Life of John Keats Part 38

Notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more placid.

Severn had hired a piano for their lodgings, and the patient often allowed himself to be soothed with music. His thoughts even turned towards verse, and he again meditated and spoke of his proposed poem on the subject of Sabrina. Severn began to believe he would get well, and on November 30 Keats himself wrote to Brown in a strain far from cheerful, indeed, but much less desperate than before.

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having pa.s.sed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. G.o.d knows how it would have been--but it appears to me--however, I will not speak of that subject.

I must have been at Bedhampton nearly at the time you were writing to me from Chichester--how unfortunate--and to pa.s.s on the river too!

There was my star predominant! I cannot answer anything in your letter, which followed me from Naples to Rome, because I am afraid to look it over again. I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any handwriting of a friend I love so much as I do you. Yet I ride the little horse, and, at my worst, even in quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life. There is one thought enough to kill me; I have been well, healthy, alert, etc., walking with her, and now the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem, are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach. There, you rogue, I put you to the torture; but you must bring your philosophy to bear, as I do mine, really, or how should I be able to live? Dr Clark is very attentive to me; he says there is very little the matter with my lungs, but my stomach, he says, is very bad. I am well disappointed in hearing good news from George, for it runs in my head we shall all die young. I have not written to Reynolds yet, which he must think neglectful; being anxious to send him a good account of my health, I have delayed it from week to week. If I recover, I will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made during sickness; and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven.

Severn is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. Remember me to all friends, and tell Haslam I should not have left London without taking leave of him, but from being so low in body and mind.

Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister--who walks about my imagination like a ghost--she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always make an awkward bow.

G.o.d bless you!

But on the glimmering hopes of these first weeks at Rome there suddenly followed despair. On Dec. 10, 'when he was going on in good spirits, quite merrily,' says Severn, came a relapse which left no doubt of the issue. Haemorrhage followed haemorrhage on successive days, and then came a period of violent fever, with scenes the most piteous and distressing.

To put an end to his misery, Keats with agonies of entreaty begged to have the bottle of laudanum which Severn had by his desire bought at Gravesend: and on Severn's refusal, 'his tender appeal turned to despair, with all the power of his ardent imagination and bursting heart.' It was no unmanly fear of pain in Keats, Severn again and again insists, that prompted this appeal, but above all his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would bring upon his friend. 'He explained to me the exact procedure of his gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon the danger to my life and certainly to my fortune of my continued attendance on him.'

Severn gently holding firm, Keats for a while fiercely refused his friend's ministrations, until presently the example of that friend's patience and his own better mind made him ashamed.

From these relapses until the end Severn had no respite from his devoted ministrations. Writing to Mrs Brawne a week after the crisis, he says 'Not a moment can I be from him. I sit by his bed and read all day, and at night I humour him in all his wanderings. He has just fallen asleep, the first sleep for eight nights, and now from mere exhaustion.' By degrees the tumult of his soul abated. His sufferings were very great, partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to combat it. His diet was at one time reduced to one anchovy and a small piece of toast a day, so that he endured cruel pangs of actual hunger.

Shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then were in Italy, the friends had no succour except from the a.s.siduous kindness of Dr and Mrs Clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, Mr Ewing. The devotion and resource of Severn were infinite, and had their reward.

Occasionally there came times of delirium or half-delirium, when the dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and his ruined hopes, and of all that he would have done in poetry had life and the fruition of his love been granted him, till his companion was almost exhausted with 'beating about in the tempest of his mind'; and once and again some fresh remembrance of his betrothed, or the sight of her handwriting in a letter, would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. But generally, after the first days of storm, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian, one of the little tokens she had given him at starting, while his companion soothed him with reading or music. The virulence of the reviewers, which most of his friends supposed to be what was killing him, was a matter, Severn declares, scarcely ever on his lips or in his mind at all. Gradually he seemed to mend and gather a little strength again, till Severn actually began to dream that he might even yet recover, though he himself would admit no such hope. 'He says the continued stretch of his imagination has already killed him. He will not hear of his good friends in England, except for what they have done; and this is another load; but of their high hopes of him, his certain success, his experience, he will not hear a word. Then the want of some kind of hope to feed his voracious imagination'--This is from a letter to Mr Taylor which Severn began on Christmas Eve and never finished. On the 11th January, in one conveying to Mrs Brawne the reviving hopes he was beginning on the slenderest grounds to cherish, Severn writes:--

