notable, as illustrating the wonderful nature and progress of certain mental faculties, and as exhibiting a character which inspires the deepest human sympathy amidst all its demands on our admiration.

John Keats was born on the 29th of October, 1795, in the upper rank of the middle class, his mother possessing sufficient means to give her children an excellent education, when left a widow in 1804. She is reputed to have been a woman of saturnine demeanor, but on an occasion of illness, John, then a child between four and five years old, remained for hours as a sentinel at her door, with a drawn sword, that she might not be disturbed and at her death, which occurred when he was at Mr. Clarke's school at Enfield, he hid himself for several days in a nook under the master's desk, passionately inconsolable-traits of disposition that illustrate his character as a boy, energetic, ardent, and popular. "He combined," writes one of his schoolfellows, "a terrier-like resoluteness with the most noble placability;" and another mentions that his singular animation and ability in all exercises of skill and courage, impressed them with a conviction of his future greatness, "but rather in a military or some such active sphere of life, than in the peaceful arena of literature."* This impression was assisted by the rare vivacity of his countenance and much beauty of feature; his eyes were large and sensitive, flashing with strong emotion or suffused with tender sympathies; his hair hung in thick brown ringlets round a head diminutive for the breadth of the shoulders

* Mr. E. Holmes, author of the "Life of Mozart," &c.

below, while the smallness of the lower limbs, which in later life marred the proportion of his person, was not then apparent, any more than the undue prominence of the lower lip, which afterwards gave his face too pugnacious a character to be entirely pleasing, but at that time only completed such an image as the ancients had of Achilles, of joyous and glorious youth everlastingly striving.

Careless of an ordinary school-reputation, his zeal for the studies themselves led him frequently to spend his holidays over Virgil or Fenelon, and when his master forced him into the open air for his health, he would be found walking with a book in his hand. The scholarship of the establishment had no peculiar pretensions, and the boy's learning was limited to the elements of a liberal education. He was never taught Greek, and he took his mythology from Tooke's Pantheon and Lemprière's Dictionary, making the affiliation of his mind with the old Hellenic world the more marvellous and interesting. It is doubtful whether at any time his information exceeded these scanty limits, and it is a curious speculation whether deeper and more regular classical studies would have checked or encouraged the natural consanguinity, so to say, of his fancy with the ideal life of ancient Greece, and whether a more distinct knowledge of what the old mythology really meant, would, or would not, have hindered that reconstruction of forms

"Not yet dead,

But in old marbles ever beautiful,”

which is now not the less agreeable from being the evolution of his unlearned and unaided imagination.

Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of his preceptor, remained the friend of Keats, when removed from school in 1810, and apprenticed for five years to a surgeon of some eminence at Edmonton. This intelligent companion supplied him with books, which he eagerly perused, but so little expectation was formed of the direction in which his talents lay, that when in 1812, he asked for the loan of Spenser's Fairy Queen, Mr. Clarke remembers that the family were amused at the ambitious desires of their former pupil. He must indeed have known something of Shakspeare, for he had told a schoolfellow that "he thought no one would dare to read Macbeth alone at two o'clock in the morning;" but it was Spenser that struck the secret spring and opened the floodgates of his fancy. "He ramped through the scenes of romance," writes Mr. Clarke, "like a young horse turned into a spring meadow:" he could talk of nothing else: his countenance would light up at each rich expression, and his strong frame would tremble with emotion as he read. The lines "in imitation of Spenser" are the earliest known verses of his composition, and to the very last the traces of this main impulse of his poetic life are visible. But few memorials remain of his other studies: there is a "Sonnet to Byron," of little merit, dated 1814; one of much grace and juvenile conceit on Chaucer's Tale of the "Flower and the Leaf," written on the blank leaf, while his friend was asleep over the book;

and one of most clear thought and noble diction, "On first looking into Chapman's Homer." It was to Mr. Clarke again that he owed his introduction to this fine interpretation, which preserves so much of the heroic simplicity, and the metre of which, after all various attempts, including that of the hexameter, still appears the best adapted, from its length and its powers, to represent in English the Greek epic verse. Unable to read the original, Keats had long stood by Homer as a great dumb name, and now he read it all night long, with intense delight, even shouting aloud, when some especial passage struck his imagination.

The "Epistles" to his friends and his brother George, then a clerk in London, indicate a rapid development of the poetic faculty, especially free from the formalism and imitation which encumber the early writings even of distinguished poets, and full of an easy gaiety, which at times runs into conversational commonplace, or helps itself out of difficulties by quaintnesses that look like affectations. But, even in these first efforts, the peculiarity of making the rhymes to rest on the most picturesque and varied words, instead of the conventional resonance of unimportant syllables, is distinctive, and an effect is produced which from its very novelty often mars the force and beauty of the expression, and lowers the sense of poetic harmony into an ingenious concurrence of sounds. It is also a palpable consequence of this mode of composition, that the sense appears too

often made for the rhyme, and, while most poets would be loth to allow how frequently the necessity of the rhyme suggests the corresponding thought, here the uncommon prominence of the rhyme keeps this effect constantly before the reader. Yet, when approached with sympathetic feeling and good will, this impression soon vanishes before the astonishing affluence of thought and imagination, which at once explains and excuses the defect, if it be one. Picture after picture seems to rise before the poet's eye in a succession so rapid as to embarrass judgment and limit choice, and fancies and expressions that elsewhere would be strange and farfetched are here felt to have been the first suggested.

When Keats's apprenticeship was over and he removed to London to "walk the hospitals," he soon became acquainted with men capable of appreciating and cultivating his genius. Among the foremost Leigh Hunt welcomed him with a sympathy that ripened into friendship, and the sonnet "On the day Leigh Hunt left Prison," attests the earnestness of reciprocal affection. They read and walked much together, and wrote in competition on subjects proposed. Much has been said of the influence of this connection on the writings of Keats, and much of their mannerism has been traced to this source. The justice of this supposition is more than doubtful, and the stupid malevolence of the criticisms which mainly sustained it is now too well exposed to require refutation. It is indeed probable that the fresh mind of Keats was directed by Hunt into many of