Life of John Keats Part 5

Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt were alternately his models.

The same gift of adaptiveness which Reynolds showed in serious work made him when he chose a deft, sometimes even a masterly, parodist in the humourous vein, and his work done in this vein a few years later in collaboration with Thomas Hood holds its own well beside that of his a.s.sociate. Partly owing to the persuasions of the lady to whom he was engaged, Reynolds early gave up the hope of a literary career and went into business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell sonnet to the Muses in a copy of Shakespeare which he gave to Keats, and in 1821 he writes again

As time increases I give up drawling verse for drawing leases.

In point of fact he continued to write occasionally for some years, and in the end failed somewhat tragically to prosper in the profession of law. During these early years he was not only one of the warmest friends Keats had but one of the wisest, to whom Keats could open his innermost mind with the certainty of being understood, and who once at least saved him from a serious mistake. A sonnet written by him within three months of their first meeting proves with what warmth of affection as well as with what generosity of admiration the one young aspirant from the first regarded the other. Keats one day, calling on Cowden Clarke and finding him asleep over Chaucer, pa.s.sed the time by writing on the blank s.p.a.ce at the end of _The Floure and the Lefe_, a poem with which he was already familiar, the sonnet beginning 'This pleasant tale is like a little copse.'[2] Reynolds's comment after reading it is as follows:--

Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves, Or white flowers pluck'd from some sweet lily bed; They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eyes, O'er the excited soul.--Thy genius weaves Songs that shall make the age be nature-led, And win that coronal for thy young head Which time's strange hand of freshness ne'er bereaves.

Go on! and keep thee to thine own green way, Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung; Be thou companion of the summer day, Roaming the fields and older woods among:-- So shall thy muse be ever in her May And thy luxuriant spirit ever young.

Reynolds had two sisters, Marianne and Jane, older than himself, and a third, Charlotte, several years younger. With the elder two Keats was soon on terms of almost brotherly intimacy and affection, seeing them often at the family home in Little Britain, exchanging lively letters with them in absence, and contributing to Jane's alb.u.m sets of verses some of which have only through this means been preserved. A little later the piano-playing of the youngest sister, Charlotte, was often a source of great pleasure to him.

Outside his own family Reynolds had an inseparable friend with whom Keats also became quickly intimate: this was James Rice, a young solicitor of literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or worse in health, but always, in Keats's words, 'coming on his legs again like a cat'; ever cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and indefatigable in good offices to those about him: 'dear n.o.ble generous James Rice,' records Dilke,--'the best, and in his quaint way one of the wittiest and wisest men I ever knew.' It was through Rice that there presently came to Reynolds that uncongenial business opening which in worldly wisdom he held himself bound to accept. Besides Reynolds, another and more insignificant young versifying member, or satellite, of Hunt's set when Keats first joined it was one Cornelius Webb, remembered now, if remembered at all, by the derisory quotation in _Blackwood's Magazine_ of his rimes on Byron and Keats, as well as by a disparaging allusion in one of Keats's own later letters. He disappeared early from the circle, but not before he had caught enough of its spirit to write sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost be taken for the work of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his weak moments; and for some years afterwards served as press-reader in the printing-office of Messrs. Clowes, being charged especially with the revision of the _Quarterly_ proofs.

To turn to other close a.s.sociates of Keats during the same period, known to him not through Hunt but through his brothers,--a word may suffice for Charles Wells, to whom we find him addressing in the summer of 1816 a sonnet of thanks for a gift of roses. Wells had been a schoolmate of Tom Keats and R.H. Horne, and is described as in those days a small, red-headed, snub-nosed, blue-eyed youth of irrepressible animal spirits.

