metrical sweetness and melodious words, but in the reconcilement of 'discordant elements' by 'the dark inscrutable workmanship of life,' the realisation of the relations of the spirit to its surroundings, the expansiveness of its sympathy, and its hopes for humanity.

Keats is too often remembered as the poet of sensuous perfection, to the exclusion of this wider thought, but any careful study of his poems will make it obvious that while he is pre-eminently among English poets the one who appeals most directly to the senses, his work is full of indications that his imagination and poetic genius carried him beyond this first and earliest development of the mind to the spiritual and more permanent elements of human nature; and that however 'wild' the music may have been which his 'spirit struck 'from all the beautiful,' it bore in its harmony the undertone of the discords necessary to its completion and fulness.

'The still sad music of humanity' was beautiful to him, as well as the gladness and joy of life, and he felt 'the giant agony of the world' while he gloried in the melody of its progress.

The sensuous faculties are the first to be developed, and in Keats they were developed to an unusual extent, probably by reason of the large scale of his whole nature; for it must never be forgotten that his life was an arrested one, that his poetry remains to us a Titanic fragment of that which might have been the unrivalled work of genius of our age, and that the three small volumes of verse which he left us, with the memory of his twenty-five years of life, are but a prelude to the music which never was played. The perfection of his senses, the luxuriance of his imagination, the strength of his friendship, the warmth of his affections, and the depth of his passion, are sufficient warrant to us for believing that the melody and creative beauty so much associated with him are but a partial expression of his general power, and that we are coming only by slow degrees to know the worth of his legacy of verse and the greatness of the clements which it contains.

The short sad story of his life is too well known already to need more than the briefest recapitulation in order to understand the sequence of his poems.

His

The son of a man employed in a livery-stable, he was born in October 1795, in London. father died when John was only nine years old, but his mother gave him what was considered a good education. She is said to have been a stern and severe woman, yet when she died, during her son's school career, we are told that he hid himself for several days in a nook under the master's desk, 'passionately inconsolable.'

His schoolmaster, Mr. Cowden Clarke, was one of his earliest friends, and to Mr. Clarke's son Charles he wrote, in one of those strange rhyming letters which show his versatility and command of language:

You first taught me all the sweets of song, The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine, What swell'd with pathos, and what right divine; Spenserian vowels that elope with ease,

And float along like birds o'er summer seas;

Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness, Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve's fair slenderness. Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly

Up to its climax, and then dying proudly?

In some interesting, Personal Recollections of John Keats, published by Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke in the Gentleman's Magazine of February 1874, we see how close this friendship continued to be after the school days of Keats were over.

Who found for me the grandeur of the ode,
Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load?
Who let me taste that more than cordial dram,
The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram?

Showed me that epic was of all the king,

Round, vast, and spanning all, like Saturn's ring?

With hopes that you would one day think the reading Of my rough verses not an hour misspent:

Should it e'er be so, what a rich content.

This letter is dated September 1816, the year before 'Endymion' was written.

For five years Keats prepared himself for the medical profession. It is strange how little trace we find of this work in his poems. It would seem as if he had been living a double life at the time, and that while he walked the hospitals his mind was straying in the old classic fields or in the realms of gold' of Spenser's faery world; for neither science, nor the mechanism of the body, nor the subtle connection of the body and mind, ever seem to have specially touched his imagination. The two principal inspirations of his early life were Spenser's 'Faery Queene' and a translation of Homer by Chapman; which last was to him.

such an intense delight, that he read it all night long, even shouting aloud when some special passage struck him. He knew no Greek. His marvellous knowledge of Greek mythology came through translations and his own innate sympathy with Greek feeling; and great as the loss of not having mastered the language itself must have been, there was certainly a compensating gain in the fresh appreciative power which had not been injured by the hackneying of the Greek poets in school work. How great the joy of this discovery of Homer was to him is well known by the sonnet written on this occasion.

SONNET ON READING CHAPMAN'S HOMER.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen,
Round many Western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne ;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent-upon a peak in Darien.