In order to secure ourselves against being, prejudged of injustice to the subject of this notice, we may at once, state our opinion, that as surprising powers of merely sensual perception and expression are to be detected in the poems of Keats as in any others within the range of English literature. Herrick surpassed Keats, in his own way, by fits, and in a few single passages; and Chaucer has pieces of brilliant and unmixed word-painting which have no equals in our language; but the power that these great poets attained, or at least exerted, only in moments, was the common manner and easy habit of the wonderful man, who may claim the honor of having assisted more than any other writer, except Mr. Wordsworth, in the origination of the remarkable school of poetry which is yet in its vigorous youth, and exhibits indications of capabilities of unlimited expansion. We also anticipate objections that might be urged, with apparent reason, against the following remarks, by stating our conviction, that the VOL XVI. NO. IL

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short-comings of which we shall complain, could not have existed in the mature productions of Keats, had he lived to produce them. Indeed, as we shall presently take occasion to show, his mind, which was endowed with a power of growth almost unprecedentedly rapid, was on the eve of passing beyond the terrestrial sphere in which he had as yet moved, when death cut short his marvellous, and only just commenced, career.

To Keats, more deeply perhaps than to any poet born in Christian times,

"Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,

Stained the white radiance of eternity."

His mind, like Goethe's, was "lighted from below." Not a ray of the wisdom that is from above had, as yet, illumined it.

The character of the poet, in as far as it differs from that of other men, is indeed a subject of too much importance to allow of our sacrificing this admirable occasion for

"We are men of ruined blood, Thereby comes it we are wise."

For that the consumption and insanity which have often terminated the careers of men of genius, have been not so much the consequences as the causes of their superiority, is sufficiently attested by the fact, that those diseases have been, in such cases, as in common ones, most frequently hereditary.

It is a curious medical fact, which we have heard stated by first rate authorities, that instances are not extraordinary of families, in which, while one member has been afflicted with consumption, a second with scrofula, and a third with insanity, the fourth has been endowed with brilliant genius.

In making these remarks, we no more impugn the transcendent value which the productions of genius usually bear, than the naturalist questions the value of a precious gum, in describing it as the result of vegetable malformations or disease. Nor would we be supposed to imply an ordinary absence in the man of genius of a great general superiority of moral character, when compared with the common rank of men. Genius, however fantastical may be the form which it assumes, is, in essence, an extraordinary honesty; an honesty which too often refuses to exert itself beyond the sphere of the senses and the intellect, and which, then, in its highest energy, produces a Raphael or a Coleridge; but which, sometimes, while it purifies the senses, and perfects their expression, prevents also every incontinence of character, and carries manhood to its height in a Milton or a Michael

"I have this morning such a lethargy that I cannot write. The reason of my delaying is oftentimes from this feeling: I wait for a proper temper. I am now so depressed that I have not an idea to put to paper; my hand feels like lead, and yet it is an unpleasant numbness; it does not take away the pain of existence; I don't know what to write. Monday. You see how I have delayed-and even now I have but a confused idea of what I should be about. My intellect must be in a degenerating state; it must be, for when I should be writing about-God knows what, I am troubling you with moods of my own mind-or rather body-for mind there is none. I am in that temper, that if I were under water, I would scarcely kick to come to the top. I know very well this is all nonsense. In a short time, I hope

I

shall be in a temper to feel sensibly your mention of my book. In vain have I waited till Monday, to have any interest in that or in anything else. I feel no spur at my brother's going to America; and am almost stony-hearted about his wedding."

"I a am this morning in a sort of temper, indolent, and supremely careless; I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's Castle of Indolence;' my passions are all asleep from my having slumbered all over me to a delightful sensation,—about three till nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl, and the breath of lilies, I should call it languor; but as I am, I must call it laziness. The fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree, that pleasure has no show of enticement, and pain no unbearable frown. Neither poetry, of countenance as they pass by; they seem nor ambition, nor love, have any show of alertness rather three figures on a Greek vase; a man and two women, whom no one but myself would distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the mind.”

* * *

"I feel I must again begin with my poetry, for I if I am not in action I am in pain. live under an everlasting restraint, never relieved unless I am composing, so I will write away."

There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of immortality."

"I carry all matters to an extreme-so when I have any little cause of vexation, it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles. Then, and in that temper, if I write to any friend, I have so little self-possession, that I give him time for grieving at the very time, perhaps, when I am laughing at a pun."

"We are still here enveloped in clouds. I lay awake last night listening to the rain, with a sense of being drowned and rotted like a grain of wheat."

All the above passages were written long before the appearance of the acknowledged symptoms of consumption, and to us they seem to have shown forth the end as infallibly as did the nerveless clasp of the hand, from which Coleridge predicted the early death of Keats, at an equal distance of time from its

occurrence.

To theorize justly upon character is the more difficult for the extreme ease with which mere plausibilities may be put forth on the subject; and the common difficulty is greatly increased, in the present case, by the necessity of constantly distinguishing between signs of character and the products of a very peculiar physical temperament, always subject to the influence of a malady, which, in its earliest stages, is frequently so subtle as to defy detection, and to cause its identification for a long period, with the constitution that it is destroying. The case becomes still further complicated, when we take into account the periods of prostration and lethargy, which are the re-action that follows inevitably from the prodigious activity of poetical production. To give anything like a systematic view of the mind and character of Keats, is therefore more than we dare to undertake; all we can attempt is, to select the salient points of the work before us, and to present them to our readers in such juxtaposition and contrast as may seem to be best adapted to the elimination of their significance.

