517-19

Adonis, Awakening of, in Endymion, 185

Address to Hope (Keats), style and form of, 86

Adlington’s translation of the Golden Ass of Apuleius, Keats’s possible reading of, 412 & n.

Admonition, the, in Hyperion, 452

Adventures of a Younger Son (Trelawny), Brown’s aid in, 523

Aeneid, Keats’s prose version of, 18

After Dark Vapours, sonnet (Keats), 91

Ailsa Craig, Keats on, 283-4

Alastor (Shelley), Allegoric theme of, 171-2, 234-6, 468

Date of publication, 234

Hunt’s praise of, 69, 234

Influence of on Keats, 73, 234-6

Alexander fragment (Keats) in prose, 33, 551-2

Alexander’s Feast (Dryden), Wordsworth on, 251

Alfieri, lines by, applicable to Keats, 504

Alfred, The, Reynolds’s article in, on Keats’s work, 312

Allegory, in

Alastor, 171-2, 234-6, 468

Endymion, 171-2 et alibi

Allegro, L’ (Milton), metre of, 386

Alice Fell (Wordsworth), 348

Alps, the, impression made by on Shelley, 237

Alsager, T.M., lender of Chapman’s Homer to Clarke, 39

Ambleside, Keats at, 274, 277

America, tribute from, to the value of Keats’s poems, 545

American edition of Keats’s poems, date of the first, 528 n. 2

Aminta (Tasso), Hunt’s translation dedicated to Keats, 472

Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), Keats’s inspirations from, 354, 358, 371, 396-7, 404-5, 412, 549 n.

Ancient Mariner (Coleridge), 121, 396

Angela, in the Eve of St Agnes, 402-4 & n.

Annals of the Fine Arts, Ode to a Nightingale published in, 354

Annus Mirabilis (Dryden), echoed by Keats, 392 & n.

Antiquary (Scott), Keats’s attitude to, 279

Apollo in Delos, 428

Hymn to, see Hymn

Apollo’s speech in Hyperion, 435, 437

Apuleius, The Golden Ass of, Keats’s possible reading of, 412 & n.

Arabian Nights, influence of, seen in Endymion, 175, 184, 190, 191, 195

Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen (Wolters) cited, 416 n.

Arethusa myth, in Ovid, and Keats’s and Shelley’s poems, 187

Arethusa (Shelley), 187-8, 241

Ariosto, Keats’s studies in, 370, 398

Arne’s opera Artaxerxes, a song in, quoted by Keats, 490 & n.

Arnold, Matthew, on the works of Keats and of Shelley, 540, 541, 543 & n.

Arnold, W. T., researches of, on Keats’s style, &c., and edition of his poems issued by, 544, 545

Artaxerxes, opera (Arne), Keats’s quotation from, 490 & n.

Arts, the, excellence of, Keats on, 253

Asclepiad, The, cited on Keats as medical student, 30 & n.

As from the darkening gloom a silver dove, sonnet (Keats, 1816), 91

As late I rambled in the happy fields, sonnet (Keats), 90

Astronomy (Bonnycastle), Keats’s prize-book (1811), 16 n.

Athenaeum, Dilke’s editorship of, 530, 533; Maurice’s editorship, 526

Reynolds’s Contributions to, 533

Sterling’s praise of Keats in (1828), 326-7

A Thing of beauty is a joy for Ever (Keats), composition of, 176 & n.

Auctores Mythographi Latini, ed. Van Staveren; owned and used by Keats, 447 & n.

Audubon, and George Keats, 365

‘Augustan’ poets, Keats’s dislike of, 18

Aurora Leigh, Mrs Browning’s tribute in, to Keats, 539-40

Autobiographical Fragment, An (Procter), 47 n.

Autobiography (Hunt), 401

Autumnal Scenes in Keats’s poems, 159, 161-2

Awnmarsh, Allan, translation of the Decameron published by, 397 & n.

Bacchic lyric in Endymion: inspiration of, 230 et sqq., possible influence on, of Wordsworth, 251

Keats’s term for, 388

Bacchus, in Alexander’s Feast, Wordsworth on, 251

Triumph of, figured on sarcophaguses, 231 & n.

‘Bacchus and Ariadne,’ Titian’s picture of, as inspiration for Keats, 231

Bailey, Archdeacon Benjamin, friend of Keats, 133-4, 151, 262, 295

Criticism of Endymion by, 189, 211, 270.

Impression made on, by Poems, 134

Keats’s visit to, at Oxford, 142, in his own words, 143 et sqq.

Letters to, from Keats, 150-2 et sqq., 245, 255, 257, 262, 270-1, 288-9

and Lockhart and the Reviews, 306-7, 309, 474

Memoranda of, on Keats, 534-5

Milton enthusiasm of, 257

Suitor to Mariane Reynolds, 134; the withdrawal, 341

Support of, to Keats in the battle of the critics, 306-7, 309, 311-12, 474

on Keats’s Theory of Vowel Sounds, 147, 402

on Keats when Reading Aloud, 144, 190 n.

Baldwin’s Pantheon, Keats’s debt to, 228, 231

Bards of Passion, Ode (Keats), form, metre, hints of belief in Immortality in, 386-7

‘Barry Cornwall,’ see Procter

Beaconsfield, Earl of, 536

Beadsman, the, in Eve of St Agnes, 399, 400, 402-4 & n.

Beattie, James, poems of, 19

Beauly Abbey, Skulls in, Verses on by Brown and Keats, 295, 440, 553-6

Beaumont and Fletcher, references by to the Endymion myth, 168

Beaumont, Sir George, and Haydon, 62, and Mrs Siddons, 461

Beaumont, Sir John, on the rime-beat in the heroic measure, 101, 102

Beauty, in Art and in Poetry, Keats’s views on, 253, 254, 418

Essential, Striving for communion with, the true subject of Endymion, 167 et passim.

Over-comment on, and the loss of bloom, Keats on, 263

Bebr Salim, Arabian tale of, 195

Beckford’s Vathek familiar to Keats, 184

Bedford, Duke of, carved sarcophaguses owned by, 231 n.

Bedhampton, Keats’s visits to, 333, 491

Eve of St Agnes written at, 333

Belfast, Keats’s flying visit to, 281

Bells and Pomegranates (Browning), 528

Ben Nevis, Keats on his climb up, 293-4

Ben Nevis, Sonnet written upon the Top of (Keats), 294

Bentham, Jeremy, and Hunt, 43

Bentley, Keats’s postman landlord, 141, 322

Mrs, kindness of, 322

Beppo (Byron), 309

Bertha in Eve of St Mark, 437, 439, and in Cap and Bells, 444-6

Bertram, a play (Maturin), Coleridge and, 303

Bideford, a Keats as rector of, 4

Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), criticism of, in Blackwood’s, 300

on the Poetic Revolution, 119

on Wordsworth’s poems, 245-6

Bion’s Dirge on Adonis, Shelley’s use of, 517

Blackwood, William, and the Edinburgh Magazine, 297 et sqq.; Scott’s countenance sought by, 303-4; Taylor’s encounter with, over the criticism on Keats, 475-7

Blackwood’s (Edinburgh) Magazine

Critical savagery of, and attitude to Coleridge, Hunt, Keats and others, 45, 76, 137, 151-2, 299-300; first article of the ‘Cockney School Series’ in, attacking Hunt, 152; attacks in, on Keats, 297; details of the policy of the magazine, its editors, &c., 297 et sqq.; “Z” articles in, 301-3, 307-8, 474, 527; fatal duel due to, 519; indignation of Keats’s friends, 309 et sqq., 516 et sqq., 522; Scott’s attitude, 305-6, 525-6

Hazlitt’s quarrel with, 521, and accusation of, as to the death of Keats, 522

Impenitence, and further berating of Keats by, 477-8

Blake, William, drawings of, 393 Poems of, new note in, 107-8

Blank verse, corruption of, 17th century, 100

Blundell’s School, Tiverton, 4

Boccaccio, influence of, on Keats, 259-60, 333-4, 389, 397 & n. 1, 400 n. 2

Boiardo, 552 Keats’s reference to, 356

Bolton-le-Sands, Keats at, 271

Bookman, The, of New York, Haydon’s ‘Christ’s entry into Jerusalem’ reproduced and discussed in, 462 n.

