Ode to a Nightingale. John Keats

from him, in the same document, now unfortunately gone astray, to which I have already referred as containing his character of the poet’s mother. The die was cast. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three brothers and the social gatherings of their friends, it was determined that John Keats (or according to his convivial alias ‘Junkets’) should put forth a volume of his poems. Leigh Hunt brought on the scene a firm of publishers supposed to be sympathetic, the brothers Charles and James Ollier, who had already published for Shelley and who readily undertook the issue. The volume was printed, and the last proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company, with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be furnished at once. Keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet To Leigh Hunt Esqr, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion: —

      Glory and Loveliness have pass’d away;

       For if we wander out in early morn,

       No wreathed incense do we see upborne

       Into the East to meet the smiling day:

       No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay,

       In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,

       Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn

       The shrine of Flora in her early May.

       But there are left delights as high as these,

       And I shall ever bless my destiny,

       That in a time when under pleasant trees

       Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,

       A leafy luxury, seeing I could please,

       With these poor offerings, a man like thee.

      With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old pagan world and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet’s first venture was sent forth, amid the applauding expectations of all his circle, in the first days of March 1817.