A Reading in the Letters of John Keats

ONE would like to know whether a first reading in the letters of Keats does not generally produce something akin to a severe mental shock. It is a sensation which presently becomes agreeable, being in that respect like a plunge into cold water, but it is undeniably a shock. Most readers of Keats, knowing him, as he should be known, by his poetry. have not the remotest conception of him as he shows himself in his letters. Hence they are unprepared for this splendid exhibition of virile intellectual health. Not that they think of him as morbid, — his poetry surely could not make this impression, — but rather that the popular conception of him is, after all these years, a legendary Keats, the poet who was killed by reviewers, the Keats of Shelley’s preface to the Adonais, the Keats whose story is written large in the world’s book of Pity and of Death. When the readers are confronted with a fair portrait of the real man, it makes them rub their eyes. Nay, more, it embarrasses them. To find themselves guilty of having pitied one who stood in small need of pity is mortifying. In plain terms, they have systematically bestowed (or have attempted to bestow) alms on a man whose income at its least was bigger than any his patrons could boast. Small wonder that now and then you find a reader, with large capacity for the sentimental, who looks back with terror to his first dip into the letters.

The legendary Keats dies hard ; or perhaps we would better say that when he seems to be dying he is simply, in the good old fashion of legends, taking out a new lease of life. For it is as true now as when the sentence was first penned, that “ a mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.” Among the many readers of good books, there will always be some whose notions of the poetical proprieties suffer greatly by the facts of Keats’s history. It is so much pleasanter to them to think that the poet’s sensitive spirit was wounded to death by bitter words than to know that he was carried off by pulmonary disease. But when they are tired of reading Endymion, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes in the light of this incorrect conception, let them try a new reading in the light of the letters, and the masculinity of this very robust young maker of poetry will prove refreshing.

The letters are in every respect good reading. Rather than deplore their frankness, as one critic has done, we ought to rejoice in their utter want of affectation, in their boyish honesty. At every turn there is something to amuse or to startle one into thinking. We are carried back in a vivid way to the period of their composition. Not a little of the pulsing life of that time throbs anew, and we catch glimpses of notable figures. Often, the feeling is that we have been called in haste to a window to look at some celebrity passing by, and have arrived just in time to see him turn the corner. What a touch of reality, for example, does one get in reading that “ Wordsworth went rather huff’d out of town ” ! One is not in the habit of thinking of Wordsworth as capable of being “ huffed,” but the writer of the letters feared that he was. All of Keats’s petty anxieties and small doings, as well as his aspirations and his greatest dreams, are set down here in black on white. It is a complete and charming revelation of the man. One learns how he “ went to Hazlitt’s lecture on Poetry, and got there just as they were coming out; ” how he was insulted at the theatre, and would n’t tell his brothers; how it vexed him because the Irish servant said that his picture of Shakespeare looked exactly like her father, only “ her father had more color than the engraving ; ” how he filled in the time while waiting for the stage to start by counting the buns and tarts in a pastry-cook’s window, “ and had just begun on the jellies ; ” how indignant he was at being spoken of as “ quite the little poet; “ how he sat in a hatter’s shop in the Poultry while Mr. Abbey read him some extracts from Lord Byron’s “last Hash poem,” Don Juan ; how some beef was carved exactly to suit his appetite, as if he “ had been measured for it ; ” how he dined with Horace Smith and his brothers and some other young gentleman of fashion, and thought them all hopelessly affected ; in a word, almost anything you want to know about John Keats can be found in these letters. They are of more value than all the “ recollections ” of all his friends put together. In their breezy good nature and cheerfulness they are a fine antidote to the impression one gets of him in Haydon’s account, “ lying in a white bed with a book, hectic and on his back, irritable at his weakness and wounded at the way he had been used. He seemed to be going out of life with a contempt for this world, and no hopes of the other. I told him to be calm, but he muttered that if he did not soon get better he would destroy himself.” This is taking Keats at his worst. It is well enough to know that he seemed to Haydon as Haydon has described him, but few men appear to advantage when they are desperately ill. Turn to the letters written during his tour in Scotland, when he walked twenty miles a day, climbed Ben Nevis, so fatigued himself that, as lie told Fanny Keats, “ when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me around the town, like a Hoop, without waking me. Then I get so hungry a Ham goes but a very little way, and fowls are like Larks to me. . . . I take a whole string of Pork Sausages down as easily as a Pen’orth of Lady’s fingers.” And then he bewails the fact that when he arrives in the Highlands he will have to be contented “ with an acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of Milk, and a Cloaths basket of Eggs morning, noon and night.” Here is the active Keats, of honest mundane tastes and an athletic disposition, who threatens “ to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds to cut Sickness.”

Indeed, the letters are so pleasant and amusing in the way they exhibit minor traits, habits, prejudices, and the like, that it is a temptation to dwell upon these things. How we love a man’s weaknesses — if we share them ! I do not know that Keats would have given occasion for an anecdote like that told of a certain book-loving actor, whose best friend, when urged to join the chorus of praise that was quite universally sung to this actor’s virtues, acquiesced by saying amiably, “ Mr. Blank undoubtedly has genius, but he can’t spell; ” yet there are comforting evidences that Keats was no servile follower of the “monster Conventionality ” even in his spelling, while in respect to the use of capitals he was a law unto himself. He sprinkled them through his correspondence with a lavish hand, though at times he grew so economical that, as one of his editors remarks, he would spell Romeo with a small r, Irishman with a small i, and God with a small g.

It is also a pleasure to find that, with his other failings, he had a touch of book-madness. There was in him the making of a first-class bibliophile. He speaks with rapture of his black-letter Chaucer, which he proposes to have bound “ in Gothique,” so as to unmodernize as much as possible its outward appearance. But to Keats books were literature or they were not literature, and one cannot think that his affections would twine about ever so bookish a volume which was merely “curious.”

One reads with sympathetic amusement of Keats’s genuine and natural horror of paying the same bill twice, “ there not being a more unpleasant thing in the world (saving a thousand and one others).” The necessity of preservingadequate evidence that a bill had been paid was uppermost in his thought quite frequently; and once when, at Leigh Hunt’s instance, sundry packages of papers belonging to that eminently methodical and businesslike man of letters were to be sorted out and in part destroyed, Keats refused to burn any, “ for fear of demolishing receipts.”

But the reader will chance upon few more humorous passages than that in which the poet tells his brother George how he cures himself of the blues, and at the same time spurs his flagging powers of invention : “ Whenever I find myself growing vaporish I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings neatly, and, in fact, adonize, as if I were going out — then all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the greatest relief.” The virtues of a clean shirt have often been sung, but it remained for Keats to show what a change of linen and a general adonizing could do in the way of furnishing poetic stimulus. This is better than coffee, brandy, absinthe, or falling in love; and it prompts one to think anew that the English poets, taking them as a whole, were a marvelously healthy and sensible breed of men.

It is, however, in respect to the light they throw upon the poet’s literary life that the letters are of highest significance. They gratify to a reasonable extent that natural desire we all have to see authorship in the act. The processes by which genius brings things to pass are so mysterious that our curiosity is continually piqued ; and our failure to get at the real thing prompts us to be more or less content with mere externals. If we may not hope to see the actual process of making poetry, we may at least study the poet’s manuscript. By knowing of his habits of work we flatter ourselves that we are a little nearer the secret of his power.

We must bear in mind that Keats was a boy, always a boy, and that he died before he quite got out of boyhood. To be sure, most boys of twenty-six would resent being described by so juvenile a term. But one must have successfully passed twenty - six without doing anything in particular to understand how exceedingly young twenty-six is. And to have wrought so well in so short a time, Keats must have had from the first a clear and noble conception of the nature of his work, as he must also have displayed extraordinary diligence in the doing of it. Perhaps these points are too obvious, and of a sort which would naturally occur to any one ; but it will be none the less interesting to see how the letters bear witness to their truth.

