On the death of their remaining parent, the young Keats's were consigned to the guardianship of Mr. Abbey, a merchant. About eight thousand pounds were left to be equally divided among the four children. It does not appear whether the wishes of John, as to his destination in life, were at all consulted, but on leaving school in the summer of 1810, he was apprenticed, for five years, to Mr. Hammond, a surgeon of some eminence at Edmonton. The vicinity to Enfield enabled him to keep up his connection with the family of Mr. Clarke, where he was always received with familiar kindness. His talents and energy had strongly recommended him to his preceptor, and his affectionate disposition endeared him to his son. In Charles Cowden Clarke, Keats found a friend capable of sympathising with all his highest tastes and finest sentiments, and in this genial atmosphere his powers gradually expanded. He was always borrowing books, which he devoured rather than read. Yet so little expectation was formed of the direction his ability would take, that when, in the beginning of 1812, he asked for the loan of Spenser's "Fairy Queen," Mr. Clarke remembers that it was supposed in the family that he merely desired, from a boyish ambition, to study an illustrious production of literature. The effect, however, produced on him by that great work of ideality was electrical: he was in the

habit of walking over to Enfield at least once a week, to talk over his reading with his friend, and he would now speak of nothing but Spenser. A new world of delight seemed revealed to him: "he ramped through the scenes of the romance," writes Mr. Clarke, "like a young horse turned into a spring meadow: he revelled in the gorgeousness of the imagery, as in the pleasures of a sense fresh-found: the force and felicity of an epithet (such for example as—“ the seashouldering whale ") would light up his countenance with ecstacy, and some fine touch of description would seem to strike on the secret chords of his soul and generate countless harmonies. This in fact was not only his open presentation at the Court of the Muses, (for the lines in imitation of Spenser,

"Now Morning from her orient chamber came,
And her first footsteps touched a verdant hill," &c.

are the earliest known verses of his composition,) but it was the great impulse of his poetic life, and the stream of his inspiration remained long coloured by the rich soil over which it first had flowed. Nor will the just critic of the maturer poems of Keats fail to trace to the influence of the study of Spenser much that at first appears forced and fantastical both in idea and in expression, and discover that precisely those defects which are commonly attributed to

an extravagant originality may be distinguished as proceeding from a too indiscriminate reverence for a great but unequal model. In the scanty records which are left of the adolescent years in which Keats became a poet, a Sonnet on Spenser, the date of which I have not been able to trace, itself illustrates this view :

"Spenser! a jealous honourer of thine,
A forester deep in thy midmost trees,
Did, last eve, ask my promise to refine

Some English, that might strive thine ear to please.

But, Elfin-poet ! 'tis impossible

For an inhabitant of wintry earth

To rise, like Phoebus, with a golden quill,

Fire-winged, and make a morning in his mirth.
It is impossible to 'scape from toil

O' the sudden, and receive thy spiriting:
The flower must drink the nature of the soil

Before it can put forth its blossoming :

Be with me in the summer days and I
Will for thine honour and his pleasure try."

A few memorials remain of his other studies. Chaucer evidently gave him the greatest pleasure: he afterwards complained of the diction as "annoyingly mixed up with Gallicisms," but at the time when he wrote the Sonnet, at the end of the tale of "The Flower and the Leaf," he felt nothing but the pure breath of nature in the morning of English literature. His friend Clarke, tired with a long walk, had fallen

asleep on the sofa with the book in his hand, and when he woke, the volume was enriched with this addition,

"This pleasant tale is like a little copse: " &c. *

The strange tragedy of the fate of Chatterton "the marvellous Boy, the sleepless soul that perished in its pride," so disgraceful to the age in which it occurred and so awful a warning to all others of the cruel evils, which the mere apathy and ignorance of the world can inflict on genius, is a frequent subject of allusion and interest in Keats's letters and poems, and some lines of the following invocation bear a mournful anticipatory analogy to the close of the beautiful elegy which Shelley hung over another early grave.

"O Chatterton! how very sad thy fate!
Dear child of sorrow-son of misery!

How soon the film of death obscured that eye,
Whence Genius mildly flashed, and high debate.
How soon that voice, majestic and elate,
Melted in dying numbers! Oh! how nigh
Was night to thy fair morning. Thou didst die
A half-blown flow'ret which cold blasts amate.+
But this is past: thou art among the stars
Of highest Heaven to the rolling spheres
Thou sweetly singest: nought thy hymning mars,
Above the ingrate world and human fears.

* See the "Literary Remains."
Amate.-Affright. Chaucer.

On earth the good man base detraction bars

From thy fair name, and waters it with tears."

Not long before this, Keats had become familiar with the works of Lord Byron, and indited a Sonnet, of little merit, to him in December, 1814:—

"Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody!
Attuning still the soul to tenderness,
As if soft Pity, with unusual stress,

Had touched her plaintive lute, and thou, being by,
Hadst caught the tones, nor suffered them to die.
O'ershading sorrow doth not make thee less
Delightful thou thy griefs dost dress
With a bright halo, shining beamily,
As when a cloud the golden moon doth veil,
Its sides are tinged with a resplendent glow,
Through the dark robe oft amber rays prevail,
And like fair veins in sable marble flow;
Still warble, dying swan! still tell the tale,

The enchanting tale, the tale of pleasing woe."

Confused as are the imagery and diction of these lines, their feeling suggests a painful contrast with the harsh judgment and late remorse of their object, the proud and successful poet, who never heard of this imperfect utterance of boyish sympathy and

respect.

The impressible nature of Keats would naturally incline him to erotic composition, but his early loveverses are remarkably deficient in beauty and even in passion. Some which remain in manuscript are without any interest, and those published in the