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."

d

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

aslae volume of 1817 are the worst pieces in it. The world of personal emotion was then far less familiar to him than that of fancy, and indeed it seems to have been long before he descended from the ideal atmosphere in which he dwelt so happily, into the troubled realities of human love. Not, however, that the creatures even of his young imagination were unimbued with natural affections; so far from it, it may be reasonably conjectured that it was the interfusion of ideal and sensual life which rendered the Grecian mythology so peculiarly congenial to the mind of Keats, and when the "Endymion" comes to be critically considered, it will be found that its excellence consists in its clear comprehension of that ancient spirit of beauty, to which all outward perceptions so excellently ministered, and which undertook to ennoble and purify, as far as was consistent with their retention, the instinctive desires of mankind.

Friendship, generally ardent in youth, would not remain without its impression in the early poems of Keats, and a congeniality of literary dispositions appears to have been the chief impulse to these relations. With Mr. Felton Mathew,* to whom his first published Epistle was addressed, he appears to have enjoyed a high intellectual sympathy. This friend had introduced

* A gentleman of high literary merit, now employed in the administration of the Poor Law.

him to agreeable society, both of books and men, and those verses were written just at the time when Keats became fully aware that he had no real interest in the profession he was sedulously pursuing, and was already in the midst of that sad conflict between the outer and inner worlds, which is too often, perhaps always in some degree, the Poet's heritage in life. That freedom from the bonds of conventional phraseology which so clearly designates true genius, but which, if unwatched and unchastened, will continually outrage the perfect form that can alone embalm the beautiful idea and preserve it for ever, is there already manifest, and the presence of Spenser shows itself not only by quaint expressions and curious adaptations of rhyme, but by the introduction of the words “and make a sun-shine in a shady place," applied to the power of the Muse. Mr. Mathew retains his impression that at that time "the eye of Keats was more critical than tender, and so was his mind: he admired more the external decorations than felt the deep emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you through the mazes of elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the pathetic. He used to spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never observed the tears in his eyes nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme sensibility." This modification of a nature at first passionately susceptible and the