In the first place, Keats was anything but a loafer at literature. He seems never to have dawdled. A fine healthiness is apparent in all allusions to his processes of work. “ I read and write about eight hours a day,” he remarks in a letter to Haydon. Bailey, Keats’s Oxford friend, says that the fellow would go to his writing-desk soon after breakfast, and stay there until two or three o’clock in the afternoon. He was then writing Endymion. His stint was about “ fifty lines a day, . . . and he wrote with as much regularity, and apparently with as much ease, as he wrote his letters. . . . Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but not often, and he would make it up another day. But he never forced himself.” Bailey quotes, in connection with this, Keats’s own remark to the effect that poetry would better not come at all than not to come “ as naturally as the leaves of a tree.” Whether this spontaneity of production was as great as that of some other poets of his time may be questioned ; but he would never have deserved Tom Nash’s sneer at those writers who can only produce by “ sleeping betwixt every sentence.” Keats had in no small degree the “ fine extemporal vein ” with “ invention quicker than his eye.”

We uncritically feel that it could hardly have been otherwise in the case of one with whom poetry was a passion. Keats had an infinite hunger and thirst for good poetry. His poetical life, both in the receptive and productive phases of it, was intense. Poetry was meat and drink to him. He could even urge his friend Reynolds to talk about it to him, much as one might beg a trusted friend to talk about one’s lady-love, and with the confidence that only the fitting thing would be spoken. "Whenever you write, say a word or two on some passage in Shakespeare which may have come rather new to you,” —a sentence which shows his faith in the many-sidedness of the great poetry. Shakespeare was forever “ coming new ” to him, and he was “ haunted ” by particular passages. He loved to fill the cup of his imagination with the splendors of the best poets until the cup overflowed. “ I find I cannot exist without Poetry, — without eternal Poetry; half the day will not do, — the whole of it; I began with a little, but habit has made me a leviathan.” He tells Leigh Hunt, in a letter written from Margate, that he thought so much about poetry, and “ so long together,” that he could not get to sleep at night. Whether this meant in working out ideas of his own, or living over the thoughts of other poets, is of little importance ; the remark shows how deeply the roots of his life were imbedded in poetical soil. He loved a debauch in the verse of masters of his art. He could intoxicate himself with Shakespeare’s sonnets. He rioted in “ all their fine things said unconsciously.” We are tempted to say, by just so much as he had large reverence for these men, by just so much he was of them.

Undoubtedly, this ability to be moved by strong imaginative work may be abused until it becomes a maudlin and quite disordered sentiment. Keats was too well balanced to be carried into appreciative excesses. He knew that mere yearning could not make a poet of one any more than mere ambition could. He understood the limits of ambition as a force in literature. Keats’s ambition trembled in the presence of Keats’s conception of the magnitude of the poetic office. “ I have asked myself so often why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is.” Yet he had honest confidence. One cannot help liking him for the fine audacity with which he pronounces his own work good, — better even than that of a certain other great name in English literature ; one cannot help loving him for the sweet humility with which he accepts the view that, after all, success or failure lies entirely without the range of self-choosing. There is a point of view from which it is folly to hold a poet responsible even for his own poetry, and when Endymion was spoken of as “ slipshod ” Keats could reply, “ That it is so is no fault of mine. . . . The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. . . . That which is creative must create itself. In Endymion I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure ; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”

Well might a man who could write that last sentence look upon poetry not only as a responsible, but as a dangerous pursuit. Men who aspire to be poets are gamblers. In all the lotteries of the literary life none is so uncertain as this. A million chances that you don’t win the prize to one chance that you do. It is a curious thing that ever so thoughtful and conscientious an author may not know whether he is making literature or merely writing verse. He conforms to all the canons of taste in his own day; he is devout and reverent; he slums excesses of diction, and he courts originality ; his verse seems to himself and to his unflattering friends instinct with the spirit of his time, but twenty years later it is oldfashioned. Keats, with all his feeling of certainty, stood with head uncovered before that power which gives poetical gifts to one, and withholds them from another. Above all would he avoid selfdelusion in these things. “ There is no greater Sin after the seven deadly than to flatter one’s self into an idea of being a great Poet.”

