RECOLLECTIONS OF JOHN KEATS.

BY CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE.

IN the village of Enfield, in Middlesex, ten miles on the North road from London, my father, John Clarke, kept a school. The house had been built by a West India merchant in the latter end of the seventeenth or beginning of the eighteenth century. It was of the better character of the domestic architecture of that period, the whole front being of the purest red brick, wrought by means of moulds into rich designs of flowers and pomegranates, with heads of cherubim over niches in the centre of the building. The elegance of the design and the perfect finish of the structure were such as to secure its protection when a branch railway was brought from the Ware and Cambridge line to Enfield. The old school-house was converted into the station-house, and the railway company had the good taste to leave intact one of the few remaining specimens of the graceful English architecture of long-gone days.

Here it was that John Keats all but commenced, and did complete bis school education. He was born on the 29th of October, 1795; and he was one of the little fellows who had not wholly emerged from the child's costume upon being placed under my father's care. It will be readily conceived that it is difficult to recall from the "dark backward and abysm" of seventy-odd years the general acts of perhaps the youngest individual in a corporation of between seventy and eighty youngsters; and very little more of Keats's child-life can I remember than that he had a brisk, winning face, and was a favorite with all, particularly my mother. His maternal grandfather, Jennings, was proprietor of a large livery-stable, called the "Swan and Hoop," on the pavement in Moorfields, opposite the entrance into Finsbury Circus. He had two sons at my father's school: the elder was an officer in Duncan's ship off Camperdown. After the battle, the Dutch Admiral, De Winter, pointing to young Jennings, told Duncan that he had fired several shots at that young man, and always missed his mark; - no credit to his 'steadiness of aim, for Jennings, like his own admiral, was considerably above the ordinary dimensions of stature.

Keats's father was the principal servant at the Swan and Hoop stables - a man of so remarkably fine a commonsense, and native respectability, that I perfectly remember the warm terms in which his demeanor used to be canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit his boys John was the only one resembling him in person and feature, with brown hair and dark hazel eyes. The father was killed by a fall from his horse in returning from a visit to the school. This detail may be deemed requisite when we see in the last memoir of the poet the statement that "John Keats was born on the 29th of October, 1795, in the upper rank of the middle class." His two brothers -George, older, and Thomas, younger than himself were like the mother, who was tall, of good figure, with large oval face, and sensible deportment. The last of the family was a sister, Fanny, I think, much younger than all, and I hope still living, of whom I remember, when once walking in the garden with her brothers, my mother speaking with much fondness for her pretty and simple manners. She married Mr. Llanos, a Spanish refugee, the author of "Don Esteban," and "Sandoval, the Freemason." He was a man of liberal principles, very attractive bearing, and of more than ordinary accomplishments.

In the early part of his school-life John gave no extraordinary indications of intellectual character; but it was remembered of him afterwards, that there was ever present a determined and steady spirit in all his undertakings; I never knew it misdirected in his required pursuit of study. He was a most orderly scholar. The future ramifications of that noble genius were then closely shut in the seed, which was greedily drinking in the moisture that made it afterwards burst forth so kindly into luxuriance and beauty. My father was in the habit, at each half-year's vacation, of bestowing prizes upon those pupils who had performed the greatest quantity of voluntary work; and such was

Keats's indefatigable energy for the last two or three successive half-years of his remaining at school, that, upon each occasion, he took the first prize by a considerable distance. He was at work before the first school-hour began, and that was at seven o'clock; almost all the intervening times of recreation were so devoted; and during the afternoon holidays, when all were at play, he would be in the school-almost the only one at his Latin or French translation; and so unconscious and regardless was he of the consequences of so close and persevering an application, that he never would have taken the necessary exercise had he not been sometimes driven out for the purpose by one of the masters.

It has just been said that he was a favorite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a highly pugnacious spirit, which, when roused, was one of the most picturesque exhibitions off the stage-I ever saw. One of the transports of that marvellous actor, Edmund Kean, whom, by the way, he idolized, was its nearest resemblance; and the two were not very dissimilar in face and figure. Upon one occasion when an usher, on account of some impertinent behavior, had boxed his brother Tom's ears, Jolin rushed up, put himself in the received posture of offence, and, it was said, struck the usher - who could, so to say, have put him into bis pocket. His passion at times was almost ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, laughing when John was in "one of his moods," and was endeavoring to beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon the most trying occasions. He was not merely the "favorite of all," like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him.

