Page:That Keats Was Maturing.pdf/3

 dutiful to the command of Nature. There is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it.' Indications are not wanting that Keats, at one period, did, indeed, turn all his heart to the love of philosophy. He was never a weakling; his earliest prose quite clearly proves that the romantic boy, who seemed to live in a world Of naiads and sirens, might have reached distinction in any—the most austere—literary walk. Year after year feeling and experience did their work with him. Perhaps his political leanings were primarily towards Toryism (he did not join very heartily in Hunt's assaults on the Liverpool-Castlereagh administration); and perhaps his ultimate political opinions were influenced by personal friendships, and accentuated by the abuse he received at the hands of Tory organs. Perhaps, too, at the beginning, and, indeed, even until the end, he overrated the Paradise of Sensation in contrast with the Paradise of Mind: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Certainly he did not join Shelley on his moral side in hatching every year a new universe down to his death. But Keats was far from indifferent to the problems of human life and destiny. By gradual transition he was daily rising to where the 'burden of the mystery' no longer weighs on us. Here is moral teaching which, though concrete, not abstract, in expression, is possessed of almost philosophic definiteness: 'Stop and consider! Life is but a day, A fragile dew-drop, on its perilous way From a tree's summit; a poor Indian's sleep, While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep, Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan? Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown; The reading of an ever-changing tale; The light uplifting of a maiden's veil; A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air; A laughing school-boy, without grief or care, Riding the springy branches of an elm.' It may be true that Keats's mind, with its loving yearning after loveliness, seemed always to have a look southwards. Or it may be true that his whole nature, saturated in sensuousness, appeared 'to follow, like the sunflower, the sun constantly,' and to fly from the chill north, unvisited by the sun's rays. But Keats could look steadfastly on the gray shadows Of life: 'Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known; The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs; Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs; Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.' Keats knew the full bitterness of the shadowed valley. About his own steps there fell but too frequently the beat of misery's many feet. On him also, however, wrapped in poetic luxury, the storm and stress of city life weighed heavily. Even by stern poverty itself he was not wholly unvisited. Perhaps he fled to his ideal world from the very fangs of London misery. Certainly as much may be said for his first great and obvious imitator, Hood, whose 'Whims and Oddities' were not more humorfully spontaneous than designed as foils to the excesses of a sympathetic temperament which, in view of the thousand sore trials of life, sometimes steeped the poet to the lips in pathos. Within that Chamber of Maiden Thought, into which Keats had but newly entered when his end came, he felt the