Now or somewhat later he formed an intimacy, never afterwards broken, with Hazlitt. Keats's own regard for Wells was short-lived, being changed a year or so later into fierce indignation when Wells played off a heartless practical joke upon the consumptive Tom in the shape of a batch of pretended love-letters from an imaginary 'Amena.' It was after Keats's death that Wells earned a place of his own in literature with the poetic drama _Joseph and his Brethren_, dead-born in its first anonymous form and re-animated after many years, but still during the life-time of its author, through the enthusiasm which its qualities of intellect and pa.s.sion inspired in Rossetti and Swinburne.

Of far different importance were two other acquaintances.h.i.+ps, which Keats owed to his brother George and which in the same months were ripening into affection, one of them into an affection priceless in the sequel. The first was with a young solicitor called William Haslam (it is odd how high a proportion of Keats's intimates were of this profession). Of him no personal picture has come down to us, but in the coming days we find him, of all the set, the most prompt and serviceable on occasions of practical need or urgency: 'our oak friend' he is called in one such crisis by Joseph Severn. It was as the friend of Haslam, and through Haslam of his brother George, that Keats first knew Joseph Severn, whose name is now inseparable from his own. He was two years Keats's senior, the son of a music-master sprung from an old Gloucesters.h.i.+re stock and having a good connexion in the northern suburbs of London. The elder Severn seems to have been much of a domestic tyrant, and in all things headstrong and hot-headed, but blessed with an admirable wife whom he appreciated and who contrived to make the household run endurably if not comfortably. Joseph, the son, showing a precocious talent for drawing, was apprenticed to a stipple engraver, but the perpetual task of 'stabbing copper' irked him too sorely: his ambition was to be a painter, and against the angry opposition of his father he contrived to attend the Royal Academy schools, picking up meanwhile for himself what education in letters he could. He had a hereditary talent for music, an untrained love for books and poetry, and doubtless some touch already of that engaging social charm which Ruskin noted in him when they first met five and twenty years later in Rome. He was beginning to get a little practice as a miniature painter and to make private attempts in history-painting when he met the brilliant young poet-student of Guy's, with whom he was shy and timid at first, as with a sort of superior being. But before long he became used to drinking in with delight all that Keats, in communicative hours, was moved to pour out from the play of his imagination or the stores--infinite as to the innocent Severn they appeared--of his reading in poetry and history. What especially, he recorded in after life, used to enrapture him was Keats's talk on the meaning and beauty of the Greek polytheism as a 'religion of joy.' On his own part he was proud to act as cicerone to Keats in the British Museum or the British Inst.i.tution (the National Gallery as yet was not), and deferentially to point out to him the glories of the antique or of t.i.tian and Claude and Poussin.

Thus our obscurely-born and half-schooled young medical student, the orphan son of a Finsbury stable-keeper, found himself at twenty-one, before the end of his second winter in London, fairly launched in a world of art, letters, and liberal aspirations and living in familiar intimacy with some, and friendly acquaintance with others, of the most gifted spirits of his time. The power and charm of genius already shone from him, and impressed alike his older and his younger companions.

Portraits of him verbal and other exist in abundance. A small, compact, well-turned figure, broad-chested for its height, which was barely an inch over five feet; a shapely head set off by thickly cl.u.s.tering gold-brown hair and carried with an eager upward and forward thrust from the shoulders; the features powerful, finished, and mobile, with an expression at once bold and sensitive; the forehead sloping and not high, but broad and strong: the brows well arched above hazel-brown, liquid flas.h.i.+ng eyes, 'like the eyes of a wild gypsy maid in colour, set in the face of a young G.o.d,' Severn calls them. To the same effect Haydon,--'an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions': and again Leigh Hunt,--'the eyes mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a n.o.ble action or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears and his mouth tremble.' In like manner George Keats,--'John's eyes moistened and his lip quivered at the relation of any tale of generosity or benevolence or n.o.ble daring, or at sights of loveliness or distress.'