A cotemporary journal of respectable authority, pronounces the writings of Keats to be distingnished by two of the Miltonic characteristics of poetry, sensuousness and passion, and to be wanting in the third, simplicity. We do not think that Keats' verses are characterized remarkably by either of these qualities, in the sense in which Milton understood them, when he proclaimed his famous rule. That Keats' poems, if we except certain parts of the fragment of Hyperion, want simplicity, is too obvious to require proof or illustration. His verses constitute a region of eye-wearying splendor,

from which all who can duly appreciate them, must feel glad to escape, after the astonishment and rapture caused by a short sojourn among them. As for sensuousness, it is an excellence which cannot thrive in the presence of sensuality; and it is by sensuality, in the broader, and not in the vulgar and degrading sense of the term, that Keats' poems are most obviously characterized. This charge, for such we admit that it is, must be substantiated; and to this object we devote our second batch of extracts. They will be, not from Keats' poems, but from his letters; since the shortest way of establishing the general prevalence of a quality in a man's writings is to show it to have been constantly present in his personal character.

The first quotation we make is a very important one. It contains Keats' explicit testimony against himself, with regard to the quality in point. Notwithstanding the young poet's unusual honesty of character, he would probably not have made the following confession and complaint, had he not secretly, though certainly very erroneously, believed them to be a revelation of traits of which he was possessed in common with Shakspeare.

"As to the poetical character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am anything, I am a member, that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime, which is a thing per se, and stands alone,) it is not itself-it has no self-it is everything and nothing. It has no character; it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elenjoys light and shade; it lives in a gusto, be it evated. It has as much delight in conceiving an lago as an Imogene. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the cameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste of the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the he has no identity; he is continually in for and most unpoetical of anything in existence, because filling some other body. The sun, the moon, the

sea, and men and women, who are creatures of an impulse, are poetical, and have about them an uuchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity; he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures. If, then, he has no self; and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say, I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess; but it is a very fact, that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature. How can it when I have no nature? When I am in a room

with people, if I am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself; but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, so that I am in a very little time annihilated; not only among

mian; she has a rich eastern look, she has fine eyes and manners; when she comes into the room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess; she is too fine and conscious of herself to repulse any man that may address her, from habit she thinks that nothing particular; I always find myself more at ease with such a woman.' "She is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way, for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things-the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical, and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron, and the Charmian, hold the first place in onr minds. In the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save

me."

This last sentence, though it sounds very like nonsense, is, nevertheless, an important one. It is obvious that when Keats wrote it, the first alternative would have seemed preferable to the second. Indeed, his subsequent story shows beyond doubt that "the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical," vastly outweighed, in the poet's practical estimation, the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal." This Charmian," whatever the fair qualities of mind and heart of which she may have been possessed, soon engrossed the whole of Keats' being, simply by the peculiar character of her personal attractions.

"

Mr. Milnes has perceived the liability of Keats' nature to the charge that we are now making against it, and he defends him upon the plea of youth, and an ardent temperament. Could we have convinced ourselves of the validity of this plea, our readers should have heard nothing of the present complaint; but we are persuaded that the quality under discussion was vitally inherent in the nature of Keats; that is to say, that it not only affected his life and writings, but entered into his ideal of what was desirable. A man is to be judged, not so much by what he outwardly is, as by what he wishes to become. Let Keats be judged out of his own mouth: “I have been hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious and a love for philosophy. Were I calculated for the former, I should be glad; but as I am not" (his health was then breaking down) "I shall turn all my soul to the latter."

Mr. Milnes tells us that

"Keats' health does not seem to have prevented him from indulging somewhat in that dissipation which is the natural outlet for the young energies of ardent temperaments, unconscious of how

scanty a portion of vital strength had been allotted to him; but a strictly regulated and abstinent life would have appeared to him pedantic and sentimental. He did not however, to any serious extent, allow wine to usurp on his intellect, or games of chance to impair his means, for in his letters to his brothers he speaks of having drank too much as of a piece of rare joviality," &c.

We repeat, that we do not believe Keats' dissipation, such as it was, to have been the spontaneous outbreak of the " young energies of an ardent temperament." To us Keats seems to have pursued the pleasures and temptations of sense, rather than to have been pursued by them. We often find him feasting coolly over the imagination of sensual enjoyment. "Talking of pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my mouth a nectarine. Good God! how fine! it went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy-all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified strawberry." He sometimes aspires to be thought a tippler, gamester, &c., but it is with the air of an unripe boy, awkwardly feigning the irregularities of a man.

We have not noticed one-fourth of the passages which we had marked for quotation, as corroborating our views upon this point; but one proof is as good as a thousand, and we are glad to turn from this part of our task to the more agreeable duty of showing the truth of our assertion that the mind of Keats, before its withdrawal from the world, was upon the eve of a great intellectual and moral alteration.

It must be remembered that our present purpose is to examine the character of Keats, solely in order to the illustration of his poetry, and of the species of poetry to which it belongs. Otherwise we should have gone more fully into the circumstances whereby the moral agency of young Keats is partly unburthened of the responsibility of much temporarily defective feeling, and erroneous thought. As it is, we can only take a hasty glance at two or three of those circumstances. "His mother, a lively and intelligent woman, was supposed to have prematurely hastened the birth of John by her passionate love of amusement, though his constitution at first gave no signs of the peculiar debility of a seventh months child.” Keats was, moreover, unfortunate, we venture to think, in some of the friends, who by their powers and their reputations were calculated to exert the greatest influence upon him, at the most susceptible period of his life. Extremely clever, "self-educated" men are not often otherwise