Books in Keats’s Library, 228 n., 390 n., 397 n., 447 n. 1

List of, compiled by Woodhouse, 556-8

Borghese, Princess (Pauline Bonaparte), and Severn, 503

Borghese Vase, the, 416

Borghese Zodiac, picture of, as inspiration to Keats, 200

Borrowers, Keats’s difficulties due to, 323-4, 327-8, 516, 517

Bowles, William Lisle, editor of Pope, 480; Byron’s controversy with, 120

Bowness, view of Windermere from, 273

Bradley, A. C., lectures by, on Keats’s letters, 545

on the Influence of Alastor on Endymion, 234

Bradley, Henry, 551

Brawne, Fanny, appearance and character of, 329, 330 & n.

Keats’s love-affair with, and its effects on him, 329 et sqq., 437, 455, 488, 491-2, 494, 497, 516, 535

Keats’s love-letters to, 360 et sqq., 365, 374, 375, 457-8, 459-60, 464-5, 544

Letters of, to Keats at Rome, effect of on him, 508, 511, 514

Marriage of, 535

Milnes’s error as to, 535

on Keats’s memory, 535

on her love and fears for Keats, 514

on the strength and expression of Keats’s passions, 465-6

Brawne, Mrs, 329, 330, 331, 514

Keats’s stay with, 375, 376-7, 485

Letters to, from

Keats, in quarantine, 497-8

Severn, on Keats’s state in Rome, 505-6, 507-8

Tragic fate of, 535

Bridal night lines, in Sleep and Poetry, tenderness of, 124

Bridges, Robert, on

Keats’s poetry, 540

and its relation to Wordsworth, 126-9, 544-5

on Endymion

Parallel between and Moore’s Epicurean, 186 n.

Structure of the poem, 173

Bright Star, sonnet (Keats), a cry of the heart, 334-5; two forms of, 493-4

Britannia’s Pastorals (Browne), as model to Keats, 21, 93, 98, 109-10, 124

Double-endings in, 98, 109-10, 207

Echoes of, in Keats’s poems, 93, 109-10, 349, 350, 401, 418

Lines in, on

Devon, 261

Endymion, 167-8 & n.

British Critic, on Endymion, and on the Lamia volume, 474

British Institution, pictures seen by Keats at, 78, 231, 464

British Museum, art treasures in, Keats’s knowledge of, and inspiration from, 66, 78, 231-2, 416

Broadmayne, Dorset, the Keatses of, 4

Brougham, Lord, challenge of, to the Lowthers, 272

Support given by, to Hunt, 43

Brown, Charles, attitude of, to George Keats, 529, 530

and Dilke, relations between, 381-2, 530

Fairy tales, satiric, by, 381-2, 444

Friendship of with Keats, 141, 142, 159, 535

Biographical designs of, 529, 530

Scottish walking tour with Keats, 268, 271, 272 et sqq.; Diaries of, cited, 273 & n.

Keats’s life with, 320 et sqq. Collaboration in writing, 295, 357, 359, 364, 376, 440 et sqq., 553-6

Keats’s (temporary) indignation against, 465

Loan by, to Keats, 357, 373

Second tour of in Scotland, 462; leading to absence at Keats’s departure for Italy, 487, 488, 491

Letters to, from Keats, 371 et sqq., 464, 491-2, 500, 504-5

Satiric verses on, by Keats, 345

Keats’s poems transcribed by, 494 n., 496 & n.

Later life in Italy, and death in New Zealand, 522-31

on Fanny Brawne and her love for Keats, 514; and on her grief at his death, 515

on the cause of Keats’s illness, 516, 517, 522

on the influence of the Faerie Queene on Keats, 20

on the Ireby dancing-school, 277

on Keats’s first sight of Windermere, 273-4

on Keats’s state of mind and health (Oct. 1819), 375 et sqq.; on the fatal chill, 284; on Keats as invalid, 456

on the writing of the Ode to a Nightingale, 353-4 & n.

Browne, William, of Tavistock, works of (see also Britannia’s Pastoral), Keats’s familiarity with, 21; as affecting his style, 93, 109, 124

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, tribute of to Keats, 539-40

Browning, Robert, inspiration derived by from gift of poems of Keats and Shelley, 526

Rossetti’s enthusiasm for, 538

Slow sale of his Bells and Pomegranates series, 528

Bulletin and Review of the Keats-Shelley Memorial (Morris), 510 n.

Burford Bridge Inn, Keats’s stay at, 152-3, 158, 162, 242

Endymion finished at, 158, 161-3

Burnet’s History of his Own Time, influence of, on Keats, 14

Burney, Fanny, 159 n.

Burns, Robert, an English, see Clare

Keats on, 282, 283-4

Burton, Robert (see Anatomy of Melancholy), and the legend of St Agnes’ Eve, 396-7

Burton-in-Kendal, Keats at, 272

Byron, Lord

Allusion to, in Hyperion, 453

Attitude of, to

Keats, 432, 480-1, 517, 520

Hunt, 43, 47 n., 49

and the Elgin marbles, 60

Poems of (see also under names), 49, 518

Early Influences on, and sources of inspiration, 2, 268

Keats’s appreciation of, 31, and sonnet on, 91

Monetary gains of, 82

Verse forms used by, 108, 390

Reynolds’s poem dedicated to, 74

Sovereignty of, as poet, 526, 537

at Shelley’s cremation, 521

on the effect of the Reviews on Keats, 517, 520 & see 315

on Hyperion, 432

on Leigh Hunt, 47 n., and on his Story of Rimini, 49

Departure for Italy, 522

Death of, 521

Byron’s Collected Works, Prose, on Reynolds in later life, 533 & n.

Calidore (Keats), and its Induction, 34, sentiments, form and metre of, 111, 122, 470

Callington, the Keatses of, 5

Cambridge Students, enthusiasm of for Adonais, and for Keats, 520, 527, 530

Campbell, John, of Islay, on the Goylen story, 291 n.

Campbell, Thomas, poet, as editor, 473

Poems of

Heroic couplet used in, 108

Jeffrey on, 528

Hunt on, 44

Camelford, the Keatses around, 5

Camperdown, sea fight of, Keats’s uncle in, 5

Canterbury, effect of on Keats, 140

Canova, Severn’s introduction to, 501

Cap and Bells, The; or, The Jealousies (Keats), written with Brown, 140, 380, 470

Copying of, 376, 379

Echoes in, 87 & n.

First printed, 537

Idea inspiring, story, metre, tone, &c., 367, 444, 447, 549

Keats’s discontent with, 380, 381, 445 & n.

Lines on margin of, 455

Stanzas in, suggestive of Queen Caroline’s arrival, 463

Carisbrooke, Endymion begun at, 135, 161, 176 n.

Carlyle, Thomas, on Hunt, Lamb and Keats, 532

Caroline, Queen, at Dover, 463

Caroline poetry, an instance of Keats’s interest in, 150

Cary’s Dante, echoes of, by Keats 400 n. 1

Castle Builder, The (Keats), a fragment, 389

Castle of Indolence, The (Thomson), 28, 342

‘Cave of Despair,’ Severn’s competition picture, 380

Cave of Quietude, in Endymion, 154

Cenci, The (Shelley) gift of by Shelley to Keats, 467, 485

Chaldee MS., the, 301-3; Scott on, 304

Chamberlayne, William, misuse of the Heroic Couplet by, 100-1, 209 n.

Champion, The, 519; Stage criticisms in, by Keats, 242-4

Chapman, George, see also Homer, Hymn to Apollo, Hymn to Pan, Iliad, Odyssey

Heroic couplet used by, 98; lines illustrating, 99

Metre used by, fault in, 209

Strained rimes of, 211

Translation of Homer by, as influencing Keats, 38 et sqq., 124, 206, 428

Character in men of Power, and its absence in men of Genius, Keats on, 154

Charioteer theme, in Sleep and Poetry, 117-18, 119, 198-9

Charis lyrics (Jonson), metre of, 386

‘Charmian,’ an East-Indian, 318-19, 330; Milnes’s error on, 535

Charles II., Scott’s handling of, 45

Chartier, Alain, and La Belle Dame sans Merci, 350, 469

Chatterton, and the Rowley forgeries, 106-7; English of, and verse-flow, 369; Keats’s admiration for, 146-7, and sonnet on, 23, 91

Chaucer, Geoffrey, poems of, 186

Echoes of, in Eve of St Mark, 437-8, 539

Heroic couplet as used in, lines illustrating, 93-4

Influence on Keats, 391

Keats’s studies in, 341, & see 75 & n.

Landor on, 537

Morris’ exemplar, 539

Verse of, as ‘translated’ by Dryden, 103-4

Cheapside, No. 76, lodging of the Keats brothers, 28, 134

Chichester, Keats at, 333

Chief of organic numbers (Keats), origin of, 257

Childe Harold (Byron), 21

Christabel (Coleridge), 121; criticism of, in the Edinburgh Review, 299, 300; tags from, used by Keats, 243

Christie, J. H., 310, 311; duel of, with Scott, over the ‘Z’ papers, 519, 526

‘Christopher North,’ see Wilson

‘Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,’ Haydon’s picture, 60, 248, 250; Keats on, 256; private view of, Keats at, various comments; Keats’s head painted in, 460-2

Christ’s Hospital, Reynolds’s father’s post at, 74

Church Street, Edmonton, Keats’s home at, 9

Circe, in Endymion, 191 et sqq.

Clare, John, 475 & n.

Clarendon Press edition of Keats’s poems 1906, frontispiece of, 416 n.

Claret, and Game, Keats on his liking for, 340

Clark, Sir James, Keats’s doctor in Rome, 501, 502, 503, 504, 514; kindness of, with his wife, to Keats, 506

Clarke, Charles Cowden, 252, 539; Keats’ sonnet on when asleep over Chaucer, 75 & n.

Epistle to (Keats), 37-8, 113

and Hunt, in prison, 43-4

Relations with Keats, 8, 12, 18, 19, 20 et sqq., 34-5, 36, 64; introduction by, to Hunt, 36, and to Homer’s poems, 38 et sqq.

Keats’s letter to, in Dean St. days, 34

recollections, on Keats at a bear-baiting, 81-2; on Keats’s fight with a butcher boy, 343; on Keats at school, 13, 531-2, and his successes, 14; on Keats’s introduction to Leigh Hunt, 34-5; on Keats’s power of Self-expression, 81; on Keats’s reading Poetry, 225-6; on Keats as surgeon’s apprentice, 17 et sqq., and medical student, 28; on Keats’s verse-writing to a given subject, 55; on last sight of Keats, 342; on the publication of Poems, 130, 131

on T. Keats senior, 6

Clarke, John, Keats’s schoolmaster, 7, 8, 17, 343

Clarke, Mrs. Charles Cowden, on Keats at her father’s house, 328

Claude, pictures by, inspiring Keats, 264, 291 n., 417

Clive Newcome and his friends on the Victorian poets, 536-7

Closed or Stopped Couplet system, the, 95 et sqq.

Avoidance of, by Keats, 207, 209 n.

Croker’s attitude to, 311

Clowes, Messrs., and Webb, 76-7

Cockerell, Sydney, on Morris and the changes in La Belle Dame sans Merci, 470

‘Cockney School,’ articles on, in Blackwood’s, 45, 76, 137, 152, 299-300 et sqq., 477-8; effect of, 313, 370, 516 et sqq.

Shelley included in, by Maginn, 519

Cockneyism, verses by Keats charged with, 109 n.

Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, see New Monthly

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Anatomical studies of, 29

Critical style of, 46

Friend of Haydon, 62

Lack of negative capability in, Keats on, 254

Lectures by, on Shakespeare, 244

Poems of, 21, 121

Disuse by, of the older verse form, 108, 118, 119, 207

Echo of, in Endymion, 230

Galignani’s edition of, 150 n., 527

Hazlitt’s criticism on, 299, 300

Hunt’s verdict on, 44

Rossetti’s enthusiasm for, 538

Political change of view of, 45

Relations with Wordsworth, 45, 108, 207; strained, 245-6

on the Poetic revolution, 119; on the Reviews and Keats’s death, 347; on his walk with Keats (‘There is Death in that hand’), 346-8; on Wordsworth’s poems, 245-6

College St., Westminster, Keats’s stay in, 374-5

Collins, William, poems of, 19

‘Come hither, all sweet maidens,’ see On a Picture of Leander

Commonwealth and Restoration Poets, use of the heroic couplet by, with illustrations, 102 et sqq.

Complete Works of John Keats, edited by H. Buxton Forman, referred to, 262, 335 n. 1, 392 n., 400 n. 1, 459 n., 549 n.

Compound Epithets, Keats’s felicity in, 412-13

Comus (Milton), 19, 432; Echoes of, in Endymion, 195; Keats’s recitations from, 495

Concordance to Keats’s Poems, published by Cornell University, 545

Constable, Archibald, owner of the Edinburgh Review, 297, 311-12

Relations with Scott, 303, 524-5

Cooke, Thomas, translator of Hesiod, 428

Coolness and Refreshment in Nature, preferred in Keats’s imagery, 217-18

Cooper, George, 30

Cooper, Sir Astley, and Keats, 30, 31

Copthall Court, possible treasures in, 534

Cornell, see Concordance.

Cornhill Magazine for April, 1917, cited on Coleridge’s talk with Keats, 347-8 & n.

Cornish origin of Keats’s father, Fanny Keats on, 3

Corsair, The (Byron), form used in, 108

Cotterell, Charles, kindness of, to Keats, 496, 498, 501

Cotterell, Miss, 488, 489, 490, 495, 496, 498

Country Ballads, Wordsworth’s, Strained simplicity of, 121, 348

Couplet, Closed, versus Free System, 95 et sqq.