Keats, if one may judge from a letter written to John Taylor in February, 1818, had little expectation that his Endymion was going to be met with universal plaudits. He doubtless looked for fair treatment. He probably had no thought of being sneeringly addressed as “ Johnny,” or of getting recommendations to return to his “ plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.”In fact, he looked upon the issue as entirely problematical. He seemed willing to take it for granted that in Endymion he had but moved into the go-cart from the leading-strings. “ If Endymion serves me for a pioneer, perhaps I ought to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths ; and I have, I am sure, many friends who if I fail will attribute any change in my life to humbleness rather than pride, — to a cowering under the wings of great poets rather than to bitterness that I am not appreciated.”And for evidence of any especial bitterness because of the lashing he received one will search the letters in vain. Keats was manly and good humored, most of his morbidity being referred directly to his ill health. The trouncing he had at the hands of the reviewers was no more violent than the one administered to Tennyson by Professor Wilson. Critics, good and bad, can do much harm. They may terrorize a timid spirit. But a greater terror than the fear of the reviewers hung over the head of John Keats. He stood in awe of his own artistic and poetic sense. He could say with truth that his own domestic criticism had given him pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict. If he had had any terrible heart-burning over their malignancy, if he had felt that his life was poisoned, he could hardly have forborne some allusion to it in his letters to his brother, George Keats. But he is almost imperturbable. He talks of the episode freely, says that he has been urged to publish his Pot of Basil as a reply to the reviewers, has no idea that he can be made ridiculous by abuse, notes the futility of attacks of this kind, and then, with a serene conviction that is irresistible, adds, “ I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death ” !

Such egoism of genius is magnificent; the more so as it appears in Keats because it runs parallel with deep humility in the presence of the masters of his art. Naturally, the masters who were in their graves were the ones he reverenced the most and read without stint. But it was by no means essential that a poet be a dead poet before Keats did him homage. It is impossible to think that Keats’s attitude towards Wordsworth was other than finely appreciative, in spite of the fact that he applauded Reynolds’s Peter Bell, and inquired almost petulantly why one should be teased with Wordsworth’s “ Matthew with a hough of wilding in his hand,”But it is also impossible that his sense of humor should not have been aroused by much that he found in Wordsworth. It was Wordsworth he meant when he said, “ Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself,”— a sentence, by the way, quite as unconsciously funny as some of the things he laughed at in the works of his great contemporary.

It will be pertinent to quote here two or three of the good critical words which Keats scattered through his letters. Emphasizing the use of simple means in his art, he says, “ I think that poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity ; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

“ We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us. . . . Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”Or as Ruskin has put the thing with respect to painting, “ Entirely first-rate work is so quiet and natural that there can be no dispute over it.”

Keats appears to have been in no sense a hermit. With the exception of Byron, he was perhaps less of a recluse than any of his poetical contemporaries. With respect to society he frequently practiced total abstinence ; but the world was amusing, and he liked it. He was fond of the theatre, fond of whist, fond of visiting the studios, fond of going to the houses of his friends. But he would run no risks ; he was shy and he was proud. He dreaded contact with the ultra-fashionables. Naturally, his opportunities for such intercourse were limited, but he cheerfully neglected his opportunities. I doubt if he ever bewailed his humble origin ; nevertheless, the constitution of English society would hardly admit of his forgetting it. He had that pardonable pride which will not allow a man to place himself among those who, though outwardly fair-spoken, offer the insult of a hostile and patronizing mental attitude.