Now he has changed to calmness and quietude, as singular as productive of good, for his mind was most certainly killing him. He has now given up all thoughts, hopes, or even wish for recovery. His mind is in a state of peace from the final leave he has taken of this world and all its future hopes; this has been an immense weight for him to rise from. He remains quiet and submissive under his heavy fate. Now, if anything will recover him, it is this absence of himself. I have perceived for the last three days symptoms of recovery. Dr Clark even thinks so. Nature again revives in him--I mean where art was used before; yesterday he permitted me to carry him from his bedroom to our sitting-room--to put clean things on him--and to talk about my painting to him. This is my good news--don't think it otherwise, my dear madam, for I have been in such a state of anxiety and discomfiture in this barbarous place, that the least hope of my friend's recovery is a heaven to me.

For three weeks I have never left him--I have sat up all night--I have read to him nearly all day, and even in the night--I light the fire--make his breakfast, and sometimes am obliged to cook--make his bed, and even sweep the room. I can have these things done, but never at the time when they must and ought to be done--so that you will see my alternative; what enrages me most is making a fire--I blow--blow for an hour--the smoke comes fuming out--my kettle falls over on the burning sticks--no stove--Keats calling me to be with him--the fire catching my hands and the door-bell ringing: all these to one quite unused and not at all capable--with the want of even proper material--come not a little galling. But to my great surprise I am not ill--or even restless--nor have I been all the time; there is nothing but what I will do for him--there is no alternative but what I think and provide myself against--except his death--not the loss of him--I am prepared to bear that--but the inhumanity, the barbarism of these Italians....

O! I would my unfortunate friend had never left your Wentworth Place--for the hopeless advantages of this comfortless Italy. He has many, many times talked over 'the few happy days at your house, the only time when his mind was at ease.' I hope still to see him with you again. Farewell, my dear madam. One more thing I must say--poor Keats cannot see any letters, at least he will not--they affect him so much and increase his danger. The two last I repented giving, he made me put them into his box--unread.

The complaint about the barbarity of Rome and of Italian law was due to a warning Severn had received that on the death of his friend every stick and shred of furniture in the house would have to be burnt. Within a few days the last thread of hope was snapped by fresh returns of haemorrhage and utter prostration, with renewed feverish agitations of the tortured spirit. Writing to Haslam on January the 15th, Severn shows himself almost broken down by the imminence of money difficulties about to add themselves to his other cares:--

Poor Keats has just fallen asleep--I have watched him and read to him--to his very last wink--he has been saying to me 'Severn I can see under your quiet look--immense twisting and contending--you don't know what you are reading--you are enduring for me more than I'd have you--O that my last hour was come--what is it puzzles you now--what is it happens--' I tell him that 'nothing happens--nothing worries me beyond his seeing--that it has been the dull day.' Getting from myself to his recovery--and then my painting--and then England--and then--but they are all lies--my heart almost leaps to deny them--for I have the veriest load of care--that ever came upon these shoulders of mine. For Keats is sinking daily--perhaps another three weeks may lose me him for ever--this alone would break down the most gallant spirit--I had made sure of his recovery when I set out. I was selfish and thought of his value to me--and made a point of my future success depend on his candor to me--this is not all--I have prepared myself to bear this now--now that I must and should have seen it before--but Torlonias the bankers have refused any more money--the bill is returned unaccepted--'no effects' and I tomorrow must--aye must--pay the last solitary crown for this cursed lodging place--yet more should our unfortunate friend die--all the furniture will be burnt--bed sheets--curtains and even the walls must be sc.r.a.ped--and these devils will come upon me for 100 or 150--the making good--but above all this n.o.ble fellow lying on the bed is dying in horror--no kind hope smoothing down his suffering--no philosophy--no religion to support him--yet with all the most gnawing desire for it--yet without the possibility of receiving it....