Courthope, W. J., judgment of, on Keats, 542-3

Cowley, Abraham, use of the heroic couplet by, 103

Crabbe, George, use of the heroic couplet by, 108

Craven St., City Road, Keats’s home at, 3

Crewe, Earl of, owner of MS. of the Ode to a Nightingale, 354 n.

Cripps, ——, Haydon, and Keats, 151

Criticism, early 19th century

Amenities of, 137-8

Destructive, Jeffrey on, 480

Personalities in, Scott on, 305-6

Croker, John Wilson, criticisms by, on

Endymion, 310-11

Tennyson’s and Keats’s Poems, 528 n. 1

‘Crown, A, of Ivy,’ sonnet (Hunt), occasion of, 56

Cupid and Psyche myth, sources of, open to Keats, 412

Curse, The, of Kehama (Southey), 121

Curse, The, of Minerva (Byron), 60

Cybele, passage on, in Sandys’s Ovid’s Metamorphoses, compared with that in Endymion, 223-4

Cynthia and Endymion story, Keats’s love for, 164, 166

Dancing, country school of, at Ireby, described by Brown, and by Keats, 277-8

Dante, 244

Poems of

Eagle in, 186

Influence of, on Keats, 400 n. 1, 544, 545

Keats’s travelling book, 272, 545

Rossetti’s love for, 538

Sonnet-beginnings used by, 92

Davideis, The (Cowley), metre of, 103

Dean St., No. 8, Borough, Keats’s first independent abode, 28

‘Death of Alcibiades,’ Severn’s picture for competition, 503

Death and Dying, Keats’s allusions to, in his poems, 112, 203, 336, 344

Deathbed feelings of a Poet, Keats on, in the Epistle to George Keats, 112

Decay of Pagan Beauty, Keats’s sonnet on, see To Leigh Hunt

Decameron, influence of, on Keats, see Boccaccio

Decasyllabic Couplet, see Heroic Couplet

Defence of Poesy (Shelley), Miltonian passage in, 430 & n.

Delight, the spirit animating Keats’s poetry, 83-4

‘Della Cruscan’ school, 519

‘Dentatus,’ picture by Haydon, 60

De Quincey, Thomas, as critic, 46, 430 on Keats, and his poetry, 213, 528 and Shelley’s poetry, 477

Descent, The, of Liberty, A Masque (Hunt), 44

de Sélincourt, Professor E., Editorial work of, on Keats’s poems, 545

on Endymion

‘Four Elements’ theory, 173

‘Moon’ passage in, 215

on Eve of St Agnes

‘Corbels’ passage in, 400 n. 1

on Hyperion, the scale of, 427

Destructiveness of Nature, Keats’s lines on, 265

de Vere, Aubrey, 540

Devonshire, Keats’s visit to, 260 et sqq.; second visit planned, 357

the Keats of, 4, 5

De Wint, P., 380

Dilke, Charles Wentworth, friendship of, with Keats and Brown, 141-2, 308, 321, 332-3, 346, 370, 458, 465, 491, 530

George Keats exonerated by, 530

House of, 321

Letters to, from Keats, 371

on supporting himself by his pen, 373

on Tom Keats’s illness, 316

Literary tastes and work of, 141-2, 167

Editorship of the Athenaeum, 530, 533

Relations of, with the Brawnes, 535

on James Rice, 76

Views of, on Keats’s attachment to Fanny Brawne, 330 n., 331

Dilke, Mrs C. W., 321; on the Fairy tales competition, 381; on Keats, on his return from Scotland, 296

Dilke, Sir Charles, Keats collection given by, to Hampstead Public Library, 16 n., 33 n. 2

Owner of Keats’s Sosibio Vase tracing, 416 n.

Dilke, William, 321 n.

Divine Comedy (Dante), influence of, on Keats, 545

Dodsley, James, ‘Old Plays’ by, Dilke’s continuation of, 142

Don Estehan (Llanos), 536

Don Giovanni, pantomime on, Keats’s criticism on, 242

Don Juan (Byron), 444

Keats on, 366, 496

Metre of, 445

Reference in, to Keats, 481, as killed by the Reviews, 520

Donne, Dr. John, Methods of, with the Heroic Couplet, 100

Downer, A. C., The Odes of Keats by, Urn illustrated in, 416 n.

Dragon-world and its hundred eyes, Keats on, 336

Dramatic Specimens (Lamb), 142 Fuller’s words on Fancy, quoted in 388-9

‘Draught, A, of Sunshine’ (‘Hence Burgundy,’ &c.) (Keats), lines in, on the Madness of Song, 257

Drayton, Michael, influence of, on Keats, seen in

Endymion, 206, 216

Epistle to Reynolds, 21

Hyperion, 175

Sprightly lines by, 109 n.

Two poetic versions by, of the Endymion theme, echoes of, in Keats’s poem, 168 et sqq.

Use by, of Heroic Couplet, 97-8

Dream, A, after reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca, Sonnet (Keats), 343

Drummond of Hawthornden, William, references of, to Endymion in his sonnets, 168

Dryden, John

Influence of, on Keats, seen in

Drear-Nighted December, 160

Isabella, 392

Use by, of Heroic Couplet, 103

‘Duchess of Dunghill,’ Keats on, 283

Duncan, Admiral, 5

Durdle Door, 492

Duverger’s French Grammar owned by Keats, 16 n.

Eagle, the, in Endymion and other poems, 186

Earthly Paradise, The (Morris), 539

Eclectic Review, The, Reviews by, of Keats’s poems

Lamia, 474

Poems, 132

Eden, The, of Imagination (Reynolds), 74

Edgeworth, Maria, and Hunt, 43

Edinburgh Magazine on the Lamia volume, 474-5

Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, see Blackwood’s

Edinburgh Review, politics, publisher and rival of, 297

Critical ferocity in, 299

Hazlitt in, on Keats as killed by the Reviews, 521-2

Influence of, 316

Jeffrey’s article in, on Endymion, and on the Lamia volume, 479-80

Reynolds’s contributions to, 533

Edmonton, third home at, of Keats, 9, 39, 113

Eglantine Villa, Shanklin, 358 n.

Election of a Poet Laureate (Duke of Buckingham), 44

Election contest, Keats’s contact with, 277, 274

Elgin, Earl of, 231 n.; and the Parthenon Marbles, 59-60

Elgin Marbles, the, Haydon’s defence of the removal of, 59-60, 460

Hunt’s sonnet on, 63

Keats’s reveries among, 416

Keats’s sonnets on, 66-7

Eliot, George, phrase of, on the word Love, 549 n.

Elizabethan Poets and Poetry, Keats’s introduction to, 19

Influence of, on Keats’s poems, 124, 168 et sqq., 171, 206, 207, 209, 223 et sqq., 389, 442, 479

Keats’s studies of, 430

Spirit of, reborn in Keats, 171

Use in, of the Couplet, Closed and Free Systems, 95, illustrations, 96 et sqq., 207

Elizabethan versions of the Endymion story, 167 et sqq.

Ellis, George, and the legend of St. Agnes’ Eve, 398 n.

Elmes, James, and the Ode to a Nightingale, 354

“Enchanted Castle,” by Claude, inspiration of, to Keats, 264, 291 & n.; owner of 265 n.