In the latter part of the time - perhaps eighteen months - that he remained at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading. Thus, his whole time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive memory, and the quantity that he read was surprising. He must in those last months have exhausted the school library, which consisted principally of abridgments of all the voyages and travels of any note; Mayor's collection. also his "Universal History; " Robertson's histories of Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss Edgeworth's productions, together with many other works equally well calculated for youth. The books, however, that were his constantly recurrent sources of attrac tion were Tooke's "Pantheon," Lemprière's "Classical Dictionary," which he appeared to learn, and Spence's "Polymetis." This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with the Greek mythology; here was he "suckled in that creed outworn;" for his amount of classical attainment extended no further than the "Eneid; " with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated that before leaving school he had voluntarily translated in writing a considerable portion. And yet I remember that at that early age - mayhap under fourteen - notwithstanding, and through all its incidental attractiveness, he hazarded the opinion to me (and the expression riveted my surprise), that there was feebleness in the structure of the work. He must have gone through all the better publications in the school library, for he asked me to lend him some of my own books; and, in my "mind's eye," I now see him at supper (we had our meals in the school-room), sitting back on the form, from the table, holding the folio volume of Burnet's History of his Own Time" between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This work, and Leigh Hunt's Examiner, — which my father took in, and I used to lend to Keats, no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and religious liberty. He once told me, smiling, that one of his guardians, being informed what books I had lent him to read, declared that if he had fifty children he would not send one of them to that school. Bless his patriot head!

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The shield and helmet of Diomed, with the accompanying simile, in the opening of the third book; and the prodigious description of Neptune's passage to the Achive ships, in the thirteenth book:

The woods and all the great hills near trembled beneath the weight

Of his immortal-moving feet. Three steps he only took, Before he far-off gas reached, but with the fourth, it shook With his dread entry.

One scene I could not fail to introduce to him the shipwreck of Ulysses, in the fifth book of the "Odysseis;' and I had the reward of one of his delighted stares, upon reading the following lines:

Then forth he came, his both knees falt'ring, both
His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth
His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath
Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.
The sea had soaked his heart through; all his veins
His toils had racked t'a laboring woman's pains.
Dead-weary was he.

was off with them to Oberon and fairyland." And yet, with all his self-styled unfitness for the pursuit, I was afterwards informed that at his subsequent examination he displayed an amount of acquirement which surprised his fellow-students, who had scarcely any other association with him than that of a cheerful, crotchety rhymester. He once talked with me, upon my complaining of stomachic derangement, with a remarkable decision of opinion, describing the functions and actions of the organ with the practitioner; casually illustrating the comment, in his charclearness and, as I presume, technical precision of an adult acteristic way, with poetical imagery: the stomach, he said, being like a brood of callow nestlings (opening his capacious mouth) yearning and gaping for sustenance; and, indeed, he merely exemplified what should be, if possible, the "stock in trade" of every poet, namely, to know all that is to be known, "in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth."

It was about this period that, going to call upon Mr. Leigh Hunt, who then occupied a pretty little cottage in the Vale of Health, on Hampstead Heath, I took with me

:

From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran,
And lost in lassitude lay all the man. [! ! !]

Chapman supplied us with many an after-treat; but it was in the teeming wonderment of this his first introduction, that, when I came down to breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter with no other enclosure than his famous sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." We had parted, as I have already said, at day-spring, yet he contrived that I should receive the poem from a distance of, may be, two miles, by ten o'clock. In the published copy of this sonnet he made an alteration in the seventh line:

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene.
The original which he sent me had the phrase –

Yet could I never tell what men could mean ; which he said was bald, and too simply wondering. No one could more earnestly chastise his thoughts than Keats. His favorite among Chapman's "Hymns of Homer" the one to Pan, which he himself rivalled in the "Endy

mion: "

was

In one of our conversations, about this period, I alluded to his position at St. Thomas's Hospital, coasting and reconnoitring, as it were, for the purpose of discovering what progress he was making in his profession; which I had taken for granted had been his own selection, and not one chosen for him. The total absorption, therefore, of every other mood of his mind than that of imaginative composition, which had now evidently encompassed him, induced me, from a kind motive, to inquire what was his bias of action for the future; and with that transparent candor which formed the mainspring of his rule of conduct, he at once made no secret of his inability to sympathize with the science of anatomy, as a main pursuit in life; for one of the expressions that he used, in describing his unfitness for its mastery, was perfectly characteristic. He said, in illustration of his argument," The other day, for instance, during the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I

could not but anticipate that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and indeed approvingly, of the compositions — written, too, by a youth under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty lines of the first poem. Horace Smith happened to be there on the occasion, and he was not less demonstrative in his apprethe sonnet, "How many Bards gild the Lapses of Time!" ciation of their merits. The piece which he read out was marking with particular emphasis and approval the last

six lines:

So the unnumbered sounds that evening store,

The songs of birds, the whisp'ring of the leaves,
The voice of waters, the great bell that heaves
With solemn sound, and thousand others more,
That distance of recognizance bereaves,
Make pleasing music, and not wild uproar.