Now Haslam what do you think of my situation--for I know not what may come with tomorrow--I am hedg'd in every way that you look at me--if I could leave Keats for a while every day I could soon raise money by my face painting--but he will not let me out of his sight--he cannot bear the face of a stranger--he has made me go out twice and leave him solus. I'd rather cut my tongue out than tell him that money I must get--that would kill him at a word--I will not do anything that may add to his misery--for I have tried on every point to leave for a few hours in the day but he wont unless he is left alone--this won't do--nor shall not for another minute whilst he is John Keats.

Yet will I not bend down under these--I will not give myself a jot of credit unless I stand firm--and will too--you'd be rejoiced to see how I am kept up--not a flinch yet--I read, cook, make the beds--and do all the menial offices--for no soul comes near Keats except the doctor and myself--yet I do all this with a cheerful heart--for I thank G.o.d my little but honest religion stays me up all through these trials.

I'll pray to G.o.d tonight that He may look down with mercy on my poor friend and myself. I feel no dread of what more I am to bear but look to it with confidence.

In religion Keats had been neither a believer nor by any means (except in the earliest days of his enthusiasm for Leigh Hunt) a scoffer; respecting Christianity without calling himself a Christian, and by turns clinging to and drifting from the doctrine of human immortality.

Now, on his death-bed, says Severn, among the most haunting and embittering of his distresses was the thought that not for him were those ready consolations of orthodoxy which were within the reach of every knave and fool. After a time, contrasting the steadfast behaviour of the believer Severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the power of the Christian teaching and example, and bidding Severn read to him from Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Dying and Holy Living_, strove to pa.s.s the remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy.

The danger of money trouble must have been due to a pure misunderstanding, as the credit at Torlonia's was in fact not exhausted, and a fresh communication from Mr Taylor removed all anxiety on that score. One day Keats was seized with a desire for books and was able for a time to take pleasure in reading those which Severn procured for him. Another and continual pleasure was Severn's playing on the piano, and especially his playing of Haydn's sonatas. 'With all his suffering and consciousness of approaching death,' wrote Severn in after years, 'he never quite lost the play of his cheerful and elastic mind, yet these happier moments were but slight s.n.a.t.c.hes from his misery, like the flickering rays of the sun in a smothering storm. Real rays of suns.h.i.+ne they were, all the same, such as would have done honour to the brightest health and the happiest mind: yet the storm of sickness and death was always going on, and I have often thought that these bursts of wit and cheerfulness were called up of set purpose--were, in fact, a great effort on my account.'

Neither patient nor watcher thought any more of recovery. For a few days Severn had the help of an English nurse. It was doubtless then that Keats made his friend go and see the place chosen for his burial. 'He expressed pleasure at my description of the locality of the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, about the gra.s.s and the many flowers, particularly the innumerable violets--also about a flock of goats and sheep and a young shepherd--all these intensely interested him. Violets were his favourite flowers, and he joyed to hear how they overspread the graves. He a.s.sured me that he seemed already to feel the flowers growing over him': and it seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he gave for his epitaph the words, partly taken from a phrase in Beaumont and Fletcher's _Philaster_,[4]--'here lies one whose name was writ in water.' Ever since his first attack at Wentworth Place he had been used to speak of himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual question to the doctor when he came in was, 'Doctor, when will this posthumous life of mine come to an end?'. As he turned to ask it neither physician nor friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at all times of extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing unearthly brightness in his wasted cheeks. Once or twice he was torn again by too sharp a reminder of vanished joys and hopes. Severn handed him a letter which he supposed to be from Mrs Brawne, but which was really from her daughter. 'The glance of that letter tore him to pieces. The effects were on him for many days--he did not read it--he could not, but requested me to place it in his coffin together with a purse and a letter (unopened) of his sister's--since which time he has requested me not to place _that letter_, but only his sister's purse and letter with some hair.' Loveable and considerate to the last, 'his generous concern for me,' reiterates Severn, 'in my isolated position at Rome was one of his greatest cares.' His response to kindness was irresistibly winning, and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with him to the end.

