has been lost; only let it not be like Pope's Homer, a new work with an old name-a portrait, itself of considerable power and beauty, but in which the features of the individual are scarcely to be recognised. The Sonnet in which these his first impressions are concentrated, was left the following day on Mr. Clarke's table, realising the idea of that form of verse expressed by Keats himself in his third Epistle, as

"swelling loudly

Up to its climax, and then dying proudly."

This Epistle is written in a bolder and freer strain than the others; the Poet in excusing himself for not having addressed his Muse to Mr. Clarke before, on account of his inferiority to the great masters of song, implies that he is growing conscious of a possible brotherhood with them; and his terse and true description of the various orders of verse, with which his friend has familiarised his mind-the Sonnet, as above cited-the Ode,

"Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load,"

the Epic,

"of all the king,

Round, vast, and spanning all, like Saturn's ring,"

and last,

"The sharp, the rapier-pointed Epigram,-"

betokens the justness of perception generally allied with redundant fancy.

These notices have anticipated the period of the termination of Keats's apprenticeship and his removal to London, for the purpose of walking the hospitals. He lodged in the Poultry, and having been introduced by Mr. Clarke to some literary friends soon found himself in a circle of minds which appreciated his genius and stimulated him to exertion. One of his first acquaintance, at that time eminent for his poetical originality and his political persecutions, was Mr. Leigh Hunt, who was regarded by some with admiration, by others with ridicule, as the master of a school of poets, though in truth he was only their encourager, sympathiser, and friend; while the unpopularity of his liberal and cosmopolite politics was visited with indiscriminating injustice on all who had the happiness of his friendship or even the gratification of his society. In those days of hard opinion, which we of a freer and worthier time look upon with indignation and surprise, Mr. Hunt had been imprisoned for the publication of phrases which, at the most, were indecorous expressions of public feeling, and became a traitor or a martyr according to the temper of the spectator. The heart of Keats leaped towards him in human and poetic brotherhood, and the earnest Sonnet on the day he left his prison riveted the connexion. They read and walked together, and wrote verses in competition on a given subject. "No imaginative

pleasure," characteristically observes Mr. Hunt, " was left unnoticed by us or unenjoyed, from the recollection of the bards and patriots of old, to the luxury of a summer rain at our windows, or the clicking of the coal in winter time." Thus he became intimate with Hazlitt, Shelley, Haydon, and Godwin, with Mr. Basil Montague and his distinguished family, and with Mr. Ollier, a young publisher, himself a poet, who, out of sheer admiration, offered to publish a volume of his productions. The poem with which it commences was suggested to Keats by a delightful summers-day, as he stood beside the gate that leads from the Battery, on Hampstead Heath, into a field by Caen Wood; and the last, "Sleep and Poetry," was occasioned by his sleeping in Mr. Hunt's pretty cottage, in the vale of Health, in the same quarter. These two pieces, being of considerable length, tested the strength of the young poet's fancy, and it did not fail. For the masters of song will not only rise lark-like with quivering wings in the sunlight, but must train their powers to sustain a calm and protracted flight, and pass, as if poised in air, over the heads of mankind. Yet it was to be expected that the apparent faults of Keats's style would be here more manifest than in his shorter efforts; poetry to him was not yet an Art; the irregularities of his own and other verse were no more to him than the

inequalities of that nature, of which he regarded

himself as the interpreter ;

"For what has made the sage or poet write,
But the fair paradise of Nature's light?

In the calm grandeur of a sober line

We see the waving of the mountain pine,
And when a tale is beautifully staid,

We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade."

He had yet to learn that Art should purify and elevate the Nature that it comprehends, and that the ideal loses nothing of its truth by aiming at perfection of form as well as of idea. Neither did he like to regard poetry as a matter of study and anxiety, or as a representative of the struggles and troubles of the mind and heart of men. He said most exquisitely,

that

"a drainless shower

Of light is Poesy-'tis the supreme of power;
'Tis Might half-slumbering on its own right arm."

He thought that—

"strength alone, though of the Muses born,

Is like a fallen angel-trees uptorn,

Darkness and worms and shrouds and sepulchres
Delight it—for it feeds upon the burrs

And thorns of life, forgetting the great end

Of Poesy, that it should be a friend

To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of men."

And yet Keats did not escape the charge of sacrificing beauty to supposed intensity, and of merging the abiding grace of his song in the passionate fantasies of

the moment. Words indeed seem to have been often selected by him rather for their force and their harmony, than according to any just rules of diction; if he met with a word anywhere in an old writer that took his fancy he inserted it in his verse on the first opportunity; and one has a kind of impression that he must have thought aloud as he was writing, so that many an ungainly phrase has acquired its place by its assonance or harmony, or capability to rhyme, (for he took great pleasure in fresh and original rhymes) rather than for its grammatical correctness or even justness of expression. And when to this is added the example set him by his great master Spenser, of whom a noted man of letters has been heard irreverently to assert "that every Englishman might be thankful that Spenser's gibberish had never become part and parcel of the language," the wonder is rather that he sloughed off so fast so many of his offending peculiarities, and in his third volume attained so great a purity and concinnity of phraseology, that little was left to designate either his poetical education or his literary associates.

he

At the completion of the matter for this first volume

gave a striking proof of his facility in composition; he was engaged with a lively circle of friends when the last proof-sheet was brought in, and he was requested by the printer to send the Dedication directly,