Endimion (Gombauld), parallels to, in Keats’s poem, 175 & n.

Endimion (Lyly), edited by Dilke, 167; allegory in, 168 n.

Endimion and Phoebe (Drayton), 169; echoed by Keats, 216

Endings of Lines Closed, Keats’s avoidance of, 207 Double, Keats’s relinquishment of, 207

End Moor, the toper at, 273, 277

End rime-syllables

Chaucerian, 94-5

Elizabethan, 95 et sqq.

Endymion, the Greek myth of, 166 & n.

Browne’s reference to, 167-8 & n.

in Elizabethan poetry, 167 et sqq.

in Sleep and Poetry, 123

Endymion (Keats), 257 n., 386, 389, 467, 470

Affinities of lines in, with those in other poems, 176 n., 207 et sqq., 236

Allegorical strain in, 171 et sqq.

Analysis of, 164 et sqq. Reason for undertaking, 204-5

Ascending scale in, 181-2

Autumnal scene in, 161

Bailey’s praise, and Keats’s apathy, 270

Beauties in, mixed with the faults, 214 et sqq.

Begun at Carisbrooke, 135, 161, 176 & n.; opening lines of, 161, partly written at Oxford, 142-3, 147; progress of, 140, 141, Keats’s depression during, 150, and letters on to friend whilst writing, 150, 151, 153, study of, helpful to understanding the poem, 154

Brought to a close at Burford Bridge, 158-9, 161; last lines of, 161-2; copying of, by Keats, 244, 251; revision and correction of, for press, 244; Keats’s letters on to Taylor, 260; seen through the press, 262

Book I., 175

Book II., 182

Book III., 189

Book IV., 197

Characters in, 166, 177 et alibi

Contemporary influences seen in, 233 et sqq.

Date of publication, 163

Deeper speculative and symbolic meanings of, and of Keats’s other poems, key to, 153-4

Dramatic promise of, 222

Elizabethan influence seen in, 124, 138 et sqq., 206-7, 223 et sqq.

English spirit in, 391

Exordium of, famous line in, 176 & n.

Faults and flaws in, 207 et sqq., 392, 407, 411

Spiritual, 213 et sqq., 392

Technical, 211 et sqq.

Inseparable from its Beauties, 214

First title of, 73

Germs of, 57-8, 259 n.

Hunt’s views on, 150-1, 252-3, 312

Ideas in, 448 in Embryo, 259 n.

Ironic power, promise of, in, 222 as Keats’s test of his own poet-hood, 165; his own judgment on the poem, 269

Long meditated, 135

Love as treated in, 181, 183, 213, 222, 549

Lyrics in, compared with their sources, 224 et sqq.

Models for, Jeffrey on, 479

Moods and aims governing the writing of, 254

New sympathies awakened, 188

Pioneer work, Keats on, 254

Poetic melody of, 147

Poetry of, qualities, affinities and defects of, 207 et sqq.

Preface to, 269, modesty of, 308

Reference in, to the Pymmes brook, 10

Reviews on, 307 et sqq., 463, 474, 477-8, 479-80, 528 & n. I, 529, 543 n.

Keats on, 314-15

Source of the Indian Maiden in Book IV., 33

Sources of Inspiration, 165 et sqq.

Study on, by Mrs F. M. Owen, 544

Subject: Analysis of, 164, Keats on, 148

Symbolism of, 172 et sqq., 312, 411; the Four Elements theory, 173-4, error of, 175

Taylor’s purchase of copyright of, 486

True meaning of, 544

Endymion sarcophagus, from Italy, at Woburn, 231 n.

Enfield, Clarke’s school at, 7 et sqq.; Keats’s attachment to, 17 et sqq., and lines on, 37, 113

Enfield Chase, beauties of, 22

Englefield, Sir Henry, and the Story of Rimini, 49

English character of Keats’s poems, Jeffrey on, 480

English Heroic Metre, Leigh Hunt’s effort to revive, 47-9

English Historical Portraits, Show of Keats at, 464

English Literature, Hunt’s predilections in, 47

English Poetry, History of, lines on, in Sleep and Poetry, 118-19

English Poets, Keats’s attendance at Hazlitt’s lectures on, 244, 300

English Romance poetry, Rossetti’s love for, 538

English Spring flowers, Keats’s delight in, 497

English Writers, Why so fine? Keats on, 355-6

Enid (Tennyson), a Keats reminiscence in, 123

Epic poetry, the obvious model for, 429

Epicurean, The (Moore), model for, 186 n.

Epipsychidion (Shelley), possible echoes in, of Endymion, 240, 241

Epistle to Charles Cowden Clarke (Keats), 37-8, 113

Epistle to George Felton Mathew (Keats), 93, 109 & n., 110, 470

Epistle to Henry Reynolds (Drayton), sprightly lines from, 109

Epistle to Maria Gisborne (Shelley), versification in, 241

Epistle to my brother George (Keats), 37, 111-13

Epistles (Keats) group of (see the foregoing), in Poems, metre and form of, 93

Epithalamion (Spenser), lines in, on Endymion, 167; lyric effect in, 122

Epping Forest, 22; reminiscences of in Keats’s poems, 90

Essays in Criticism, Arnold’s Essay on Keats reprinted in, 543 n.

Essays and Studies (Suddard), 157 n.

Essays and Tales (Sterling), praise in, of Keats, 527 & n. I, 528 n. 3

Ethereal Musings, Keats on, 155

Eton, famous headmaster of, 4 n.

Woodhouse at, 134

Eve of St Agnes, legend of, Jonson on, 396

Eve, The, of St Agnes (Keats), 308, 350, 406, 443; an achievement, 386, 396; written at Bedhampton, 333-4; read to Cowden Clarke, 342, 343

Feast of Fruits in, Miltonic parallel to, 401

Hunt’s picture from, 538

Lines in, reminiscent of Wieland’s Oberon, 87 n.

Poetic scope and method of, 399 et sqq.

Place of, in English poetry, 386, 396

Publication plans, 366

Shelley’s delight in, 483

Some changes made in, 367

Sources, story, form, beauties, and metre of, 396 et sqq., 436

Eve, The, of St Mark (Keats), 140, 444, 445, 470

Bridge between Chaucer and Morris, 539

Date of, 334, 337, 437

Incomplete, 339

Included in Milnes’s Book, 537

Sent to George Keats, 371

Subject, metre, form; echoes in, relation of, to the P.R.B., and Keats’s own words on, 437-41

Evocation, and Exposition, the genius of Keats and of Wordsworth seen in, 128-9, 234, 267-8

Ewing, Mr, kindness of, to Keats, 506

Examiner, The, founded by John Hunt, 42, 46

Edited from prison by Leigh Hunt, 44

Influence of, on Keats, 14

Keats’s critique in, on Reynolds’s skit on Peter Bell, 348

Poems published in, by

Keats, 35 & n., 36, 38, 54, 66-7, 73

Reynolds, 73-4

Shelley, 73

Reynolds’ Endymion article reissued in, 312

Shelley’s Alastor praised in, 234

on the New Movement in Poetry as shown in ‘Poems,’ 131-2

Excursion, The (Wordsworth), 21, 128

Effect of, on Shelley, and on Keats, 233-4

Passage in, on Greek Mythology, Keats on, 125, 146, 250

Exordium to Book III. of Endymion, 189

Fabliaux ou Contes, by Le Grand; Way’s translation of, 33 & n. 1

‘Faded the flower,’ lines on Fanny Brawne, date and self-expression in, 377-8

Faerie Queene (Spenser, q.v.), influence of, on Keats, 19-21, 31, 177, 185, 428

Fairfax, Edward, Italian stanza form used by, 390

Fairies of the Four Elements (Keats), words for operatic chorus, 350, 441

Faithful Shepherdess (Fletcher), the Endymion passage in, 168

Influence of, on Keats, 168, 206, 386, 479

Metre of, 386

Falmouth district, the name Jennings common in, 5

‘Fame like a Wayward Girl,’ sonnet (Keats), echoes in, 349-50

Fancy (Keats), 263, date, 386-7

Metre, form, subject and Inspiration of, 327, 387-9

Published in the Lamia volume, 470

Fancy, The, a medley (Reynolds), 475 n.