Severn tells how in watching Keats he used sometimes to fall asleep, and awakening, find they were in the dark. 'To remedy this one night I tried the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a lighted candle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be conducted, all which I did without telling Keats. When he awoke and found the first candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while doubting suddenly cried out, "Severn, Severn, here's a little fairy lamp-lighter actually lit up the other candle."' And again: 'Poor Keats has me ever by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens his eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep.'

Life held out for six weeks after the second relapse, but from the first days of February the end was visibly drawing near. On one of his nights of vigil Severn occupied himself in making that infinitely touching death-bed drawing in black and white of his friend with which all readers are familiar. Between the 14th and 22nd of February Severn wrote letters to Brown, to Mrs Brawne, and to Haslam to prepare them for the worst and to tell them of the reconciled and tranquil state into which the dying man had fallen. Death came very peacefully at last. On the 23rd of that month, writes Severn, 'about four, the approaches of death came on. 'Severn--I--lift me up--I am dying--I shall die easy; don't be frightened--be firm, and thank G.o.d it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept.' Three days later his body was carried, attended by several of the English in Rome who had heard his story, to its grave in that retired and verdant cemetery which for his sake and Sh.e.l.ley's has become a place of pilgrimage to the English-speaking world for ever.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A long-popular song from Arne's opera _Artaxerxes_.

[2] Unless Brown had transcribed 'morning' for 'moving' in error; and this was probably the case, though there is a tempting sonority in the juxtaposition of the nearly identical broad vowel sounds in his version.

[3] _Reminiscences of a Literary Life_, by Charles Macfarlane: London, John Murray, 1917, pp. 12-15.--Keats in his letters is apt enough to talk of cant and flummery, but not of humbug, and I suspect the word, though not the thought, is put into his mouth. With reference to Mr Macfarlane's account of Keats generally as 'one of the most cheery and plucky little fellows I ever knew,' and as a man to have stood with composure a whole broadside of Blackwood and Quarterly articles, and to have faced a battery by the side of any friend, it is difficult to conjecture at what date the writer can have seen enough of Keats to form these impressions. From January 1816, when he was in his seventeenth year, to 1827, young Macfarlane seems to have lived entirely at Naples, except for some excursions to the Levant and a short visit to England in 1820, when Keats was a consumptive patient already starting or started for Italy.

[4] Act v, Sc. iii. See Harrison S. Morris in _Bulletin and Review of the Keats-Sh.e.l.ley Memorial_, 1913, p. 30.

CHAPTER XVII

EPILOGUE

Hopes and fears at home--f.a.n.n.y Brawne: Leigh Hunt--Supposed effect of reviews--Sh.e.l.ley misled and inspired--_Adonais_--A _Blackwood_ Parody--False impressions confirmed--Death of Sh.e.l.ley--Hazlitt and Severn--Brown at Florence--Inscription for Keats's grave--Severn and Walter Scott--Slow growth of Keats's fame--Its beginnings at Cambridge--Opinion in the early 'forties--Would-be biographers at odds--Taylor and Brown: Brown and Dilke--A solution: Monckton Milnes--The old circle: Hunt and Haydon--John Hamilton Reynolds--Haslam, Severn, Bailey--Flaws and slips in Milnes's work--Its merit and timeliness--Its reception--The Pre-Raphaelites--Rossetti and Morris--The battle won: Later critics--Keats and Sh.e.l.ley--Pitfalls and prejudices--Arnold and Palgrave--Mr. Buxton Forman and others--Latest eulogists--Risks to permanence of fame--His will conquer--Youth and its storms--The might-have-been--Guesses and a certainty.

