sic. Cowden Clarke's piano-playing had been a delight to him at school, and he tells us himself how from a boy he had in his mind's eye visions of pictures: "When a schoolboy, the abstract idea I had of an heroic painting was what I cannot describe. I saw it somewhat sideways-large, prominent, round, and coloured with magnificence-somewhat like the feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra. Or of Alcibiades leaning on his crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the sea." In Haydon's pictures Keats continued to see, as the friends and companions of every ardent and persuasive worker in the arts are apt to see, not so much the actual performance as the idea he had preconceived of it in the light of his friend's intentions and enthusiasm. At this time Haydon, who had already made several drawings of Keats's head in order to introduce it in his picture of Christ entering Jerusalem, proposed to make another more finished, “to be engraved," writes Keats, "in the first style, and put at the head of my poem, saying, at the same time, he had never done the thing for any human being, and that it must have considerable effect, as he will put his name to it." Both poet and publisher were delighted with this condescension on the part of the sublime Haydon, who failed, however, to carry out his promise. "My neglect," said Haydon, long afterwards, "really gave him a pang, as it now does me."

With Hunt, also, Keats's intercourse continued frequent, while with Reynolds his intimacy grew daily closer. Both of these friendships had a stimulating influence on his poetic powers. "The Wednesday before last, Shelley,

Hunt, and I wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile," he tells his brothers on the 16th of February, 1818. "I have been writing at intervals many songs and sonnets, and I

long to be at Teignmouth to read them over to you." With the help of Keats's manuscripts, or of the transcripts made from them by his friends, it is possible to retrace the actual order of many of these fugitive pieces. On the 16th of January was written the humourous sonnet on Mrs. Reynolds's cat; on the 21st, after seeing in Leigh Hunt's possession a lock of hair reputed to be Milton's, the address to that poet beginning "Chief of organic numbers !" and on the 22d the sonnet, "O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute," in which Keats describes himself as laying aside (apparently) his Spenser in order to read again the more rousing and human - passionate pages of Lear. On the 31st he sends in a letter to Reynolds the lines to Apollo beginning "Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port," and in the same letter the sonnet beginning “When I have fears that I may cease to be," which he calls his last. On the 3d of February he wrote the spirited lines to Robin Hood, suggested by a set of sonnets by Reynolds on Sherwood Forest; on the 4th the sonnet beginning "Time's sea has been five years at its slow ebb," in which he recalls the memory of an old, otherwise unrecorded lovefancy, and also the well-known sonnet on the Nile, written at Hunt's in competition with that friend and with Shelley; on the 5th another sonnet postponing compliance for the present with an invitation of Leigh Hunt's to compose something in honour, or in emulation, of Spenser; and on the 8th the sonnet in praise of the colour blue, composed by way of protest against one of Reynolds. About the same time Keats agreed with Reynolds that they should each write some metrical tales from Boccaccio, and publish them in a joint volume, and began at once for his own part with Isabella or the Pot of Basil. A little later

in this so prolific month of February we find him rejoic

ing in the song of the thrush and blackbird, and melted into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under the influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. He theorizes pleasantly in a letter to Reynolds on the virtues and benefits of this state of mind, translating the thrush's music into some blank-verse lines of a singular and haunting melody. In the course of the next fortnight we find him in correspondence with Taylor about the corrections to Endymion, and soon afterwards making a clearance of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing to flit. His brother George, who had been taking care of Tom at Teignmouth since December, was now obliged to come to town, bent on a scheme of marriage and emigration; and Tom's health having made a momentary rally, Keats was unwilling that he should leave Teignmouth, and determined to join him there. He started in the second week of March, and stayed almost two months. It was an unlucky season for weather-the soft-buffeting sheets and misty drifts of Devonshire rain renewing themselves, in the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know, throughout almost the whole spring, and preventing him from getting more than occasional tantalizing snatches of enjoyment in the beauty of the scenery, the walks, and flowers. His letters are full of objurgations against the climate, conceived in a spirit which seems hardly compatible, in one of his strong family feeling, with the tradition which represents his father to have been a Devonshire

man:

"You may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, toggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em; the primroses are out-but then you are in; the cliffs are of a fine deep colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them....

I fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. I fancy the flowers, all precocious, have an Acrasian spell about them; I feel able to beat off the Devonshire waves like soap-froth. I think it well for the honour of Britain that Julius Cæsar did not first land in this county. A Devonshirer, standing on his native hills, is not a distinct object; he does not show against the light; a wolf or two would dispossess him.” 1

Besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering his invalid brother, who had a relapse just after he came down, Keats was busy during these Devonshire days seeing through the press the last sheets of Endymion. He also composed, with the exception of the few verses he had begun at Hampstead, the whole of Isabella, the first of his longer poems written with real maturity of art and certainty of touch. At the same time he was reading and appreciating Milton as he had never done before. With the minor poems he had been familiar from a boy, but had not been attracted by Paradise Lost until first Severn, and then more energetically Bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to him; and he now turned to that poem, and penetrated with the grasp and swiftness of genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the very essence of its power and beauty. His correspondence with his friends, particularly Bailey and Reynolds, is, during this same time, unusually sustained and full. It was in all senses manifestly a time with Keats of rapidly maturing power, and in some degree also of threatening gloom. The mysteries of existence and of suffering, and the "deeps of good and evil," were beginning for the first time to press habitually on his thoughts. In that beautiful and interesting letter to Reynolds, in which he makes the comparison of human life to a mansion of many apartments, it is his own present state which he thus describes :

1 See Appendix, p. 222.

"We no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere. We see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there forever in delight. However, among the effects this breathing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of man, of convincing one's nerves that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and oppression, whereby this Chamber of Maiden-thought becomes gradually darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set open-but all dark—all leading to dark passages. We see not the balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, we are in that state, we feel the 'Burden of the Mystery.'

A few weeks earlier, addressing to the same friend the last of his rhymed Epistles, Keats had thus expressed the mood which came upon him as he sat taking the beauty of the evening on a rock at the sea's edge:

"Twas a quiet eve,

The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave

An untumultuous fringe of silver foam

Along the flat brown sand; I was at home,

And should have been most happy-but I saw
Too far into the sea, where every maw

The greater or the less feeds evermore:

But I saw too distinct into the core

Of an eternal fierce destruction,

And so from happiness I far was gone.

Still am I sick of it, and tho' to-day

I've gathered young spring leaves, and flowers gay

Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,

Still do I that most fierce destruction see

The Shark at savage prey, the Hawk at pounce,
The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce,
Ravening a worm. Away, ye horrid moods!
Moods of one's mind!"

In a like vein, recalling to Bailey a chance saying of his, "Why should woman suffer?"—" Aye, why should she?”