And once more Haydon,--'Keats was the only man I ever met who seemed and looked conscious of a high calling, except Wordsworth.... He was in his glory in the fields. The humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble, then his eyes flashed, his cheek glowed and his mouth quivered.' 'Nothing seemed to escape him,'--I now quote paragraphs compiled by the late Mr William Sharp from many jotted reminiscences of Severn's,--

Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of a bird and the undernote of response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal, the changing of the green and brown lights and furtive shadows, the motions of the wind--just how it took certain tall flowers and plants--and the wayfaring of the clouds: even the features and gestures of pa.s.sing tramps, the colour of one woman's hair, the smile on one child's face, the furtive animalism below the deceptive humanity in many of the vagrants, even the hats, clothes, shoes, wherever these conveyed the remotest hint as to the real self of the wearer. Withal, even when in a mood of joyous observance, with flow of happy spirits, he would suddenly become taciturn, not because he was tired, not even because his mind was suddenly wrought to some bewitching vision, but from a profound disquiet which he could not or would not explain.

Certain things affected him extremely, particularly when 'a wave was billowing through a tree,' as he described the uplifting surge of air among swaying ma.s.ses of chestnut or oak foliage, or when, afar off, he heard the wind coming across woodlands. 'The tide! the tide!' he would cry delightedly, and spring on to some stile, or upon the low bough of a wayside tree, and watch the pa.s.sage of the wind upon the meadow gra.s.ses or young corn, not stirring till the flow of air was all around him, while an expression of rapture made his eyes gleam and his face glow till he 'would look sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the forest depths,' or like 'a young eagle staring with proud joy before taking flight.'...

Though small of stature, not more than three-quarters of an inch over five feet, he seemed taller, partly from the perfect symmetry of his frame, partly from his erect att.i.tude and a characteristic backward poise (sometimes a toss) of the head, and, perhaps more than anything else, from a peculiarly dauntless expression, such as may be seen on the face of some seamen....

The only time he appeared as small of stature was when he was reading, or when he was walking rapt in some deep reverie; when the chest fell in, the head bent forward as though weightily overburdened, and the eyes seemed almost to throw a light before his face....

The only thing that would bring Keats out of one of his fits of seeming gloomful reverie--the only thing, during those country-rambles, that would bring the poet 'to himself again' was the motion 'of the inland sea' he loved so well, particularly the violent pa.s.sage of wind across a great field of barley. From fields of oats or barley it was almost impossible to allure him; he would stand, leaning forward, listening intently, watching with a bright serene look in his eyes and sometimes with a slight smile, the tumultuous pa.s.sage of the wind above the grain. The sea, or thought-compelling images of the sea, always seemed to restore him to a happy calm.

In regard to Keats's social qualities, he is said, and owns himself, to have been not always quite well conditioned or at his ease in the presence of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and unaffected. His voice was rich and low, and when he joined in discussion, it was usually with an eager but gentle animation, while his occasional bursts of fierce indignation at wrong or meanness bore no undue air of a.s.sumption, and failed not to command respect. 'In my knowledge of my fellow beings,' says Cowden Clarke, 'I never knew one who so thoroughly combined the sweetness with the power of gentleness, and the irresistible sway of anger, as Keats. His indignation would have made the boldest grave; and they who had seen him under the influence of injustice and meanness of soul would not forget the expression of his features--"the form of his visage was changed."'

In lighter moods his powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are described as great and never used unkindly. He loved the exhibition of any kind of energy, and was as almost as keen a spectator of the rough and violent as of the tender and joyous aspects and doings of life and nature. 'Though a quarrel in the streets,' he says, 'is a thing to be hated the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel.' His yearning love for the old polytheism and instinctive affinity with the Greek spirit did not at all blunt his relish of actualities. To complete our picture and ill.u.s.trate the wide and unfastidious range of his contact with life and interest in things, let us take Cowden Clarke's account of the way he could enjoy and re-enact such a scene of brutal sport and human low-life as our refinement no longer tolerates:--

