The Life and Times of John Keats: Complete Personal letters & Two Extensive Biographies. John Keats
a Mountain’s Side called Latmus he was a very contemplative sort of a Person and lived solitary among the trees and Plains little thinking that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in Love with him. — However so it was; and when he was asleep on the Grass she used to come down from heaven and admire him excessively for a long time; and at last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms to the top of that high Mountain Latmus while he was a dreaming — but I dare say you have read this and all the other beautiful Tales which have come down from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece. If you have not let me know and I will tell you more at large of others quite as delightful. This Oxford I have no doubt is the finest City in the world — it is full of old Gothic buildings — Spires — towers — Quadrangles — Cloisters — Groves etc and is surrounded with more clear streams than ever I saw together. I take a Walk by the Side of one of them every Evening and, thank God, we have not had a drop of rain these days.
He goes on to tell her (herein echoing Hunt’s opinion) how much better it would be if Italian instead of French were taught everywhere in schools, and winds up: —
Now Fanny you must write soon — and write all you think about, never mind what — only let me have a good deal of your writing — You need not do it all at once — be two or three or four days about it, and let it be a diary of your Life. You will preserve all my Letters and I will secure yours — and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good Bundle — which, hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and God knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on times past — that now are to come.
Next follows another letter to Jane Reynolds; partly making fun, much better fun than in the last, about Dilke’s shooting and about the rare havoc he would like to make in Mrs Dilke’s garden were he at Hampstead: partly grave in the high style into which he is apt at any moment to change from nonsense: —
Now let us turn to the seashore. Believe me, my dear Jane, it is a great happiness to see that you are, in this finest part of the year, winning a little enjoyment from the hard world. In truth, the great Elements we know of, are no means comforters: the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown — the Air is our robe of state — the Earth is our throne and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before it — able, like David’s harp, to make such a one as you forget almost the tempest cares of life. I have found in the ocean’s music, — varying (tho’ selfsame) more than the passion of Timotheus, an enjoyment not to be put into words; and, ‘though inland far I be,’ I now hear the voice most audibly while pleasing myself in the idea of your sensations.
To Reynolds Keats writes on September the 21st: —
For these last five or six days, we have had regularly a Boat on the Isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your eye-lashes. We sometimes skim into a Bed of rushes, and there become naturalized river-folks, — there is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened ‘Reynolds’s Cove,’ in which we have read Wordsworth, and talked as may be; I think I see you and Hunt meeting in the Pit. — What a very pleasant fellow he is, if he would give up the sovereignty of a room pro bono. What evenings we might pass with him, could we have him from Mrs H. Failings I am always rather rejoiced to find in a man than sorry for; they bring us to a level.
Then follows a diatribe against the literary and intellectual pretensions of certain sets of ladies, from which he has felt an agreeable relief in some verses he has found on taking down from Bailey’s shelves the poems of Katherine Philips, ‘the matchless Orinda.’ The verses which pleased him, truly of her best, are those To M. A. at parting, and Keats goes on to copy them in full. Had Orinda been a contemporary, he might not, indeed, have failed to recognize in her a true woman of letters: but would he not also have found something to laugh and chafe at in the poses of that high-flying coterie of mutual admirers, Silvander and Poliarchus, Lucasia and Rosania and Palæmon, of which she was the centre? This is one of the very few instances to be found in Keats’ work or correspondence of interest in the poetry of the Caroline age.
Quite in the last days of his visit Keats, whose mind and critical power had been growing while he worked upon Endymion, and whom moreover the long effort of composition was clearly beginning to fatigue, confides to Haydon his dissatisfaction with what he has done:— ‘You will be glad to hear that within these last three weeks I have written 1000 lines — which are the third Book of my Poem. My Ideas with respect to it I assure you are very low — and I would write the subject thoroughly again — but I am tired of it and think the time would be better spent in writing a new Romance which I have in my eye for next summer — Rome was not built in a day — and all the good I expect from my employment this summer is the fruit of Experience which I hope to gather in my next Poem.’
Coming back in the first week of October to Hampstead, whither his brothers had by this time also returned from a trip to Paris, Keats was presently made uncomfortable by evidences of discord among his friends and reports of what seemed like disloyalty on the part of one of them, Leigh Hunt, to himself. Haydon had now left the studio in Great Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove, and the Hunts, having come away from Hampstead and paid a long late-summer visit to the Shelleys at Marlow, were lodging near him in the same street. ‘Everybody seems at loggerheads,’ Keats writes to Bailey. ‘There’s Hunt infatuated — there’s Haydon’s picture in statu quo — There’s Hunt walks up and down his painting-room — criticizing every head most unmercifully.’ Both Haydon and Reynolds, he goes on, keep telling him tales of Hunt: How Hunt has been talking flippantly and patronizingly of Endymion, saying that if it is four thousand lines long now it would have been seven thousand but for him, and giving the impression that Keats stood to him in the relation of a pupil needing and taking advice. He declares in consequence that he is quite disgusted with literary men and will never know another except Wordsworth; and then, more coolly and sensibly, ‘now, is not this a most paltry thing to think about?… This is, to be sure, the vexation of a day, nor would I say so many words about it to any but those whom I know to have my welfare and reputation at heart.’
During the six or seven autumn weeks spent at Hampstead after his return from Oxford Keats was getting on, a little flaggingly, with the fourth book of Endymion, besides writing an occasional lyric or two. Fresh from the steadying and sympathetic companionship of Bailey, he keeps up their intimacy by affectionate letters in which he discloses much of that which lay deepest and was best in him. Writing in the first days of November he congratulates Bailey on having got a curacy in Cumberland and promises some day to visit him there; says he is in a fair way to have finished Endymion in three weeks; mentions an idea he has of shipping his brother Tom, who has been looking worse, off to Lisbon for the winter and perhaps going with him; and gets in by a side wind a masterly criticism of Wordsworth’s poem The Gipsies and also of Hazlitt’s criticism of it in the Round Table. A fragment of another letter, dated November the 5th, alludes with annoyance, not for the first time, to some failure of Haydon’s to keep his word or take trouble about a young man from Oxford named Cripps whom he had promised to receive as pupil and in whom Bailey and Keats were interested. The same fragment records the appearance in Blackwood (the Endinburgh Magazine, as Keats calls it) of the famous first article of the Cockney School series, attacking Hunt with a virulence far beyond even the accustomed licence of the time, and seeming by the motto prefixed to it (verses of Cornelius Webb coupling the names of Hunt and Keats) to threaten a similar handling of Keats later on. ‘I don’t mind the thing much,’ says Keats, ‘but if he should go to such lengths with me as he has done with Hunt, I must infallibly call him to an Account if he be a human being, and appears in Squares and Theatres, where we might possibly meet — I don’t relish his abuse.’
Some time about mid-November Keats, his health and strength being steadier than in the spring, felt himself in the mood for a few weeks of solitude and went to spend them at Burford Bridge Inn, in the beautiful vale of Mickleham between Leatherhead and Dorking. The outing, he wrote, was intended ‘to change the scene — change the air — and give me a spur to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting lines.’ Keats dearly loved a valley: he loved even the sound of the names denoting one. In his marginal notes to a copy of Paradise Lost he gave a friend we find the following: —
‘Or have ye chosen this place