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He has his Summer, when luxuriously

Spring's honey'd cud of youthful thought he loves To ruminate, and by such dreaming high

Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves
His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness-to let fair things

Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

VI

ON FAME.

I.

FAME, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gipsey,--will not speak to those

Who have not learnt to be content without her; A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close,

Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her; A very Gipsey is she, Nilus-born,

Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;

Ye love-sick Bards! repay her scorn for scorn;
Ye Artists lovelorn! madmen that ye are!
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

VII

ON FAME.

II.

"You cannot eat your cake and have it too."-Proverb.

How fever'd is the man, who cannot look

Upon his mortal days with temperate blood,

S

Who vexes all the leaves of his life's book,
And robs his fair name of its maidenhood;
It is as if the rose should pluck herself,

On the ripe plum finger its misty bloom,
As if a Naiad, like a meddling elf,

Should darken her pure grot with muddy gloom: But the rose leaves herself upon the briar,

For winds to kiss and grateful bees to feed,

And the ripe plum still wears its dim attire,
The undisturbed lake has crystal space;

Why then should man, teasing the world for grace,
Spoil his salvation for a fierce miscreed?

VIII

BRIGHT star! would I were steadfast as thou artNot in lone splendour hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moorsNo-yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever-or else swoon to death.

Finis

NOTES

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I JOHN KEATS, born Oct. 29, 1795, died Feb. 23, 1821, published his first volume in 1817. It is dated-"London: Printed for C. & J. Ollier, 3, Welbeck Street, Cavendish Square." The title-page (in addition to the foregoing and to the reprint on p. 1) bears the woodcut of a laurelled head in profile, which may be meant for Spenser. The text, preceded by three leaves, covers 121 pages in small octavo size.

II Endymion bears on the title (in addition to the reprint on p. 55) "By John Keats. London: Printed for Taylor and Hessey, 93, Fleet Street. 1818." Five leaves, in the example before me, precede the text, which (including titles before each book), extends to 207 pages. "Handsomely printed in [a largishsized] 8vo. price 9s. boards," says the Advertisement appended to the next volume.

III Lamia etc., in addition to the reprint on p. 161, bears 66 By John Keats, author of Endymion. London: Printed for Taylor and Hessey, Fleet-Street, 1820." Four leaves precede the text, which (including separate titles for Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Poems), covers 199 pages in an octavo size between that of the two former volumes.

Lastly, I was printed by C. Richards, 18, Warwick Street, Golden Square, London; II by T. Miller, Noble Street, Cheapside; III by Thomas Davison, Whitefriars.

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3 Glory and loveliness: This Dedicatory Sonnet was written in 1817, whilst the volume was in course of printing. The acquaintance of Keats with Leigh Hunt, ten or eleven years his senior, had begun by 1816. It is doubtful whether the Poet gained on the whole by the familiarity-(for, on his side, it does not seem to me to have risen to real friendship)-which followed. Hunt was at the least satisfactory stage of his long life, a State prosecution for a violently personal attack on the Prince Regent having just

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3 converted him, in his own eyes and those of his friends, into a political martyr, as the harsh criticism of the day had raised him into the literary idol of a coterie. The "self-delusion" he entertained that he was a great poet, struck Keats, a man of much stronger nature, and wholly free from such weakness, -as "lamentable," so early as May, 1817. In December, 1818, writing to his brother George, he describes Hunt as "a pleasant enough fellow in the main, when you are with him; but in reality he is vain, egotistic. . . . Hunt does one harm by making fine things pretty, and beautiful things hateful; through him I am indifferent to Mozart, and many a glorious thing when associated with him becomes nothing.' Some of the gloom of his last years had fallen on Keats when he wrote thus; yet the picture is confirmed in too many ways to be essentially doubtful. On the other hand, Hunt's affection for Keats was real; he had genuine tenderness of nature, and strong, though narrow, literary enthusiasm. Had his younger friend lived, he would doubtless have done justice to those fine qualities in Hunt which, as his West Indian blood calmed down, freed themselves, more or less, from their youthful alloy of vanity and intemperateness, during the latter half of his life.

Despite the clear insight into those faults of taste in Hunt which the preceding extract shows, the style of Keats, in his earlier work especially, was in some degree influenced by the elder poet. He seems to owe to him a rather frequent and unpleasing mannerism in the use of the word luxury: and the Rimini and Hero and Leander exhibit sudden lapses into prosaicism, words used with an abrupt or even coarse directness, strange momentary failures in good taste, from which Keats, also, is not always free. Beyond this, there is little in common between the two writers: the similarity, in case of the poems just named, is only a superficial likeness of manner. Where Keats is penetrative, Hunt is decorative: his work is formed on Dryden, but Dryden ornamentalized and without his vigour. It was to very different results that Keats studied the great Fabulist for Lamia.

In regard to the volume of 1817, it may be noted here, in Lord Houghton's words, that "this little book, the beloved first-born of so great a genius, scarcely touched the public attention."

5 This nameless Poem, to judge by its style and matter, may be safely placed amongst the latest-written pieces in the volume of 1817, and was, doubtless, chosen by Keats as a kind of "Induction," (to use the fine Elizabethan word with which he entitled the piece next following), to his little venture. But we may take it also as a fit preface to the work which his short life enabled him to give us :-presenting, as it does, two of the leading colours or motives that appear throughout his poetry,-the passion

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