4. Shelley was a radical; from your English history discover the attitude of English statesmen to radicalism between the years 1815-1825. 5. How true an estimate of Shelley was Matthew Arnold's " a pale ineffectual spirit, beating his luminous wings in the void"?

6. Shelley's note was essentially lyrical. How great a part has lyricism played in the poetry of the romantic movement?

7. Compare Shelley's spirit to Byron's. In what were they alike and how did they differ?

8. In what poem are the following lines:

"Life, like a dome of many colored glass

Stains the white radiance of eternity"?

9. Macaulay said of Shelley: "His poetry seems not to have been an art but an inspiration." Discuss this thought.

10. Write a two-hundred-word composition upon the life and poetry of Shelley.

Suggested Readings.-" The Cloud," "To a Skylark," "Ode to the West Wind," and "Adonaïs will give the reader but a taste of the consistent beauty of this poet. Dowden's "Life of Shelley is excellent; T. J. Hogg's Shelley at Oxford" is a delightful contemporary account.

CHAPTER XXXIV

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

"His fragment of "Hyperion seems actually inspired by the Titans and is as sublime as Eschylus."-Byron.

"John Keats was one of those sweet and glorious spirits who descend like the angel messengers of old, to discharge some divine command, not to dwell here."-W. Howitt.

SOMEBODY has said of John Keats that, after he grew up, he was unable to write bad poetry. He certainly produced some of the most exquisite verse of all time. He was the eldest son of a London stable-keeper. His education, owing to the death of both his parents, stopped short in his fifteenth year.

He was then apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton, where he worked until, in 1814, he removed to London in order to be near the hospitals. His passion for poetry led him, however, to abandon the medical profession and subsist on his small inheritance. In 1817 he published a volume of poems, which contained the famous sonnet, "On first looking into Chapman's Homer." Early in 1818 this was followed by his first long poem, "Endymion," which he himself condemned as immature and which "Blackwood's Magazine" and the "Quarterly Review " attacked so savagely that the story arose that his death was due to their fury. This legend has been kept alive by Byron's famous quatrain:

"Who killed John Keats?

'I,' says the Quarterly, So savage and tartarly, "Twas one of my feats.""

As a matter of fact they disturbed him little. Instead of worrying about the opinions of obscure hack writers or attempting to reply to their criticisms, he composed during 1818-1819 an answer which forever silenced them. In other words, he wrote "Isabella," "Hyperion," "The Eve of St. Agnes," "Lamia," several wonderful odes, a number of scarcely less wonderful sonnets, "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and "The Eve of St. Mark." In the midst of these labors

he was attacked by consumption, during the early autumn of 1820 sought refuge in Italy from its ravages, and after much suffering died in Rome, February 23, 1821.

Endymion" is a romance in four books. The adventures of its hero are the experiences of the poetic soul in its search for union with

ideal beauty. Keats's efforts to work out this conception resulted in a poem as fragmentary as a broken dream, but full of beauty and valuable as a record of the tumult of emotions and images in a youth

ful poet's mind. Its vague random tunefulness is well shown in its famous opening lines:

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever;

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness, but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of deep peace and health and quiet breathing.
Therefore on every morrow are we wreathing
A flowery chain to bind us to the earth
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble hearts."

The poem also contains this:

"He ne'er is crowned

With immortality who fears to follow
Where airy voices lead."

In " Endymion " Keats had used heroic couplets modelled on those of Marlowe's" Hero and Leander." That is, the couplets, instead of standing apart, had run together. In "Lamia," influenced by Dryden, Keats wrote with more firmness but less charm. The poem shows, however, a great advance in narrative skill, it has a sort of fire that takes hold of people, and it contains lines of great beauty. The following quotations show its power and style:

"Love in a cottage, love upon a crust,

Is, God forgive us! cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last

More grievous torment than a shepherd's fast."

"There was an awful rainbow once in heaven;
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things:
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings."

Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," is a tale of unhappy love, written in the ottava rima and transplanted from an Italian original. It is a tragic tale told by a master hand, but in "The Eve of St. Agnes" Keats did still better. It is written in the Spenserian stanza. Its effectiveness grows from contrasting the cold, storm, old age, and enmity outside with the warmth, peace, youth, and bliss within Madeleine's chamber. Unlike " Isabella " it is a happy tale. Among its many fine lines are these:

"Sudden a thought came like a full blown rose
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot."

"And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon,
Manna, and dates, in argosy transferred

From Fez, and spiced dainties, every one

From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon."

Keats's genius is seen at its best, however, in his odes. In the "Ode to a Nightingale," he writes:

"O, for a draught of vintage that hath been

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvëd earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O, for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippcrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple stained mouth."

In the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," amid a score of other perfect phrases, we find this:

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter."

The idea on which these great poems and the almost equally great "Ode to Autumn are built is that common things are transitory, and that escape from weariness, fever, and fret can be made only on the viewless wings of poetry.

Like Keats's own life, his last poem, "Hyperion," is a fragment. It ends before it is well begun. Written as it is in Miltonic blank verse and obviously in imitation of " Paradise Lost," its opening passages show Saturn after his overthrow by Jove, as Paradise Lost " shows Satan after his expulsion from heaven. It begins in a style not altogether unworthy of its great model:

"Deep in the shady silence of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,

Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone.

'It seemed no force could wake him from his place;

But there came one

She was a goddess of the infant world;

By her in stature the tall Amazon

Had stood a pigmy's height; she would have ta'en
Achilles by the hair and bent his neck,

Or with a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel.