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He perceived, by that light which comes only to high-souled and noble-hearted poets,

To that end he gave the best that he had to give, freely, generously, joyously pouring himself into the ministry of his art. He did not dream for a moment that the gift was perfect. Flattery could not blind him to the limitations and defects of his early work. He was his own best and clearest critic. But he knew that so far as it went his poetic inspiration was true. He had faithfully followed the light of a pure and elevating joy in the opulent, manifold beauty of nature and in the eloquent significance of old-world legends, and he believed that it had already led him to a place among the poets whose verse would bring delight, in far-off years, to the sons and daughters of mankind. He believed also that if he kept alive his faith in the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth it would lead him on yet further, into a nobler life and closer to those immortal bards whose

He expressed this faith very clearly in the early and uneven poem called “Sleep and Poetry,” in a passage which begins

And then, ere four years had followed that brave wish, his voice fell silent under a wasting agony of pain and love, and the daisies were growing upon his Roman grave.

The pathos of his frustrated hope, his early death, has sometimes blinded men a little, it seems to me, to the real significance of his work and the true quality of his influence in poetry. He has been lamented in the golden verse of Shelley’s “Adonaïs,” and in the prose of a hundred writers who have shared Shelley’s error without partaking of his genius, as the loveliest innocent ever martyred by the cruelty of hostile critics. But, in fact, the vituperations of Gifford and his crew were no more responsible for the death of Keats, than the stings of insects are for the death of a man who has perished of hunger on the coast of Labrador. They added to his sufferings, no doubt, but they did not take away his life. Keats had far too much virtue in the old Roman sense—far too much courage, to be killed by a criticism. He died of consumption, as he clearly and sadly knew that he was fated to do when he first saw the drop of arterial blood upon his pillow.

Nor is it just, although it may seem generous, to estimate his fame chiefly by the anticipation of what he might have accomplished if he had lived longer; to praise him for his promise at the expense of his performance; and to rest his claim to a place among the English poets upon an uncertain prophecy of rivalry with Shakespeare. I find a far sounder note in Lowell’s manly essay, when he says: “No doubt there is something tropical and of strange overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but it was maturity nevertheless.” I hear the accent of a wiser and saner criticism in the sonnet of one of our American poets:

“Take him for what he was and did”—that should be the key-note of our thought of Keats as a poet. The exquisite harmony of his actual work with his actual character; the truth of what he wrote to what his young heart saw and felt and enjoyed; the simplicity of his very exuberance of ornament, and the naturalness of his artifice; the sincerity of his love of beauty and the beauty of his sincerity—these are the qualities which give an individual and lasting charm to his poetry, and make his gift to the world complete in itself and very precious, although,—or perhaps we should even say because,—it was unfinished.

Youth itself is imperfect: it is impulsive, visionary, and unrestrained; full of tremulous delight in its sensations, but not yet thoroughly awake to the deeper meanings of the world; avid of novelty and mystery, but not yet fully capable of hearing or interpreting the still, small voice of divine significance which breathes from the simple and familiar elements of life.

Yet youth has its own completeness as a season of man’s existence. It is justified and indispensable. Alfred de Musset’s

are simply monstrous. The poetry which expresses and represents youth, the poetry of sensation and sentiment, has its own place in the literature of the world. This is the order to which the poetry of Keats belongs.

He is not a feminine poet, as Mr. Coventry Patmore calls him, any more than Theocritus or Tennyson is feminine; for the quality of extreme sensitiveness to outward beauty is not a mark of femininity. It is found in men more often and more clearly than in women. But it is always most keen and joyous and overmastering in the morning of the soul.

Keats is not a virile poet, like Dante or Shakespeare or Milton; that he would have become one if he had lived is a happy and loving guess. He is certainly not a member of the senile school of poetry, which celebrates the impotent and morbid passions of decay, with a café chantant for its temple, and the smoke of cigarettes for incense, and cups of absinthe for its libations, and for its goddess not the immortal Venus rising from the sea, but the weary, painted, and decrepit Venus sinking into the gutter.

He is in the highest and best sense of the word a juvenile poet—“mature,” as Lowell says, but mature, as genius always is, within the boundaries and in the spirit of his own season of life. The very sadness of his lovely odes, “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” “To Psyche,” is the pleasant melancholy of the springtime of the heart. “The Eve of St. Agnes,” pure and passionate, surprizing us by its fine excess of colour and melody, sensuous in every line, yet free from the slightest taint of sensuality, is unforgettable and unsurpassable as the dream of first love. The poetry of Keats, small in bulk and slight in body as it seems at first sight to be, endures, and will endure, in English literature, because it is the embodiment of the spirit of immortal youth.

Here, I think, we touch its secret as an influence upon other poets. For that it has been an influence,—in the older sense of the word, which carries with it a reference to the guiding and controlling force supposed to flow from the stars to the earth,—is beyond all doubt. The History of English Literature, with which Taine amused us some fifty years ago, nowhere displays its narrowness of vision more egregiously than in its failure to take account of Gray, Collins, and Keats as fashioners of English poetry. It does not mention Gray and Collins at all; the name of Keats occurs only once, with a reference to “sickly or overflowing imagination,” but to Byron nearly fifty pages are devoted. The American critic, Stedman, showed a far broader and more intelligent understanding of the subject when he said that “Wordsworth begot the mind, and Keats the body, of the idyllic Victorian School.”

We can trace the influence of Keats not merely in the conscious or unconscious imitations of his manner, like those which are so evident in the early poems of Tennyson and Procter, in Hood’s Plea of the Midsummer Fairies and Lycus the Centaur, in Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets, and William Morris’s Earthly Paradise, but also in the youthful spirit of delight in the retelling of old tales of mythology and chivalry; in the quickened sense of pleasure in the luxuriance and abundance of natural beauty; in the freedom of overflowing cadences transmuting ancient forms of verse into new and more flexible measures; in the large liberty of imaginative diction, making all nature sympathize with the joy and sorrow of man,—in brief, in many of the finest marks of a renascence, a renewed youth, which characterize the poetry of the early Victorian era.

I do not mean to say that Keats alone, or chiefly, was responsible for this renascence. He never set up to lead a movement or to found a school. His genius is not to be compared to that of a commanding artist like Giotto or Leonardo or Michelangelo, but rather to that of a painter like Botticelli, whose personal and expressive charm makes itself felt in the work of many painters, who learned secrets of grace and beauty from him, though they were not his professed disciples or followers.

Take for example Matthew Arnold. He called himself, and no doubt rightly, a Wordsworthian. But it was not from Wordsworth that he caught the strange and searching melody of “The Forsaken Merman,” or learned to embroider the laments for “Thyrsis” and “The Scholar-Gypsy” with such opulence of varied bloom as makes death itself seem lovely. It was from John Keats. Or read the description of the tapestry on the castle walls in “Tristram and Iseult.” How perfectly that repeats the spirit of Keats’s descriptions in “The Eve of St. Agnes”! It is the poetry of the picturesque.

Indeed, we shall fail to do justice to the influence of Keats unless we recognize also that it has produced direct and distinct effects in the art of painting. The English pre-Raphaelites owed much to his inspiration. Holman Hunt found two of his earliest subjects for pictures in “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “The Pot of Basil.” Millais painted “Lorenzo and Isabella,” and Rossetti “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” There is an evident sympathy between the art of these painters, which insisted that every detail in a picture is precious and should be painted with truthful care for its beauty, and the poetry of Keats, which is filled, and even overfilled, with minute and loving touches of exquisite elaboration.

But it must be remembered that in poetry, as well as in painting, the spirit of picturesqueness has its dangers. The details may be multiplied until the original design is lost. The harmony and lucidity of a poem may be destroyed by innumerable digressions and descriptions. In some of his poems—in “Endymion” and in “Lamia”—Keats fell very deep into this fault, and no one knew it better than himself. But when he was at his best he had the power of adding a hundred delicate details to his central vision, and making every touch heighten and enhance the general effect. How wonderful in its unity is the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”! How completely magical are the opening lines of “Hyperion”:

How large and splendid is the imagery of the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”! And who that has any sense of poetry does not recognize the voice of a young master in the two superb lines of the last poem that Keats wrote?—the sonnet in which he speaks of the bright star

The poets of America have not been slow to recognize the charm and power of Keats. Holmes and Longfellow and Lowell paid homage to him in their verse. Lanier inscribed to his memory a poem called “Clover.” Gilder wrote two sonnets which celebrate his “perfect fame.” Robert Underwood Johnson has a lovely lyric on “The Name Writ in Water.”

But I find an even deeper and larger tribute to his influence in the features of resemblance to his manner and spirit which flash out here and there, unexpectedly and unconsciously, in the poetry of our New World. Emerson was so unlike Keats in his intellectual constitution as to make all contact between them appear improbable, if not impossible. Yet no one can read Emerson’s “May-Day,” and Keats’ exquisitely truthful and imaginative lines on “Fancy,” one after the other, without feeling that the two poems are very near of kin. Lowell’s “Legend of Brittany” has caught, not only the measure, but also the tone and the diction of “Isabella.” The famous introduction to “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” with its often quoted line,

finds a parallel in the opening verses of “Sleep and Poetry”—

Lowell’s “Endymion,” which he calls “a mystical comment on Titian’s ‘Sacred and Profane Love,’” is full of echoes from Keats, like this:

In Lanier’s rich and melodious “Hymns of the Marshes” there are innumerable touches in the style of Keats; for example, his apostrophe to the

or his praise of the

One of the finest pieces of elegiac verse that have yet been produced in America, George E. Woodberry’s poem called “The North Shore Watch,” has many passages that recall the young poet who wrote

Indeed, we hear the very spirit of Endymion speaking in Woodberry’s lines:

Father John B. Tabb, who had the exquisite art of the Greek epigram at his command, in one of his delicately finished little poems, imagined Sappho listening to the “Ode to a Nightingale”:

Yes; the memory and influence of Keats endure, and will endure, because his poetry expresses something in the heart that will not die so long as there are young men and maidens to see and feel the beauty of the world and the thrill of love. His poetry is complete, it is true, it is justified, because it is the fitting utterance of one of those periods of mental life which Keats himself has called “the human seasons.”

But its completeness and its truth depend upon its relation, in itself and in the poet’s mind, to the larger world of poetry, the fuller life, the rounded year of man. Nor was this forward look, this anticipation of something better and greater yet to come, lacking in the youth of Keats. It flashes out, again and again, from his letters, those outpourings of his heart and mind, so full of boyish exuberance and manly vigour, so rich in revelations of what this marvellous, beautiful, sensitive, courageous little creature really was,—a great soul in the body of a lad. It shows itself clearly and calmly in the remarkable preface in which he criticizes his own “Endymion,” calling it “a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished.” “It is just,” he writes, “that this youngster should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit to live.” The same fine hope of a sane and manly youth is expressed in his early verses entitled “Sleep and Poetry.” He has been speaking of the first joys of his fancy, in the realm of Flora and old Pan: the merry games and dances with white-handed nymphs: the ardent pursuit of love, and the satisfied repose in the bosom of a leafy world. Then his imagination goes on to something better.

How young-hearted is this vision, how full of thronging fancies and half-apprehended mystic meanings! Yet how unmistakably it has the long, high, forward look toward manhood, without which youth itself is not rounded and complete!

After all, that look, that brave expectation, is vital in our picture of Keats. It is one of the reasons why we love him. It is one of the things which make his slender volume of poetry so companionable, even as an ardent, dreamy man is doubly a good comrade when we feel in him the hope of a strong man. We cannot truly understand the wonderful performance of Keats without considering his promise; we cannot appreciate what he did without remembering that it was only part of what he hoped to do.

He was not one of those who believe that the ultimate aim of poetry is sensuous loveliness, and that there is no higher law above the law of “art for art’s sake.” The poets of arrested development, the artificers of mere melody and form, who say that art must always play and never teach, the musicians who are content to remain forever

are not his true followers.

He held that “beauty is truth.” But he held also another article that has been too often left out in the repetition of his poetic creed: he held “truth, beauty,” and he hoped one day to give a clear, full utterance to that higher, holier vision. Perhaps he has, but not to mortal ears.

THE RECOVERY OF JOY
WORDSWORTH’S POETRY

When this essay was written, a good many years ago, there was no available biography of Wordsworth except the two-volume Memoir by Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, the poet’s nephew. It is a solid work of family piety, admiring and admirable; but it must be admitted that it is dull. It is full of matters of no particular consequence, and it leaves out events in the poet’s life and traits in his character which are not only interesting in themselves but also of real importance to a vital understanding of his work.

Even while reading the Memoir, I felt sure that he was not always the tranquil, patient, wise, serenely happy sage that he appeared in his later years,—sure that a joy in peace as deep and strong as his was, could only have been won through sharp conflict,—sure that the smooth portrait drawn by the reverent hand of the bishop did not fully and frankly depict the real man who wrote the deep and moving poetry of Wordsworth.

It was about this time that the valuable studies of Wordsworth’s early life which had been made by Professor Emile Legouis, (then of the University of Lyons, now of the Sorbonne,) were published in English. This volume threw a new light upon the poet’s nature, revealing its intense, romantic strain, and making clear at least some of the causes which led to the shipwreck of his first hopes and to the period of profound gloom which followed his return from residence in France in December 1792.

Shortly after reading Professor Legouis’ book, I met by chance a gentleman in Baltimore and was convinced by what he told me, (in a conversation which I do not feel at liberty to repeat in detail,) that Wordsworth had a grand “affair of the heart” while he lived in France, with a young French lady of excellent family and character. But they were parted. A daughter was born, (whom he legitimated according to French law,) and descendants of that daughter were living.

There was therefore solid ground for my feeling that the poet was not a man who had been always and easily decorous. He had passed through a time of storm and stress. He had lost not only his political dreams and his hopes of a career, but also his first love and his joy. The knowledge of this gave his poetry a new meaning for me, brought it nearer, made it seem more deeply human. It was under the influence of this feeling that this essay was written in a farmhouse in Tyringham Valley, where I was staying in the winter of 1897, with Richard Watson Gilder and his wife.

Since then Professor George McLean Harper has completed and published, (1916,) his classic book on William Wordsworth, His Life, Works, and Influence. This is undoubtedly the very best biography of the poet, and it contains much new material, particularly with reference to his life and connections in France. But there is nothing in it to shake, and on the contrary there is much to confirm, the opinion which was first put forth in this essay: namely, that the central theme, the great significance, of Wordsworth’s poetry is the recovery of joy.

I

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the town of Cockermouth in Cumberland; educated in the village school of Hawkshead among the mountains, and at St. John’s College, Cambridge. A dreamy, moody youth; always ambitious, but not always industrious; passionate in disposition, with high spirits, simple tastes, and independent virtues; he did not win, and seems not to have desired, university honours. His principal property when he came of age consisted of two manuscript poems,—An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches,—composed in the manner of Cowper’s Task. With these in his pocket he wandered over to France; partly to study the language; partly to indulge his inborn love of travel by a second journey on the Continent; and partly to look on at the vivid scenes of the French Revolution. But the vast dæmonic movement of which he proposed to be a spectator caught his mind in its current and swept him out of his former self.

Wordsworth was not originally a revolutionist, like Coleridge and Southey. He was not even a native radical, except as all simplicity and austerity of character tend towards radicalism. When he passed through Paris, in November of 1791, and picked up a bit of stone from the ruins of the Bastile as a souvenir, it was only a sign of youthful sentimentality. But when he came back to Paris in October of 1792, after a winter at Orleans and a summer at Blois, in close intercourse with that ardent and noble republican, Michael Beaupuy, he had been converted into an eager partisan of the Republic. He even dreamed of throwing himself into the conflict, reflecting on “the power of one pure and energetic will to accomplish great things.”

His conversion was not, it seems to me, primarily a matter of intellectual conviction. It was an affair of emotional sympathy. His knowledge of the political and social theories of the Revolution was but superficial. He was never a doctrinaire. The influence of Rousseau and Condorcet did not penetrate far beneath the skin of his mind. It was the primal joy of the Revolutionary movement that fascinated him,—the confused glimmering of new hopes and aspirations for mankind. He was like a man who has journeyed, half asleep, from the frost-bound dulness of a wintry clime, and finds himself, fully awake, in a new country, where the time for the singing of birds has come, and the multitudinous blossoming of spring bursts forth. He is possessed by the spirit of joy, and reason follows where feeling leads the way. Wordsworth himself has confessed, half unconsciously, the secret of his conversion in his lines on The French Revolution as it appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement.

There was another “bliss,” keener even than the dreams of political enthusiasm, that thrilled him in this momentous year,—the rapture of romantic love. Into this he threw himself with ardour and tasted all its joy. We do not know exactly what it was that broke the vision and dashed the cup of gladness from his lips. Perhaps it was some difficulty with the girl’s family, who were royalists. Perhaps it was simply the poet’s poverty. Whatever the cause was, love’s young dream was shattered, and there was nothing left but the painful memory of an error, to be atoned for in later years as best he could.

His political hopes and ideals were darkened by the actual horrors which filled Paris during the fall of 1792. His impulse to become a revolutionist was shaken, if not altogether broken. Returning to England at the end of the same year, he tried to sustain his sinking spirits by setting in order the reasons and grounds of his new-born enthusiasm, already waning. His letter to Bishop Watson, written in 1793, is the fullest statement of republican sympathies that he ever made. In it he even seems to justify the execution of Louis XVI, and makes light of “the idle cry of modish lamentation which has resounded from the court to the cottage” over the royal martyr’s fate. He defends the right of the people to overthrow all who oppress them, to choose their own rulers, to direct their own destiny by universal suffrage, and to sweep all obstacles out of their way. The reasoning is so absolute, so relentless, the scorn for all who oppose it is so lofty, that already we begin to suspect a wavering conviction intrenching itself for safety.

The course of events in France was ill fitted to nourish the joy of a pure-minded enthusiast. The tumultuous terrors of the Revolution trod its ideals in the dust. Its light was obscured in its own sulphurous smoke. Robespierre ran his bloody course to the end; and when his head fell under the guillotine, Wordsworth could not but exult. War was declared between France and England, and his heart was divided; but the deeper and stronger ties were those that bound him to his own country. He was English in his very flesh and bones. The framework of his mind was of Cumberland. So he stood rooted in his native allegiance, while the leaves and blossoms of joy fell from him, like a tree stripped bare by the first great gale of autumn.

The years from 1793 to 1795 were the period of his deepest poverty, spiritual and material. His youthful poems, published in 1793, met with no more success than they deserved. His plans for entering into active life were feeble and futile. His mind was darkened and confused, his faith shaken to the foundation, and his feelings clouded with despair. In this crisis of disaster two gifts of fortune came to him. His sister Dorothy took her place at his side, to lead him back by her wise, tender, cheerful love from the far country of despair. His friend Raisley Calvert bequeathed to him a legacy of nine hundred pounds; a small inheritance, but enough to protect him from the wolf of poverty, while he devoted his life to the muse. From the autumn of 1795, when he and his sister set up housekeeping together in a farmhouse at Racedown, until his death in 1850 in the cottage at Rydal Mount, where he had lived for thirty-seven years with his wife and children, there was never any doubt about the disposition of his life. It was wholly dedicated to poetry.

II

But what kind of poetry? What was to be its motive power? What its animating spirit? Here the experience of life acting upon his natural character became the deciding factor.

Wordsworth was born a lover of joy, not sensual, but spiritual. The first thing that happened to him, when he went out into the world, was that he went bankrupt of joy. The enthusiasm of his youth was dashed, the high hope of his spirit was quenched. At the touch of reality his dreams dissolved. It seemed as though he were altogether beaten, a broken man. But with the gentle courage of his sister to sustain him, his indomitable spirit rose again, to renew the adventure of life. He did not evade the issue, by turning aside to seek for fame or wealth. His problem from first to last was the problem of joy,—inward, sincere, imperishable joy. How to recover it after life’s disappointments, how to deepen it amid life’s illusions, how to secure it through life’s trials, how to spread it among life’s confusions,—this was the problem that he faced. This was the wealth that he desired to possess, and to increase, and to diffuse,—the wealth

None of the poets has been as clear as Wordsworth in the avowal that the immediate end of poetry is pleasure. “We have no sympathy,” said he, “but what is propagated by pleasure, ... wherever we sympathise with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone.” And again: “The end of Poetry is to produce excitement, in co-existence with an over-balance of pleasure.”

But it may be clearly read in his poetry that what he means by “pleasure” is really an inward, spiritual joy. It is such a joy, in its various forms, that charms him most as he sees it in the world. His gallery of human portraits contains many figures, but every one of them is presented in the light of joy,—the rising light of dawn, or the waning light of sunset. Lucy Gray and the little maid in We are Seven are childish shapes of joy. The Highland Girl is an embodiment of virginal gladness, and the poet cries

Wordsworth regards joy as an actual potency of vision:

Joy is indeed the master-word of his poetry. The dancing daffodils enrich his heart with joy.

The kitten playing with the fallen leaves charms him with pure merriment. The skylark’s song lifts him up into the clouds.

He turns from the nightingale, that creature of a “fiery heart,” to the Stock-dove:

He thinks of love which grows to use

He speaks of life’s disenchantments and wearinesses as

When autumn closes around him, and the season makes him conscious that his leaf is sere and yellow on the bough, he exclaims

Temperate rejoicing,—that is the clearest note of Wordsworth’s poetry. Not an unrestrained gladness, for he can never escape from that deep, strange experience of his youth. Often, in thought, he

But even while he hears these sounds he will not be “downcast or forlorn.” He will find a deeper music to conquer these clashing discords. He will learn, and teach, a hidden joy, strong to survive amid the sorrows of a world like this. He will not look for it in some far-off unrealized Utopia,

To this quest of joy, to this proclamation of joy, he dedicates his life.

And herein he becomes a prophet to his age,—a prophet of the secret of joy, simple, universal, enduring,—the open secret.

The burden of Wordsworth’s prophecy of joy, as found in his poetry, is threefold. First, he declares with exultation that he has seen in Nature the evidence of a living spirit in vital correspondence with the spirit of man. Second, he expresses the deepest, tenderest feeling of the inestimable value of the humblest human life,—a feeling which through all its steadiness is yet strangely illumined by sudden gushes of penetration and pathos. Third, he proclaims a lofty ideal of the liberty and greatness of man, consisting in obedience to law and fidelity to duty.

I am careful in choosing words to describe the manner of this threefold prophesying, because I am anxious to distinguish it from didacticism. Not that Wordsworth is never didactic; for he is very often entirely and dreadfully so. But at such times he is not at his best; and it is in these long uninspired intervals that we must bear, as Walter Pater has said, “With patience the presence of an alien element in Wordsworth’s work, which never coalesced with what is really delightful in it, nor underwent his peculiar power.” Wordsworth’s genius as a poet did not always illuminate his industry as a writer. In the intervals he prosed terribly. There is a good deal of what Lowell calls “Dr. Wattsiness,” in some of his poems.

But the character of his best poems was strangely inspirational. They came to him like gifts, and he read them aloud as if wondering at their beauty. Through the protracted description of an excursion, or the careful explanation of a state of mind, he slowly plods on foot; but when he comes to the mount of vision, he mounts up with wings as an eagle. In the analysis of a character, in the narration of a simple story, he often drones, and sometimes stammers; but when the flash of insight arrives, he sings. This is the difference between the pedagogue and the prophet: the pedagogue repeats a lesson learned by rote, the prophet chants a truth revealed by vision.

III

Let me speak first of Wordsworth as a poet of Nature. The peculiar and precious quality of his best work is that it is done with his eye on the object and his imagination beyond it.

Nothing could be more accurate, more true to the facts than Wordsworth’s observation of the external world. There was an underlying steadiness, a fundamental placidity, a kind of patient, heroic obstinacy in his character, which blended with his delicate, almost tremulous sensibility, to make him rarely fitted for this work. He could look and listen long. When the magical moment of disclosure arrived, he was there and ready.

Some of his senses were not particularly acute. Odours seem not to have affected him. There are few phrases descriptive of the fragrance of nature in his poetry, and so far as I can remember none of them are vivid. He could never have written Tennyson’s line about