Most of his friendships were with men, and this is to his credit. The man is spiritually warped who is incapable of a deep and abiding friendship with one of his own sex ; and to go a step further, that man is utterly to be distrusted whose only friends are among women. We may not be prepared to accept the radical position of a certain young thinker, who proclaims, in season, but defiantly, that “men are the idealists, after all; ” yet it is easy to comprehend how one may take this point of view. The friendships of men are a vastly more interesting and poetic study than the friendships of men and women. This is in the nature of the case. It is the usual victory of the normal over the abnormal. As a rule, it is impossible for a friendship to exist between a man and woman, unless the man and woman in question he husband and wife. Then it is as rare as it is beautiful. And with men, the most admirable spectacle is not always that where attendant circumstances prompt to heroic display of friendship, for it is often so much easier to die than to live. But you may see young men pledging their mutual love and support in this difficult and adventurous quest of what is noblest in the art of living. Such love will not urge to a theatrical posing, and it can hardly find expression in words. Words seem to profane it. I do not say that Keats stood in such an ideal relation to any one of his many friends whose names appear in the letters. He gave of himself to them all, and he received much from each. No man of taste and genius could have been other than flattered by the way in which Keats approached him. He was charming in his attitude toward Haydon ; and when Haydon proposed sending Keats’s sonnet to Wordsworth, the young poet wrote, “ The Idea of your sending it to Wordsworth put me out of hreatli — you know with what Reverence I would send my well wishes to him.”

But interesting as a chapter on Keats’s friendships with men would be, we are bound to confess that in dramatic intensity it would grow pale when laid beside that fiery love passage of his life, his acquaintance with Fanny Brawne. The thirty-nine letters given in the fourth volume of Buxton Forman’s edition of Keats’s Works tell the story of this affair of a poet’s heart. These are the letters which Mr. William Watson says he has never read, and at which no consideration shall ever induce him to look. But Mr. Watson reflects upon people who have been human enough to read them when he compares such a proceeding on his own part (were he able to be guilty of it) to the indelicacy of “ listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall.” This is not a just illustration. The man who takes upon himself the responsibility of being the first to open such intimate letters, and adds thereto the infinitely greater responsibility of publishing them in so attractive a form that he who runs will stop running in order to read, — such an editor will need to satisfy Mr. Watson that in so doing he was not listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall. For the general public, the wall is down, and the door containing the keyhole thrown open. Perhaps our duty is not to look. I, for one, wish that great men would not leave their love letters around. Nay, I wish you a better wish than that: it is that the perfect taste of the gentleman and scholar who gave us in its present form the correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, the early and later letters of Carlyle, and the letters of Lowell might have control of the private papers of every man of genius whose teachings the world holds dear. He would need for this an indefinite lease upon life ; but since I am wishing, let me wish largely. There is need of such wishing. Many editors have been called, and only two or three chosen.

But why one who reads the letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne should have any other feeling than that of pity for a poor fellow who was so desperately in love as to be wretched because of it I do not see. Even a cynic will grant that Keats was not disgraced, since it is very clear that he did not yield readily to what Dr. Holmes calls the great passion. He had a complacent boyish superiority of attitude with respect to all those who are weak enough to love women. “ Nothing,”he says, “ strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love. A man in love I do think cuts the sorryest figure in the world. Even when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it I could burst out laughing in his face. His pathetic visage becomes irresistible.”Then he speaks of that dinner party of stutterers and squinters described in the Spectator, and says that it would please him more “ to scrape together a party of lovers.” If this letter he genuine and the date of it correctly given, it was written three months after be had succumbed to the attractions of Fanny Brawne. Perhaps he was trying to brave it out, as one may laugh to conceal embarrassment.

In a much earlier letter than this he hopes he shall never marry, but nevertheless has a good deal to say about a young lady with fine eyes and fine manners and a “ rich Eastern look.” He discovers that he can talk to her without being uncomfortable or ill at ease. “ I am too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble. . . . She kept me awake one night as a tune of Mozart’s might do. ... I don’t cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me.” But he was not a little touched, and found it easy to fill two pages on the subject of this dark beauty. She was a friend of the Reynolds family. She crosses the stage of the Keats drama in a very impressive manner, and then disappears.

The most extraordinary passage to be met with in relation to the poet’s attitude towards women is in a letter written to Benjamin Bailey in July, 1818. As a partial hint towards its full meaning I would take two phrases in Daniel Deronda. George Eliot says of Gwendolen Harleth that there was “ a certain fierceness of maidenhood in her,” which expression is quoted here only to emphasize the girl’s feeling towards men as described a little later, when Rex Gascoigne attempted to tell her his love. Gwendolen repulsed him with a sort of fury that was surprising to herself. The author’s interpretative comment is, “ The life of passion had begun negatively in her.”

