6

The first mention of Hyperion in Keats's letters occurs in that written on Christmas day, 1818, to his brother and sister in America, in which he says: 'I think you knew before you left England that my next subject would be "the fall of Hyperion." I went on a little with it last night, but it will take some time to get into the vein again. I will not give you any extracts because I wish the whole to make an impression.' He speaks of it a week later as scarce begun.' Again, February 14, 1819, he writes to the same: 'I have not gone on with Hyperion - for to tell the truth I have not been in great cue for writing lately-I must wait for the spring to rouse me up a little.' In August he told Bailey that he had been writing parts of Hyperion, but it is quite plain that he did little continuous work on it, but was drawn off by his tales and tragedy. From Winchester, September 22, 1819, he writes to Reynolds: 'I have given up Hyperion

there were too many Miltonic inversions in it - Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or, rather, artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from Hyperion, and put a mark to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one || to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul 't was imagination - I cannot make the distinction every now and then there is a Miltonic intonation but I cannot make the division properly.' From the silence regarding the poem in his after letters, it would appear that he left it at this stage.

That Keats designed a large epic in Hyperion, which was to be in ten books, is plain, but it is also tolerably clear that he abandoned his purpose, for he did not actually forbid the publication of the fragment, though it is doubtful if the whole reason for his action is given in the Publishers' Advertisement to the 1820 volume, containing the poem. 'If any apology be thought necessary,' it is there said, 'for the

appearance of the unfinished poem of Hyperion, the publishers beg to state that they alone are responsible, as it was printed at their particular request, and contrary to the wish of the author. The poem was intended to have been of equal length with Endymion, but the reception given to that work discouraged the author from proceeding.'

Keats's friend Woodhouse, in his interleaved and annotated copy of Endymion, says of Hyperion: The poem if completed would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former God of the Sun, by Apollo, — and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, etc., and of the war of the Giants for Saturn's reëstablishment, with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome.'

It is not impossible that besides the inertia produced by diminution of physical powers, another reason existed for Keats's failure to complete his poem. In the two full books which we have, he had stated so fully and explicitly the underlying thought in his interpretation of the myth that his interest in any delineation of a hopeless struggle might well have been unequal to the task. The speeches successively of Oceanus and Clymene which so enraged Enceladus were the masculine and feminine confessions that as their own supremacy over the antecedent chaos had been due to the law which made order expel disorder, so the supremacy of the new race of gods over them was due to the still further law

'That first in beauty should be first in might.' Nay, more, the vision they have is not of a restoration of the old order, but of the defeat of the new by some still more distant evolution. 'Another race may drive

Our conquerors to mourn as we do now.'

Of the relation of this poem to Hyperion, a Vision, see the Appendix, where the other fragment is printed.

Had stood a pigmy's height: she would

have ta❜en

30

Achilles by the hair and bent his neck;
Or with a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel.
Her face was large as that of Memphian
sphinx,

Pedestal'd haply in a palace-court,
When sages look'd to Egypt for their lore.
But oh! how unlike marble was that face;
How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.
There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder labouring up.
One hand she press'd upon that aching
spot

39

Where beats the human heart, as if just there,

Or the familiar visiting of one
Upon the first toll of his passing-bell,
Or prophesyings of the midnight lamp;
But horrors, portion'd to a giant nerve,
Oft made Hyperion ache. His palace
bright

Bastion'd with pyramids of glowing gold, And touch'd with shade of bronzed obelisks,

Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,

Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries; 180 And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds Flush'd angerly: while sometimes eagles' wings,

Unseen before by Gods or wondering men, Darken'd the place; and neighing steeds were heard,

Not heard before by Gods or wondering

Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why

Is my eternal essence thus distraught
To see and to behold these horrors new?
Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?
Am I to leave this haven of my rest,
This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,
This calm luxuriance of blissful light,
These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,
Of all my lucent empire? It is left
Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine. 240
The blaze, the splendour, and the symme-
try,