Faust (Goethe), opening chorus of, 217

Feast of Fruits, in

Eve of St Agnes, Miltonic parallel to, 401

Hyperion, 450-1, 542

Feast of the Poets (Hunt), earlier skits on which modelled, 44

Keats’s allusion to, 113

Treatment in, of Scott, 45, 303

‘Feel,’ as used in ‘In drear-nighted December,’ 159 n.

Fetter Lane, Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare in, 244

Filocolo, Il (Boccaccio), compared with The Eve of St Agnes, 397-8 & n. 2

Finch, Colonel, 517

Finsbury, earliest home of Keats in, 3

Fingal’s Cave, Keats on, in prose and verse, 292

FitzGerald, Edward, admiration of, for Keats, 527 on the poetry of Keats and Shelley, 541

Fitzwilliam, Earl, help from, to Keats, 486

Fladgate firm of solicitors, Reynolds with, 533

Fletcher, John, Endymion passage by, 168

Influence seen in Keats’ Poems, 386

in Endymion, 206

in Sleep and Poetry, 125

Metre used by, 386

Faults in, 209

Floire et Blancheflor, metrical romance on, in relation to Isabella, 397-8

Florence, Artists and Literati at, 522-3, 530

Milnes’s meeting at, with Brown, 530

Floure, The, and the Lefe (Pseudo-Chaucer),

Echoes of, in Keats’s poems, 115, 177

Keats’s sonnet on, 75 & n.

Flowers, English Spring, Keats’s lines on, 446-7

Foliage, ‘Laureation’ Sonnets published in, 307

Foot measure of Stanzas, 350 & n.

Forest Scene and Festival, in Endymion, 177 et sqq.

Forman, H. Buxton, Complete Works of John Keats edited by, references to, 544, 549 n. & see footnotes

Help of, to Señora Llanos (née Keats), 536

on the ‘Bright Star’ sonnet, 335 n. 1

on the Corbels, in Eve of St Agnes, 400 n. 1

on an Echo of Dryden by Keats, 392 n.

on Mrs Lindon’s letter on Keats, 465 n.

on a reading in the Ode to Fanny, 335 n.

on a tendresse felt for Keats, 262

French literature, the less well-known, Keats’s reading in, 175 n.

Frere, Hookham, 49; use by, of the ottava rima, 390

Frere, John, and Coleridge’s meeting with Keats in 1819, 347-8

Fuller, on Fancy, 388-9

Galignani’s edition of the Poems of Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats (1829), 527

‘In Drear-nighted December,’ printed in, 159 n.

‘Gallipots’ article, in Blackwood’s, 307-8

Galloway, Keats in, 279 et sqq.

Garden of Proserpine (Swinburne), metre of, 161

Garden of Florence (Reynolds), 333

Garnett, Richard, on Shelley’s letters and those of Keats, 541

Gem, The, ‘In a Drearnighted December’ printed in, 159 n.

George, Prince-Regent, “baited” in The Twopenny Post, 43

George III., poetry of his period, 207

Gibson, John, the Sculptor, and Severn, 503

Gifford, William, editor of the Quarterly Review, 299

Critical ferocity of, 137

Hazlitt’s Letter to, 341

Shelley’s letter of remonstrance to (unsent) on the hostile criticism on Keats, 482, 516-17

Gil Blas (Le Sage), and the word ‘Sangrado,’ 309 & n.

Gipsies, The (Wordsworth), Keats on, 151

Gisborne, Mr. & Mrs., and Keats, 466-7, 516

‘Give me a golden pen,’ sonnet (Keats), in Poems, 90

‘Give me women, wine and snuff,’ couplets (Keats), 32

Gladstone, Rt Hon. W. E., and Severn, 526

Glaucus, in Endymion, 140; magic robe of, possible source of, 170, 190 et sqq.

Gleig, Bishop, 306

Gleig, Chaplain-general, 306, 310, 341

Glencroe and Loch Awe, Keats on, 289 & n., 290

‘Glory and Loveliness have pass’d away,’ sonnet to Leigh Hunt (Keats), 83, 90

‘God of the golden bow,’ in Hymn to Apollo (Keats), 58

Godfrey of Bulloigne (Tasso, trs. Fairfax), metre of, 390

Godwin, Mary (Mrs Shelley), 70

Godwin, William, influence of, on Shelley, 540

Primer of Mythology by, 228 n., 231

on Keats’s poems, 41

Goethe Circle, at Weimar, Lockhart’s intimacy with, 298, 309

Golden Ass of Apuleius, as possible inspiration to Keats, 412 & n.

Golden Treasury Series edition of Keats’s poems, 544

Goldsmith’s Greek History, Haydon’s gift of, to Keats, 65

Gollancz, Prof. Israel, 551, 553

Goylen, ruins and legend of, 291

Gray, Thomas, poems of, 19; influence of, on Keats, 23

Verse-forms used by, 108

Great Smith St., the Dilkes in, 374

‘Great Spirits now on Earth are Sojourning,’ sonnet to Haydon (Keats), 65, 120; echoes of, in Endymion, 120; included in Poems, 91

Greek History (Goldsmith), given by Haydon to Keats, 65

Greek Liberation, Byron, and Trelawny, 521, 522

Mythology, the Endymion legend in, 166 n.

Keats’s delight in, 2, 81, 114, and poetical use of, 218-19, 224 et sqq., 264-5, 414, 418, 426; Sources of his knowledge of, 14, 126, 171; his Talk on, 78; its Vitality to him, 110

Revitalization of, in Europe, 219-20

Religion, and its evolution, Wordsworth on, 125-6, 220

Sculpture, see Elgin Marbles

Influence of, on Keats, 231 n., 414 et sqq.

Style in poetry, Keats on, 426

Green, Joseph Henry, 346 & n., 347

Green, Miss E. M., A Talk with Coleridge, edited by Cornhill Magazine, (April 1917), cited, 347-8 & n.

Guy Mannering (Scott), 279

Guy’s Hospital, Keats’s student days at, 16 & n.

‘Had I a Man’s fair form,’ sonnet (Keats), included in Poems, 89

Hadrian, age of, Parthenon sculptures assigned to by the dilettanti, 60

‘Hadst thou lived in days of old’ (Keats), Valentine for Miss Wylie, metre of, 34, 269, 386

Halecret, meaning of, 429 & n.