His perception of humour, with the power of transmitting it by imitation, was both vivid and irresistibly amusing. He once described to me having gone to see a bear-baiting. The performance not having begun, Keats was near to, and watched, a young aspirant, who had brought a younger under his wing to witness the solemnity, and whom he oppressively patronized, instructing him in the names and qualities of all the magnates present. Now and then, in his zeal to manifest and impart his knowledge, he would forget himself, and stray beyond the prescribed bounds into the ring, to the las.h.i.+ng resentment of its comptroller, Mr William Soames, who, after some hints of a practical nature to 'keep back' began laying about him with indiscriminate and unmitigable vivacity, the Peripatetic signifying to his pupil. 'My eyes! Bill Soames giv' me sich a licker!' evidently grateful, and considering himself complimented upon being included in the general dispensation. Keats's entertainment with and appreciation of this minor scene of low life has often recurred to me. But his concurrent personification of the baiting, with his position,--his legs and arms bent and shortened till he looked like Bruin on his hind legs, dabbing his fore paws. .h.i.ther and thither, as the dogs snapped at him, and now and then acting the gasp of one that had been suddenly caught and hugged--his own capacious mouth adding force to the personation, was a remarkable and as memorable a display.

Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have described, Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and half awe-stricken, pa.s.sion for the poetic life. Poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air. It was a time when even people of business and people of fas.h.i.+on read: a time of literary excitement, expectancy, discussion, and disputation such as England has not known since. Fortunes, even, had been made or were being made in poetry; by Scott, by Byron, by Moore, whose _Irish Melodies_ were an income to him and who was known to have just received a cheque of 3000 in advance for _Lalla Rookh_. In such an atmosphere Keats, having enough of his inheritance left after payment of his school and hospital expenses to live on for at least a year or two, soon found himself induced to try his luck and his powers with the rest. The backing of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. His brothers, including the business member of the family, the sensible and practical George, were as eager that John should become a famous poet as he was himself. So encouraged, he made up his mind to give up the pursuit of surgery for that of literature, and declared his decision, being now of age, firmly to his guardian; who naturally but in vain opposed it to the best of his power. The consequence was a quarrel, which Mr Abbey afterwards related, in a livelier manner than we should have expected from him, in the same doc.u.ment, now unfortunately gone astray, to which I have already referred as containing his character of the poet's mother. The die was cast. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three brothers and the social gatherings of their friends, it was determined that John Keats (or according to his convivial _alias_ 'Junkets') should put forth a volume of his poems.

Leigh Hunt brought on the scene a firm of publishers supposed to be sympathetic, the brothers Charles and James Ollier, who had already published for Sh.e.l.ley and who readily undertook the issue. The volume was printed, and the last proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be furnished at once. Keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet _To Leigh Hunt Esqr_, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion:--

Glory and Loveliness have pa.s.s'd away; For if we wander out in early morn, No wreathed incense do we see upborne Into the East to meet the smiling day: No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay, In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn The shrine of Flora in her early May.

But there are left delights as high as these, And I shall ever bless my destiny, That in a time when under pleasant trees Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, A leafy luxury, seeing I could please, With these poor offerings, a man like thee.

With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old pagan world and of grat.i.tude for present friends.h.i.+p, the young poet's first venture was sent forth, amid the applauding expectations of all his circle, in the first days of March 1817.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] These drawings are preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.

[2] Cowden Clarke, writing many years later, suggests that this was Keats's first acquaintance with Chaucer. He is certainly mistaken. It was on Feb. 27, 1817, that Keats called and found him asleep as related in the text. Within a week was published the volume of _Poems_, with the princ.i.p.al piece, _Sleep and Poetry_, partly modelled on the _Floure and the Lefe_ itself and headed with a quotation from it. It is needless to add that later criticism does not admit _The Floure and Lefe_ into the canon of Chaucer's works.