The friends of Keats at home had in their love for him tried hard after his departure to nurse some sparks of hope for his recovery. John Hamilton Reynolds, answering from Exmouth a letter in which Taylor told him of the poet's having sailed, wrote, 'I am _very_ much pleased at what you tell me. I cannot now but hold a hope of his refreshed health, which I confess his residence in England greatly discouraged.... Keats, then, by this is at sea fairly--with England and one or two sincere friends behind him,--and with a warm clime before his face! If ever I wished well to Man, I wish well to him!' Haslam in a like strain of feeling wrote in December to Severn at Rome:--'The climate, however, will, I trust, avail him. Keep him quiet, get the winter through; an opening year in Italy will perfect everything. Ere this reaches you, I trust Doctor Clark will have confirmed the most sanguine hopes of his friends in England; and to you, my friend, I hope he will have given what you stand much in need of--a confidence amounting to a faith....

Keats must get himself well again, Severn, if but for us. I, for one, cannot afford to lose him. If I know what it is to love, I truly love John Keats.' The letters written by Severn to this faithful friend during the voyage and from beside the sick-bed were handed round and eagerly scanned among the circle. Brown, when they came into his hands, used to read pa.s.sages from them at his discretion to the Brawne ladies next door, keeping the darkest from the daughter by her mother's wish.

Mrs Brawne, evidently believing her child's heart to be deeply engaged, dealt in the same manner with Severn's letters to herself. The girl seems to have divined none the less that her lover's condition was past hope, and her demeanour, according to Brown's account as follows, to have been human and natural. Keats, writes Brown in a broken style,--

Keats is present to me everywhere and at all times--he now seems sitting by my side and looking hard in my face, though I have taken the opportunity of writing this in company--for I scarcely believe I could do it alone. Much as I have loved him, I never knew how closely he was wound about my heart. Mrs Brawne was greatly agitated when I told her of--and her daughter--I don't know how--for I was not present--yet she bears it with great firmness, mournfully but without affectation. I understand she says to her mother, 'I believe he must soon die, and when you hear of his death, tell me immediately. I am not a fool!'

As the news grew worse, it seems to have been more and more kept back from her, injudiciously as Brown thought, and in a mutilated letter he gives glimpses of moods in her, apparently hysterical, of alternate forced gaiety and frozen silence. A letter or two which she had written to her dying lover were withheld from him, as we have seen, by reason of the terrible agitation into which the mere sight of her handwriting threw him. We hear in the meantime of her being in close correspondence with his young sister at Walthamstow. When the news of the end came, Brown writes,--'I felt at the moment utterly unprepared for it. Then _she_--she was to have it told her, and the worst had been concealed from her knowledge ever since your December letter. It is now five days since she heard it. I shall not speak of the first shock, nor of the following days,--it is enough she is now pretty well,--and thro'out she has shown a firmness of mind which I little expected from one so young, and under such a load of grief.'

Leigh Hunt had written in these days a letter to Severn which did not reach Rome until after Keats's death. I must quote it as showing yet again the strength of the hold which Keats had on the hearts of his friends, and how he, in a second degree only to Sh.e.l.ley, had struck on something much deeper in Hunt's nature than the sunny, kindly, easy-going affectionateness which was all that in most relations he had to bestow:--

Judge how often I thought of Keats, and with what feelings. Mr Brown tells me he is comparatively calm now. If he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it all already, and can put it in better language than any man. I hear he does not like to be told that he may get better, nor is it to be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not thrive. But if this persuasion should happen no longer to be so strong upon him, or if he can now put up with such attempts to console him, remind him of what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour I swear) think always, that I have seen too many cases of recovery from apparently desperate cases of consumption, not to indulge in hope to the very last. If he still cannot bear this, tell him--tell that great poet and n.o.ble-hearted man that we shall all bear his memory in the most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads to it as our loves do. Or if this will trouble his spirit, tell him that we shall never cease to remember and love him, and that Christian or Infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think that all who are of one accord in mind or heart are journeying to one and the same place, and shall meet somehow or other again, face to face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted. Tell him he is only before us on the road, as he was in everything else; or whether you tell him the latter or no, tell him the former, and add, that we shall never forget that he was so, and that we are coming after him. The tears are again in my eyes, and I must not afford to shed them.

