A Day with Keats. Byron May Clarissa Gillington

A Day with Keats

      A DAY WITH KEATS

      About eight o'clock one morning in early summer, a young man may be seen sauntering to and fro in the garden of Wentworth Place, Hampstead. Wentworth Place consists of two houses only; in the first, John Keats is established along with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. The second is inhabited by a Mrs. Brawne and her family. They are wooden houses, with festooning draperies of foliage: and the clean countrified air of Hampstead comes with sweet freshness through the gardens, and fills the young man with ecstatic delight. He gazes around him, with his weak dark eyes, upon the sky, the flowers, the various minutiæ of nature which mean so much to him: and although he has severely tried a never robust physique by sitting up half the night in study, a new exhilaration now throbs through his veins. For, in his own words, he loves the principle of beauty in all things: and he repeats to himself, as he loiters up and down in the sunshine, the lines into which he has crystallized, for all time, sensations similar to those of the present: —

      A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

      Its loveliness increases; it will never

      Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

      A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

      Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

      Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

      A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

      Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

      Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

      Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darken'd ways

      Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,

      Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

      From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,

      Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon

      For simple sheep; and such are daffodils

      With the green world they live in; and clear rills

      That for themselves a cooling covert make

      'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,

      Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:

      And such too is the grandeur of the dooms

      We have imagined for the mighty dead;

      All lovely tales that we have heard or read:

      An endless fountain of immortal drink,

      Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

      Nor do we merely feel these essences

      For one short hour; no, even as the trees

      That whisper round a temple become soon

      Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,

      The passion poesy, glories infinite,

      Haunt us till they become a cheering light

      Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,

      That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast,

      They alway must be with us, or we die.

Endymion.

      Yet John Keats is in some respects out of keeping with the magnificent phraseology of which he is the mouthpiece. "Little Keats," as his fellow medical students termed him, is a small, undersized man, not over five feet high – the shoulders too broad, the legs too spare – "death in his hand," as Coleridge said, the slack moist hand of the incipient consumptive. The only "thing of beauty" about him is his face. "It is a face," to quote his friend Leigh Hunt, "in which energy and sensibility" (i.e., sensitiveness) "are remarkably mixed up – an eager power, wrecked and made impatient by ill-health. Every feature at once strongly cut and delicately alive." There is that femininity in the cast of his features, which Coleridge classed as an attribute of true genius. His beautiful brown hair falls loosely over those eyes, large, dark, glowing, which appeal to all observers by their mystical illumination of rapture – eyes which seem as though they had been dwelling on some glorious sight – which have, as Haydon said, "an inward look perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions."

      And he is seeing visions all the while. Some chance sight or sound has wrapt him away from the young greenness of the May morning, and plunged him deep into the opulent colour of September. His prophetic eye sees all the apple-buds as golden orbs of fruit, and the swallows, that now build beneath the eaves, making ready for their departure. And these future splendours shape themselves into lines as richly coloured.

      Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

      Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

      Conspiring with him how to load and bless

      With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

      To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

      And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

      With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

      And still more, later flowers for the bees,

      Until they think warm days will never cease,

      For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.

      Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

      Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

      Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

      Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

      Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

      Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;

      And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

      Steady thy laden head across a brook;

      Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

      Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

      Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

      Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,

      While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

      And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

      Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

      Among the river sallows, borne aloft

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

      And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

      Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

      The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft.

      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Autumn.

      The voice of Charles Brown at the open window, hailing him cheerily, breaks the spell; Keats goes in, and they sit down together to a simple breakfast-table, and Brown "quizzes" Keats, as the current phrase goes, on his inveterate abstractedness. The young man, with his sweet and merry laugh, defends himself by producing the result of his last-night's meditations, in praise of the selfsame wandering fancy.

      Ever let the Fancy roam,

      Pleasure never is at home:

      At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,

      Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;

      Then let wingèd Fancy wander

      Through the thought still spread beyond her:

      Open wide the mind's cage door,

      She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.

      O, sweet Fancy! let her loose;

      Summer's joys are spoilt by use,

      And the enjoying of the Spring

      Fades as does its blossoming:

      Autumn's