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THE ADMONITION

priestess who stands on the altar platform when he has climbed to it; all these phases of the poet's ordeal are impressively told, but are hard to interpret otherwise than dubiously and vaguely. Matters become more definite a moment afterwards, when in answer to the poet's questions the priestess tells him that none can climb to the altar beside which he stands,—the altar, we must suppose, of historic and prophetic knowledge where alone, after due sacrifice of himself, the poet can find true inspiration, except those

to whom the miseries of the world Are misery and will not let them rest.

The poet pleads that there are thousands of ordinary men and women who feel the sorrows of the world and do their best to mitigate them, and is answered,

"Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries'
Rejoin'd that voice; 'they are no dreamers weak;
They seek no wonder but the human face,

No music but a happy-noted voice:

They come not here, they have no thought to come;
And thou art here, for thou art less than they.
What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,

To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself: think of the earth;
What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?
What haven? every creature hath its home,
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low-
The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.

What a pilgrimage has the soul of Keats gone through, when he utters this heartrending cry, from the day, barely three years before, when he was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of the poetic life and of the end that awaits it:

These are the living pleasures of the bard,
But richer far posterity's award.

What shall he murmur with his latest breath,

When his proud eye looks through the film of death?

THE MONITRESS

453

The truth is that, in all this, Keats in his depression of mind and body has become fiercely unjust to his own achievements and their value: for if posterity were asked, would it not reply that the things of sheer beauty his youth has left us, draughts drawn from the inmost wells of nature and antiquity and romance, are of greater solace and refreshment to his kind than anything he could have been likely to achieve by deliberate effort in defiance of his natural genius or in premature anticipation of its maturity?

At this point there follows a fretful passage, ill-written or rather only roughly drafted, and therefore not included in the transcripts of the fragments by his friends, in which his monitress affirms contemptuously the gulf that separates the romantic dreamer from the true poet. He accepts the reproof and the threatened punishment, the more willingly if they are to extend to certain 'hectorers in proud bad verse' (he means Byron) who have aroused his spleen. Reverting to a loftier strain, and acknowledging the grace she has so far shown him, the poet asks his monitress to reveal herself. He had probably long before been impressed by engravings of the well-known ancient statue of the seated Mnemosyne sitting forward with her chin resting on her hand, her arm and shoulder heavily swathed in drapery: but his vision of her here seems wholly independent, and is noble and mystically haunting. When she has signified to him in a softened voice that the gigantic image above the altar is that of Saturn, and that the scenes of the world's past she is about to evoke before him are those of the fall of Saturn, the poet relates:

As near as an immortal's sphered words

Could to a mother's soften were these last:
And yet I had a terror of her robes,
And chiefly of the veils that from her brow

Hung pale, and curtain'd her in mysteries,

That made my heart too small to hold its blood.
This saw that Goddess, and with sacred hand
Parted the veils. Then saw I a wan face,

454

THE ATTEMPT BREAKS OFF

Not pin'd by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd
By an immortal sickness which kills not;
It works a constant change, which happy death
Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
To no death was that visage; it had past
The lilly and the snow; and beyond these
I must not think now, though I saw that face.
But for her eyes I should have fled away;
They held me back with a benignant light,
Soft, mitigated by divinest lids

Half-clos'd, and visionless entire they seem'd
Of all external things; they saw me not,

But in blank splendour beam'd, like the mild moon,
Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not
What eyes are upward cast.

The aspirant now adoringly entreats her to disclose the tragedy that he perceives to be working in her brain: she consents, and from this point begins the original Hyperion re-cast and narrated as a vision within the main vision, with comments put into the mouth of the prophetess. But the scheme, which under no circumstances, one would say, could have been a prosperous one, was soon abandoned, and this, the last of Keats's great fragments, breaks off near the beginning of the second book.

CHAPTER XV

FEBRUARY-AUGUST 1820: HAMPSTEAD AND KENTISH TOWN: PUBLICATION OF LAMIA VOLUME

Letters from the sick-bed-To Fanny Brawne To James Rice-Barry Cornwall-Hopes of returning health-Haydon's private viewImprovement not maintained-Summer at Kentish Town-Kindness of Leigh Hunt-Misery and jealousy-Severn and Mrs GisborneInvitation from Shelley-Keats on The Cenci-La Belle Dame published-A disfigured version-The Lamia volume published-Charles Lamb's appreciation-The New Monthly-Other favourable reviews— Taylor and Blackwood—A skirmish-Impenitence-And impertinence -Jeffrey in the Edinburgh-Appreciation full though tardy-Fury of Byron Shelley on Hyperion-And on Keats in general-Impressions of Crabb Robinson.

SUCH and so gloomy, although with no ignoble gloom, had been Keats's deeper thoughts on poetry and life, and such the imagery under which he figured them, during the last weeks when the state of his health enabled his mind to work with anything approaching its natural power. From the night of his seizure on February 3rd 1820, which was three months after his twenty-fourth birthday, he never wrote verse again: unless indeed the lines found on the margin of his manuscript of The Cap and Bells were written from his sick-bed and in a moment of bitterness addressed in his mind to Fanny Brawne: but from a certain pitch and formality of style in them, I should take them rather to be meant for putting into the mouth of one of the characters in some such historical play as he had been meditating in the weeks before Christmas:This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

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LETTERS FROM THE SICK-BED

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calm'd-see here it is

I hold it towards you.

For several days after the hæmorrhage he was kept to his room and his bed, and for nearly two months had to lead a strictly invalid life. At first he could bear no one in the room except the doctor and Brown. 'While I waited on him day and night,' testifies Brown, 'his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance of his eye, a motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment.'' (How often have these words come home to the heart of the present writer in days when he used to be busy about the mute sick-bed of another of these shining ones!) Severn, nursing Keats later under conditions even more trying and hopeless, bears similar testimony to his unabated charm and sweetness in suffering. Almost from the first he was able to write little letters to his sister Fanny, and is careful to give them a cheering and re-assuring turn. When after some days he is down on a sofa-bed made up for him in the front parlour he tells her what an improvement it is:—

Besides I see all that passes-for instance now, this morning -if I had been in my own room I should not have seen the coals brought in. On Sunday between the hours of twelve and one I descried a Pot boy. I conjectured it might be the one o'clock beer-Old women with bobbins and red cloaks and unpresuming bonnets I see creeping about the heath. Gipseys after hare skins and silver spoons. Then goes by a fellow with a wooden clock under his arm that strikes a hundred and more. Then comes the old French emigrant (who has been very well to do in France) with his hands joined behind on his hips, and his face full of political schemes. Then passes Mr David Lewis, a very good-natured, good-looking old gentleman who has been very kind to Tom and George and me. As for those fellows the Brickmakers they are always passing to and fro. I mustn't forget the two old maiden Ladies in Well Walk who have a Lap dog between