CHAPTER IV

THE 'POEMS' OF 1817

Spirit and chief contents of the volume--Sonnets and rimed heroics--The Chapman sonnet--The 'How many bards' sonnet--The s.e.x-chivalry group--The Leigh Hunt group--The Haydon pair--The Leander sonnet--Epistles--History of the 'heroic' couplet--The closed and free systems--Marlowe--Drayton--William Browne--Chapman and Sandys--Decay of the free system--William Chamberlayne--Milton and Marvell--Waller--Katherine Philips--Dryden--Pope and his ascendency--Reaction: The Brothers Warton--Symptoms of Emanc.i.p.ation--Coleridge, Wordsworth and Scott--Leigh Hunt and couplet reform--Keats to Mathew: influence of Browne--_Calidore_: influence of Hunt--Epistle to George Keats--Epistle to Cowden Clarke--_Sleep and Poetry_ and _I stood tiptoe_--a.n.a.lysis of _Sleep and Poetry_--Double invocation--Vision of the Charioteer--Battle-cry of the new poetry--Its strength and weakness--Challenge and congratulation--Encouragements acknowledged--a.n.a.lysis of _I stood tiptoe_--Intended induction to _Endymion_--Relation to Elizabethans--Relation to contemporaries--Wordsworth and Greek Mythology--_Tintern Abbey_ and the three stages--Contrasts of method--Evocation _versus_ Exposition.

The note of Keats's early volume is accurately struck in the motto from Spenser which he prefixed to it:--

What more felicity can fall to creature Than to enjoy delight with liberty?

The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered.

And the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: delight in the beauty and activities of nature, in the vividness of sensation, in the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of friends.h.i.+p and affection, in antic.i.p.ations of the future, and in the exercise of the art itself which expresses and communicates all these joys.

Technically considered, the volume consists almost entirely of experiments in two metrical forms: the one, the Italian sonnet of octave and sestet, not long fully re-established in England after being disused, with some exceptions, since Milton: the other, the decasyllabic or five-stressed couplet first naturalized by Chaucer, revived by the Elizabethans in all manner of uses, narrative, dramatic, didactic, elegiac, epistolary, satiric, and employed ever since as the predominant English metre outside of lyric and drama. The only exceptions in the volume are the boyish stanzas in imitation of Spenser,--truly rather of Spenser's eighteenth century imitators; the _Address to Hope_ of February 1815, quite in the conventional eighteenth century style and diction, though its form, the s.e.xtain stanza, is ancient; the two copies of verses _To some Ladies_ and _On receiving a curious Sh.e.l.l from some Ladies_, composed for the Misses Mathew, about May of the same year, in the triple-time jingle most affected for social trifles from the days of Prior to those of Tom Moore; and the set of seven-syllabled couplets drafted in February 1816 for George Keats to send as a valentine to Miss Wylie. So far as their matter goes these exceptions call for little remark. Both the sea-sh.e.l.l verses and the valentine spring from a brain, to quote a phrase of Keats's own,

--new stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay Of old romance,--

especially with chivalric images and ideas from Spenser. Of the second set of sh.e.l.l stanzas it may perhaps be noted that they seem to suggest an acquaintance with Oberon and t.i.tania not only through the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ but through Wieland's _Oberon_, a romance poem which Sotheby's translation had made well known in England and in which the fairy king and queen are divided by a quarrel far deeper and more durable than in Shakespeare's play.[1]

Taking first the score or so of sonnets in the volume, we find that none of them are love-sonnets and that few are written in any high mood of pa.s.sion or exaltation. They are for the most part of the cla.s.s called 'occasional',--records of pleasant experience, addresses of friendly greeting or invocation, or compact meditations on a single theme. They bespeak a temper cordial and companionable as well as enthusiastic, manifest sincerity in all expressions of personal feeling, and contain here and there a pa.s.sage of fine mature poetry. These, however, are seldom sustained for more than a single quatrain. The great exception of course is the sonnet, almost too well known to quote,--but I will quote it nevertheless,--on Chapman's _Homer_. That walk in the morning twilight from Clerkenwell to the Borough had enriched our language with what is by common consent one of its masterpieces in this form, having a close unsurpa.s.sed for the combined qualities of serenity and concentration: concentration twofold, first flas.h.i.+ng on our mind's eye the human vision of the explorer and his companions with their looks and gestures, then symbolically evoking through that vision a whole world-wide range of the emotions of discovery.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer rul'd as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The 'realms of gold' lines in the Chapman sonnet, recording Keats's range of reading in our older poetry, had been in a measure antic.i.p.ated in this other, written six months earlier[2]:--

How many bards gild the lapses of time!

A few of them have ever been the food Of my delighted fancy,--I could brood Over their beauties, earthly, or sublime: And often, when I sit me down to rhyme, These will in throngs before my mind intrude: But no confusion, no disturbance rude Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime.

So the unnumber'd sounds that evening store; The songs of birds--the whisp'ring of the leaves-- The voice of waters--the great bell that heaves With solemn sound,--and thousand others more, That distance of recognizance bereaves, Make pleasing music, and not wild uproar.

Technical points worth attention here are the bold reversal of the regular accentual stress twice over in the first line, and the strained use of 'store' for 'fill' and 'recognizance' for 'recognition.' But the main interest of the sonnet is its comparison of the working of Keats's miscellaneous poetic reading in his mind and memory with the effect of the confused but harmonious sounds of evening on the ear,--a frank and illuminating comment by himself on those stray echoes and reminiscences of the older poets which we catch now and again throughout his work.

Such echoes and reminiscences are always permitted to genius, because genius cannot help turning whatever it takes into something new of its own: and Keats showed himself from the first one of those chartered borrowers who have the right to draw inspiration as they please, whether direct from nature or, in the phrase of Wordsworth,

From the great Nature that exists in works Of mighty poets.[3]

Compare Sh.e.l.ley in the preface to _Prometheus Unbound_:--'One great poet is a masterpiece of nature which another not only ought to study but must study.'

Most of the remaining sonnets can best be taken in groups, each group centering round a single theme or embodying a single mood or vein of feeling. One is what may be called the s.e.x-chivalry group, including the sequence of three printed separately from the rest and beginning, 'Woman, when I behold thee flippant, vain'; that beginning 'Had I a man's fair form'; that addressed to Georgiana Wylie, with its admirable opening, 'Nymph of the downward smile, etc.,' and its rather lame conclusion; to which, as more loosely connected with the group, and touched in some degree with Byronic suggestion, may be added 'Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters.' That excellent critic, the late F.T. Palgrave, had a singular admiration for the set of three which I have placed at the head of this group: to me its chief interest seems not poetical but personal, inasmuch as in it Keats already defines with self-knowledge the peculiar blend in his nature of ardent, idealizing boyish wors.h.i.+p of woman and beauty with an acute critical sensitiveness to flaws of character defacing his ideal in actual women: a sensitiveness which grew with his growth and many a time afterwards put him ill at ease with his company and himself.

A large proportion of the remaining sonnets centre themselves more or less closely about the figure of Leigh Hunt. Two introduce him directly by name and had the effect of definitely marking Keats down, in the minds of reactionary critics, as a victim to be swooped upon in a.s.sociation with Hunt whenever occasion offered. The two are the early sonnet composed on the day of Hunt's release from prison (February 5, 1815), and shown shyly as a first flight to Cowden Clarke immediately afterwards, and the dedicatory sonnet already quoted on the decay of the old pagan beauty, written almost exactly two years later. Intermediate in date between these two come two or three sonnets of May and June 1816 which, whether inspired directly or not by intercourse with Hunt, are certainly influenced by his writing, and express a townsman's enjoyment of country walks in a spirit and vocabulary near akin to his:--'To one who has been long in city pent' (this opening comes with only the change of a word from _Paradise Lost_), 'O Solitude, if I with thee must dwell,' 'As late I rambled in the happy fields.' There is a memory of Wordsworth, and probably also of Epping Forest walks, in the cry to Solitude:--