During Keats's year of illness and dejection at home, and until the end and after it, the general impression among his friends and acquaintances was that the cause of all his troubles was the agony of mind into which the hostile reviews had thrown him. Severn in the course of his tendance discovered, as we have seen, that this was not so, and learnt the full share which was due to the pangs of unsatisfied, and in a worldly sense hopeless, pa.s.sion in a consumptive const.i.tution. Brown on his part, although he knew the secret of the heart which Keats so jealously guarded, yet attributed the chief part of his friend's distress to the fear of impending poverty--truly another contributing cause--and conceived a fierce and obstinate indignation against George for having, as he quite falsely imagined, deliberately fleeced his brother, as well as against other friends who had borrowed money from the poet and failed to pay it back. But most of those who knew Keats less intimately, seeing his sudden fall from robustness and high spirits,--having never thought of him as a possible consumptive subject,--and being themselves white-hot with anger against _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_,--inferred the poet's feelings from their own, and at the same time added fuel to their wrath against the critics, by taking it for granted that it was their cruelty which was killing him.

To no one was this impression conveyed in a more extravagant form than to Sh.e.l.ley, presumably through his friends the Gisbornes. In that letter of remonstrance to Gifford, as editor of the _Quarterly_, which he drafted in the autumn of 1820 but never sent, Sh.e.l.ley writes:--

Poor Keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this review, which I am, persuaded, was not written with any intention of producing the effect, to which it has, at least, greatly contributed, of embittering his existence, and inducing a disease from which there are now but faint hopes of his recovery. The first effects are described to me to have resembled insanity, and it was by a.s.siduous watching that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. The agony of his sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs, and the usual process of consumption appears to have begun.

In the preface to _Adonais_, composed at San Giuliano, near Pisa, in the June following Keats's death in the next year, Sh.e.l.ley repeats the same delusion in different words, adding the still less justified statement,--probably founded by his informant, Colonel Finch, on expressions used by Brown to Severn about George Keats and other borrowers,--that Keats's misery had been 'exasperated by the bitter sense of unrequited benefits:--the poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius, than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care.' Of the critical attacks upon Keats, Sh.e.l.ley seems not to have known the _Blackwood_ lampoons, and to have put down all the mischief (as did Byron following him) to the _Quarterly_ alone. With his heart and soul full of pa.s.sionate poetic regret for what the world had lost in the death of the author of _Hyperion_, and of pa.s.sionate human indignation against the supposed agents of his undoing, Sh.e.l.ley wrote that lament for Keats which is the best of his longer poems and next to _Lycidas_ the n.o.blest of its cla.s.s in the language. Like Milton, Sh.e.l.ley chose to conform to a consecrated convention and link his work to a long tradition by going back to the precedent of the Sicilian pastoral elegies, those beautiful examples of a form even in its own day conventional and literary. He took two masterpieces of that school, the dirge or ritual chant of Bion on the death of Adonis and the elegy of Moschus on the death of Bion, and into strains directly caught and blended from both of these wove inseparably a new strain of imagery and emotion entirely personal and his own.