So one might say of Keats that the life of passion began negatively in him. He was conscious of a hostility of temper towards women. “ I am certain I have not a right feeling toward women — at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot.” He certainly started with a preposterously high ideal, for he says that when a schoolboy he thought a fair woman a pure goddess. And now he is disappointed at finding women only the equals of men. This disappointment helps to give rise to that antagonism which is almost inexplicable save as George Eliot’s phrase throws light upon it. He thinks that he insults women by these perverse feelings of unprovoked hostility. “ Is it not extraordinary ? ” he exclaims, — “ when among men I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen ; I feel free to speak or to be silent ; . . . I am free from all suspicion, and comfortable. When I am among women, I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen ; I cannot speak or be silent ; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing ; I am in a hurry to be gone.” He wonders how this trouble is to be cured. He speaks of it as a prejudice produced from "a gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to unravel.” And then, with a good-humored, characteristic touch, he drops the subject, saying, “ After all, I do think better of women than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats, five feet high, likes them or not.”

Three or four months after writing these words he must have begun his friendly relations with the Brawne family. This would be in October or November, 1818. Keats’s description of Fanny is hardly flattering, and not even vivid. What is one to make of the colorless expression “ a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort ” ? But she was fair to him, and any beauty beyond that would have been superfluous. We look at the silhouette and sigh in vain for trace of the loveliness which ensnared Keats. But if our daguerreotypes of forty years ago can so entirely fail of giving one line of that which in its day passed for dazzling beauty, let us not be unreasonable in our demands upon the artistic capabilities of a silhouette. Not infrequently is it true that the style of dress seems to disfigure. But we have learned, in course of experience, that pretty women manage to be pretty, however much fashion, with their cordial help, disguises them.

It is easy to see from the letters that Keats was a difficult lover. Hard to please at the best, his two sicknesses, one of body and one of heart, made him whimsical. Nothing less than a woman of genius could possibly have managed him. He was jealous, perhaps quite unreasonably so. Fanny Brawne was young, a bit coquettish, buoyant, and he misinterpreted her vivacity. She liked what is commonly called “ the world,” and so did he when he was well; but looking through the discolored glass of ill health, all nature was out of harmony. For these reasons it happens that the letters at times come very near to being documents in love-madness. Many a line in them gives sharp pain, as a record of heart-suffering must always do. You may read Richard Steele’s love letters for pleasure, and have it. The love letters of Keats scorch and sting ; and the worst of it is that you cannot avoid reflecting upon the transitory character of such a passion. Withering young love like this does not last. It may burn itself out, or, what is quite as likely, it may become sober and rational. But in its earlier maddened state it cannot possibly last ; a man would die under it. Men as a rule do not so die, for the race of the Azra is nearly extinct.

These Brawne letters, however, are not without their bright side ; and it. is wonderful to see how Keats’s elastic nature would rebound the instant that the pressure of the disease relaxed. He is at times almost gay. The singing of a thrush prompts him to talk in his natural epistolary voice : “ There’s the Thrush again — I can’t afford it — he ’ll run me up a pretty Bill for Music. — besides he ought to know I deal at Clementi’s.” And in the letter which he wrote to Mrs. Brawne from Naples is a touch of the old bantering Keats when he says that “ it’s misery to have an intellect in splints.” He was never strong enough to write again to Fanny, or even to read her letters.

I should like to close this reading with a few sentences from a letter written to Reynolds-in February, 1818. Keats says : “ I had an idea that a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner — let him on a certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, . . . and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it, until it becomes stale — but when will it do so ? Never ! When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting post towards all the ‘two-and-thirty Palaces.’ How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent Indolence ! . . . Nor will this sparing touch of noble Books be any irreverence to their Writers — for perhaps the honors paid by Man to Man are trifles in comparison to the Benefit done by great Works to the Spirit and pulse of good by their mere passive existence.”

May we not say that the final test of great literature is that it be able to be read in the manner here indicated ? As Keats read, so did he write. His own work was

Leon H. Vincent.