Hallam, Arthur, and the poems of Shelley and Keats, 527

Hammond, Thomas, surgeon, Keats’s apprenticeship to, 16 & n. 2, 26 n., 30

Hampstead, Hunt’s home at, Keats’s pleasure at, 35-7

Keats’s life at, 141, 244, 245 et sqq., 322

Hampstead Public Library, the Dilke Keats collection at, 16 n., 33 n.

Handful of Pleasant Delites (Robinson), Keats’s possible knowledge of, 158 & n.

Happiness, Keats on, 154

Happy is England, sonnet (Keats), 34; included in Poems, 89

Happy Warrior, The (Wordsworth), form of, 108

Hare, Julius, Sterling’s letter to, on the Poems of Tennyson & Keats, 528

Haslam, William, the “oak friend” of Keats, 77, 141, 345, 487

in love, Keats’s mockery on, 371

Letters to, from Severn, on Keats’s health in 1820, 466; on the voyage to Italy, 489 et sqq., and Keats’s life there, 498 et sqq.; on money troubles in Rome, 508-9

and the Milnes Biography, 534

on his love for Keats, 513-14

Haydon, Benjamin, 135, 347

Appearance, 62

as Artist, Controversialist, Writer, 59-62, 67

Characteristics, 59, 60 et sqq., 532

and the Elgin marbles, 59-61, 63

Friends of, and his quarrels with them, 62, 71, 153, 254

Friendship with Keats, beginning and course of, 64 et sqq., 135, 136, 141, 255, 347

Keats’s Sunday Evenings with, and meeting with Wordsworth during, 245 et sqq.

in Great Marlborough St., 150, 151

Letters from, to Keats, on their friendship, 67-8; on Prayer, 62, 138-9

Letters to, from Keats, on dissatisfaction with Endymion, 150; on Haydon’s painting, 256; on a new Romance in his mind, 334

Letters to and from Keats, on a Loan, 323-4, 337-8, 339-40, 354-5; see also 370

and the Ode to a Nightingale, 354

Pictures by, 60

“Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” heads of his friends in, 60, 250, 462

Exhibition of, Keats at, 460

Keats’s estimation of, 256

Pseudo-vegetarianism of, 250

and Shelley, a heated dessert-talk between, 71

Sonnets addressed to, by

Keats, 65, 66, 67, 91, 120

Reynolds, 65

Wordsworth, 65

Sources of his accounts of Keats used in present volume, 532

on the dinner when Keats met Wordsworth, Lamb and Kingston, &c., 246 et sqq.;

on Keats as a child, 7

on Keats’s eyes, 79

on Keats, as killed by the Reviews, 520

on Keats’s lack of decision, 369

on Keats’s plunge into dissipation, 379-80

on his last sight of Keats, 486-7

on reading Shakespeare with Keats, 66

on Sleep and Poetry, 130

on Scott’s beautiful smile, 525 n.

Suicide of, 532

‘Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak,’ sonnet (Keats), on the Elgin Marbles, 67

Hazlitt, William, 133

Appearance and conversation of, 69

Attitude to, of Blackwood, 300

as Critic, 119, 151, 263; ferocity of, 137, 299, 300; style of, 243, 244

Friendship of, with

Haydon, 62

Keats, 68, 77

Invective of, against Gifford, 341

Lectures by, on English Poets, 244, 300; Keats at, 244

Taste of, Keats on, 68, 250

Wrath of, on the Blackwood Reviews, 311, 314

on Haydon’s “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” 461, 462 n.

on Keats, as killed by the Reviews, 521-2

on Keats’s verses, 41

on Shelley, 70

on Wordsworth, aet. 48, 249

on Wordsworth’s conversation on poetic subjects, 251

Heine, Heinrich, 229 Heliconia (ed. Park), 158 n.

Hemans, Felicia, verse of, 526

‘Hence Burgundy, Claret and Port,’ see Draught of Sunshine

Henry VI. (Shakespeare), as played by Kean, Keats’s criticism on, 242, 243

Hercules, triumphs of, figured on sarcophaguses, 231 & n.

Hero and Leander (Marlowe), Heroic Couplet as used in, 169

Metre of, 96

‘Heroic’ Couplet, the, history of 93 et sqq.

Keats’s use of, 93, 207 et sqq., 406

Hessey, —, see also Taylor and Hessey

Indignation of, at the Blackwood Reviews, 311

Letters to, from

Keats, on the criticisms on Endymion, and the defence by his friends, 311

Taylor, on his joust with W. Blackwood, over Keats’s poems, 475-7

Hesiod’s Theogony, the Titans in, 428

Hilton, —, 380; help from, for Keats, 486

Holman, Louis A., and Haydon’s “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” 462 n.

on the source of the P.R.B., 325

Holmes, Edward, on Keats as a boy, 11-12

Holy Living and Dying (Jeremy Taylor), Keats soothed by, in Rome, 509

Holy State (Fuller), on Fancy, 388-9

Homer, Chapman’s Translation of, Keats’s delight in, and sonnet on, 38 et sqq.; influence seen in Endymion, 206

on the Hyperion story, 428

Homeric Hymn to Pan in Chapman’s Translation, lines from, 225-6

Hood, Mrs. Thomas (née Reynolds), 55

Hood, Thomas, 159 n., 255; Parodies written by, with Reynolds, 533

Hope, lines on, in Endymion, 182

Horace, influence of, on Keats, 428 & n.

Horne, Richard Hengist. schoolfellow of Keats, 77; on Keats while with Mr Hammond, 18

Houghton, Lord (see also Milnes), 342

Poems by Keats, posthumously published by, 334-5 & nn.

La Belle Dame given from Brown’s transcript, 469

Houghton MSS., referred to, 12 n., 30 n., 56 n., 92 n., 147 n., 307 n., et alibi

House of Fame (Chaucer), the Eagle in, 186; influence seen in The Eve of St Mark, 437-8

’How many bards gild the lapses of time,’ sonnet (Keats), 88

Date and Text of, 88

Echoes in, 89

Technique of, 88

Human Life, Keats’s reflections on, 267

Human Nature, Keats’s increasing interest in, 276 et sqq.

Humour and Wit, Keats on, 245

Humphrey Clinker (Smollett), preferred by Keats to The Antiquary (Scott), 279

Hungarian Brothers, The (Porter), 325

Hunt, James Henry Leigh, 139 & n., 347

Appearance and charm of, 45-6

Attacks on, in Blackwood’s, 45, 151-2, 300-3, 477

Attitude of, to

Blackwood’s, 45, 314

Scott’s poems, 21, 45, 303

Wordsworths ‘Simple life’ poems, 348

Champion of poetic revolution, 47, 49, 119, 207

Classical translations by, 52

Contrasts in his Diction and Breeding, 46, 47 & n. I

as Critic, 44-5, 46, 48, 299

Criticisms on, by Keats, 263, 324, 328-9

Faults of Style, 46, 47 & n., 459, 477

Financial ineptitude of, 46 et alibi

Friendship of, with

Cowden Clarke, 35 et sqq.

Haydon, 63; quarrels of, 254

Keats, and influence on him, 14, 18, 35 et sqq., 41, 51 et sqq., 109, 111, 125, 141, 214, 509, 532

Haydon’s caution on, and Keats’s reply, 138-40

Keats’s changed attitude to, 252-3

Kindness to Keats in his illness (1820), 462, 464, 466; and renewed friendliness, 472

Intercoronation episode, and his verses thereon, 54-6, 307

Shelley, 69 et sqq., and influence on him, 241; present at his cremation, 521

Imprisonment of, 23, 42, 43

Keats’s sonnet on his release, 23

Keats’s first published work dedicated to, 83, 90, 130-1

in Later life, 532

Letter from, to Severn at Rome, on the love of Keats’s friends for him, 515-16

Letter to, from Keats, of criticism, 137

Life at Hampstead, 35 et sqq., 50 et sqq.