The human characteristics of the lamented person, the flesh and blood realities of life, are not touched or thought upon. A rus.h.i.+ng train of abstractions, such as were at all times to Sh.e.l.ley more inspiring and more intensely realized than persons and things,--a rus.h.i.+ng train of beautiful and sorrowful abstractions sweeps by, in _Adonais_, to a strain of music so entrancing that at a first, or even at a twentieth, reading it is perhaps more to the music of the poem than to its imagery that the spiritual sense of the reader attends. Nevertheless he will find at last that the imagery, all unsubstantial as it is, has been floated along the music into his mental being to haunt and live with him: he will be conscious of a possession for ever in that invocation of the celestial Muse to awake and weep for the youngest of her sons,--that pageant of the dead poet's own dreams and imaginations conceived as gathering 'like mist over an autumnal stream' to attend upon his corpse,--the voice of Echo silenced (again a direct adaptation from the Greek) since she has no longer words of his to repeat and awaken the spring withal,--the vision of the coming of Urania to the death chamber,--her lament, with its side-shafts of indignation against the wolves and ravens who have made her youngest-born their prey--the approach and homage of the other 'mountain shepherds,' Byron, Sh.e.l.ley himself, Moore, Leigh Hunt, all figured, especially Sh.e.l.ley, in a guise purely abstract and mythologic and yet after its own fas.h.i.+on pa.s.sionately true,--the bitter ironic application to the reviewers of the verses from Moschus used as a motto to the poem,--

Our Adonais has drunk poison--oh!

What deaf and viperous murderer could crown Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?--

the swift change to a consolatory strain exhorting the mourners to cease their grief and recognise that the lost poet is made one with Nature and that it is Death who is dead, not he,--the invitation to the beautiful burial-place at Rome,--the high strain of Platonic meditation on the transcendental permanence of the One while the Many change and pa.s.s,--the final vision by the rapt spirit of Sh.e.l.ley of the soul of his brother poet beckoning like a star from the abode of the Eternals.

Looking upon his own work in his modest and unsanguine way, Sh.e.l.ley could not suppress the hope that this time he had written something that should not be utterly neglected. He had the poem printed at Pisa, whence a small number of copies only were sent to England. One immediate effect was to instigate the last and silliest--happily, perhaps, also the least remembered--of the _Blackwood_ blackguardries. Not even the tragic experiences of the preceding winter had cured the conductors of that journal of their taste for savage ribaldry. John Scott, the keen-witted and warm-hearted editor, formerly of the _Champion_ and latterly of Taylor's and Hessey's _London Magazine_, had denounced the 'Z' papers, and demanded a disclosure of Lockhart's share in them and in the management of the magazine, in terms so peremptory and scathing that the threat of a challenge from Lockhart followed as an inevitable consequence. The clumsy, well meant intromission of third parties had only the effect of subst.i.tuting Lockhart's friend Christie in the broil for Lockhart himself. The duel was fought on January 16, 1821, exactly a week before Keats's death, and Scott was killed. None the less, when late in the summer of the same year copies of _Adonais_ reached England, remarks on it outdoing all previous outbreaks in folly and insolence were contributed to _Blackwood_ by a comparatively new recruit, the learned and drunken young Dublin scholar William Maginn. Professing absurdly to regard the c.o.c.kney school as a continuation of the 'Della Cruscan' school laughed out of existence by Gifford some five-and-twenty years earlier, the writer includes Sh.e.l.ley of all men (forgetting former laudations of him) among the c.o.c.kneys, flings up a heel at the memory of Keats as 'a young man who had left a decent calling for the melancholy trade of c.o.c.kney-poetry and has lately died of a consumption after having written two or three little books of verse much neglected by the public'; and proceeds to give a comic a.n.a.lysis of _Adonais_, with some specimens of parody upon it, which were afterwards re-published without shame under Maginn's name.

Eight years later, as we shall see, it was on the enthusiasm of a band of young Cambridge men for _Adonais_ that the fame of Keats began to be spread abroad among our younger generation in England. In the meantime the chief effect of the poem was to confirm in the minds of the few readers whom it reached the sentimental view of Keats as an over-sensitive weakling whom the breath of hostile criticism had withered up. And when two years later Byron printed in the eleventh canto of _Don Juan_ his patronizing semi-palinode, part laudatory part contemptuous, on Keats, his closing couplet,

Strange that the mind, that very fiery particle, Should let itself be snuffed out by an article,

stamped that impression for good on the minds of men in far wider circles, until the publication of Monckton Milnes's memoir after five-and-twenty years brought evidence to modify if not to efface it.