Page:That Keats Was Maturing.pdf/4

 atmosphere heavy with the sobs of the multitudes of the oppressed; and to him, as to Seneca, the voice of the suffering was sacred, and seemed, through the mist of good and evil, to go up to God. Out of the darkened passages in the mansion of life he saw no outlet; but he believed he would one day see his way there clearly, for he knew the veil of so much mystery, behind whose folds he walked darkling, must yet be drawn aside. He says, 'To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive, when he wrote Tintern Abbey; and it seems to me his genius is explorative of those dark passages. Now, if we live and go on thinking, we too shall explore them. He is a genius, and superior to us in so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries and shed a light on them.'

Perhaps, as Keats himself hinted, the chance of leaving the world suddenly impressed a sense of his duties upon him. We may sometimes see what self-reproaches were wrung from him at but too opportune moments. How soon Keats would have risen above the bias of his own nature to the heights of a great purpose, we may not know. Already in the fragment 'Hyperion' (of which, for the sooth, the Edinburgh could not advise the completion) we see him sitting at the feet of Milton, than whom no man held his fantasy under stronger command. Keats was a true heir Of Shakespeare's early fancy: would he have inherited something of Shakespeare's maturer imagination? We know that he was learning to know and love the early Italian poets: would he at length have put by his fretful restlessness and stood where Dante sat, and laved his tired forehead in the same river of resignation? We may not know; but at least we see him, before the completion of his twenty-third year, already conscious that the 'Infant Chamber of Sensation,' wherein he at first thought to delay for ever, must very soon be abandoned. This at least is certain, and it is much: 'I take poetry to be the chief, yet there is something else wanting.... I find earlier days are gone by....I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world....There is but one way for me. I will pursue it.'