Lines from Cap and Bells published by, 445

Literary industry of, and writings, 34, 46

Memories of Keats in his writings, 532

at Novello’s, 327, 328

Papers edited by, see Examiner, Indicator, Reflector

as Poet, 518

Poems by (see under their Titles), 44, 63, 130-1, 138

Anapaestic verses by, to friends, 50, 51

Praise by, of Alastor, in The Examiner, 234

Religious views of, 51

Review by, of

Lamia volume, 410-11, 472-3

Poems, 131-2

Sketch of his origin, life and career, 41 et sqq.

and The Eve of St Agnes, 398

Tributes of, to Keats, 41, 526

Views of, on Endymion, and vexation caused thereby, 150-1, 252-3, 312

Young Poets, promise of, noted in article of that title, 54, 69

on the Feast in St Agnes’ Eve, 401-2

on Hyperion, 73

on Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil, 473

on Keats’s attitude to Shelley, 70-1, 72

on Keats’s eyes, 79

on Keats and his poetry, 36

on La Belle Dame sans Merci, 469

on Sleep and Poetry, 130 et sqq.

on Wordsworth at 48, 249

Hunt, John, and the Examiner, 42

Hunt, Mrs Leigh (née Kent), 43, 254

Hunt, W. Holman, a Keats worshipper, 538

Huon of Bordeaux, source of Shakespeare’s Oberon and Titania, 87 n.

Hyginus, notes to, in Auctores Mythographi, on Moneta, 447 & n.

Hymn, A, to Apollo (Keats), 56 n., 58

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (Shelley), influence of, on Keats, 73

Inspirations of, 237

Publication of, 234

Hymn to Pan (Chapman), 124, 225-6

Hymn to Pan (Endymion), quality and affinities of, 225 et sqq.

Ode-form of, 411

Wordsworth on, 237, 249

Hymn to Pan (Shelley), 243

Hymns of Homer (Chapman’s version), influence seen in Endymion, 206

Hyperion (Keats), 308, 517;

attitude to, of the critics, 471

Blank verse of, 317

Dante’s influence seen in, 545

De Quincey’s criticism on (1845), 528-9 & n.

Designed as a romance, its scheme and scale, subject, sources, model, lines from, fine start, difficulties, and abandonment, 426 et sqq.

Epic quality of, 333

Feast of Fruits in, 450-1, 542

Fire referred to, in, 175

First intimations of, 202, 262, 334; first draft work on, 322, 323, 327, 333

Germ of lines in, 276

Keats’s change of mind on, 369, 375

Miltonism of, 399, 545

Mistake on, set right, 544

Never finished, 339

Remodelling of, 376, 379, 447-54; errors made in, 469; the Induction, 450 et sqq.; leading Ideas in, 447 et sqq.

Shelley on, 482

Transcendental cosmopolities of, Hunt on, 73

Idiot Boy, The (Wordsworth), 348

‘I had a dove,’ lines for music (Keats), 327

Iliad, The, 177

Chapman’s, Keats’s delight in, and Sonnet on, 38, 40 & n., 41, 54, 87, 88, 133; echoes of, in other poems, 177, 428

Metre of, 86

Strained rimes of, 211

Imagination and Fancy (Hunt), Keats memories in, 532

Imagination and Truth, relation between, elucidated by Adam’s dreams in Paradise Lost, 154, 155

Imagines, of Philostratus, 190 n.

Imitation of Spenser (Keats), 20; published in Poems, 86

Immortality, Keats’s attitude to, 345, 387, 492, 509

Indiaman surgeoncy, Keats’s plan concerning, 355-6, 462

Indian Maiden, in Endymion, 197 et sqq.; lines cited, 229-30; echoes in, and inspiration for, 33, 230 et sqq.

Indicator, The, 46

Lines from Cap and Bells published in, 445

La Belle Dame published in, 468-9

‘In drear-nighted December,’ an achievement, 386

Date and association of, 158 et sqq.

Model of, 158, 160

Text, 159

Versions, 159 n. 2

Induction to

Calidore, 34, 111, 122, 470

Endymion, the intended, 122, 164

Hyperion, 450 et sqq.

Ingpen, Roger, his edition of the Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley cited, 482 & n.

Invention and Imagination as the prime endowments of a Poet, Keats’s insistence on, 165

Inverary, woods at, Keats on, 288

Iona, Keats’s visit to, 291

Ireby, Keats at, 274

Brown’s account of the dancing, school at, and Keats’s of the same, 277 & n., 278

Irish Melodies (Moore), money-worth to the poet, 82

Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil. A Story from Boccaccio (Keats), 339, 386, 396, 406, 443; an achievement, 399

Apostrophes and Invocations in, 391-2

Beauties of, 389, 392-3, and horror turned to beauty, 393 et sqq., 471

Date of, 260, 262, 390

Digging scene in, 394

Lamb on, 471

Dryden echoes in, 392

Included in the Lamia volume, 470, 471

Keats’s distaste for, 366, 369

Latin usage in, 431

Lines in, on the bitter-sweet of love, 360

Metre of, 393

Millais’ picture from, 538

Reynolds’s Boccaccio tales intended for issue with, 259-60, 387, 521

Procter’s poem on the same subject, 459

Shelley’s delight in, 483

Story of, 390

Lamb on, 471

Reynolds on, 312-13

Wilson on (1828), 527

Isle of Palms, The (Wilson), 298

Isle of Wight, Keats’s visits to, 135-6, 164, 357 et sqq., 405

‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ (Keats), Cupid and Psyche reference in, 412

Date of, 115, 122, 164

Included in Poems, 115

Influence on, of a passage in The Excursion, 126

Metre, diction and subject of, 114-15

Planned as Induction to Endymion, 122, 164

References in, to the Moon, 123, 166

Scene described in, 36

Italian attitude to the Sick, 506

Literature, Hunt’s preferences in, 47

Keats’s studies in, 370, 398

Primitives, Keats’s appreciation of, 325

Italy, winter in, planned for Keats, 467, 484, and undertaken, 485, journey to, illness and death of Keats, 486 et sqq.

It is an awful mission (Keats), lines quoted, 425

‘It is a lofty feeling,’ sonnet (Hunt), occasion of, 56

Jacobean poetry, influence of, seen in Endymion, 206, 207, 209 n.

James I., 101

Jasmine Bower scene in Endymion, a flaw in the poem, 186-7

Jeffrey, Francis, editor of the Edinburgh Review, 297; as critic, 299, 528

on Keats’s poems, 478-80, 481, 528

on Shelley’s poems, 528

Jeffrey, Miss, letters to, from Keats, on going as Ship’s doctor, 355-6; on writing the Ode to Indolence, 415

Jeffrey, Mrs, and her daughters, Keats’s friendship with, 262

Jeffrey, Mrs (Mrs G. Keats), and the letters of Keats to his brother, 531

Jennings, a common name in Cornwall, 5

Jennings, Captain Midgley John, of the Royal Marines, uncle of the poet, 5, 7, 12