Smith repeated with applause the line in italics, saying, "What a well-condensed expression for a youth so young! After making numerous and eager inquiries about him, and manner, the visit ended in my being requested to personally, and with reference to any peculiarities of mind bring him over to the Vale of Health.

That was a "red-letter day" in the young poet's life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts.

The character and expression of Keats's features would arrest even the casual passenger in the street; and now they were wrought to a tone of animation that I could not but watch with interest, knowing what was in store for him from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention, with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to encounter and receive. As we approached the Heath, there was the rising and accelerated step, with the gradual subsidence of all talk. The interview, which stretched into three "morning calls," was the prelude to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its neighborhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed.

It was in the library at Hunt's cottage, where an extemporary bed had been made up for him on the sofa, that he composed the frame-work and many lines of the poem on "Sleep and Poetry - the last sixty or seventy being an inventory of the art garniture of the room, commencing: It was a poet's house who keeps the keys

Of Pleasure's temple.

In this composition is the lovely and favorite little cluster of images upon the fleeting transit of life a pathetic anticipation of his own brief career : —

Stop and consider! Life is but a day;
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
From a tree's summit; a poor Indian's sleep
While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep
Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan?

Keen fitful gusts are whispering here and there
Among the bushes half leafless and dry;
The stars look very cold about the sky,
And I have many miles on foot to fare;
Yet I feel little of the cool bleak air,

Or of the dead leaves rustling drearily,
Or of those silver lamps that burn on high,
Or of the distance from home's pleasant lair:
For I am brimful of the friendliness

That in a little cottage I have found;
Of fair-haired Milton's eloquent distress,
And all his love for gentle Lycid' drowned;
Of lovely Laura in her light green dress,

And faithful Petrarch gloriously crowned.

The glowing sonnet upon being compelled to "Leave Friends at an Early Hour"

Give me a golden pen and let me lean, etc., followed shortly after the former. But the occasion that recurs with the liveliest interest was one evening when — some observations having been made upon the character, habits, and pleasant associations with that reverend denizen of the hearth, the cheerful little grasshopper of the fireside Hunt proposed to Keats the challenge of writing then, there, and to time, a sonnet "On the Grasshopper and Cricket." No one was present but myself, and they accordingly set to. I, apart, with a book at the end of the sofa, could not avoid furtive glances every now and then at the emulants. I cannot say how long the trial lasted. I was not proposed umpire; and had no stop-watch for the occasion. The time, however, was short for such a performance, and Keats won as to time. But the event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement. sincere look of pleasure at the first line

His

The poetry of earth is never dead. "Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth and eleventh lines:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence

"Ah! that's perfect! Bravo, Keats!" And then he went on in a dilatation upon the dumbness of Nature during the season's suspension and torpidity. With all the kind and gratifying things that were said to him, Keats protested to me, as we were afterwards walking home, that he preferred Hunt's treatment of the subject to his own. neighbor Dogberry would have rejoined: "'Fore God, they are both in a tale!" It has occurred to me, upon so remarkable an occasion as the one here recorded, that a reunion of the two sonnets will be gladly hailed by the reader.

As

ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET.
Green little vaulter in the sunny grass

Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;
Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,

One to the fields, the other to the hearth,
Both have your sunshine; both though small are strong
At your clear hearts; and both were sent on earth
To sing in thoughtful ears this natural song,
In doors and out, Summer and Winter, Mirth!
December 30, 1816.
LEIGH HUNT.

Keats had left the neighborhood of the Borough, and was now living with his brothers in apartments on the second floor of a house in the Poultry, over the passage leading to the Queen's Head Tavern, and opposite to one of the City Companies' halls the Ironmongers', if I mistake not. I have the associating reminiscence of many happy hours spent in this abode. Here was determined upon, in great part written, and sent forth to the world, the first little but vigorous offspring of his brain:

And here, on the evening when the last proof-sheet was brought from the printer, it was accompanied by the information that if a "dedication to the book was intended it must be sent forthwith." Whereupon he withdrew to a side table, and in the buzz of a mixed conversation (for there were several friends in the room) he composed and brought to Charles Ollier, the publisher, the Dedication Sonnet to Leigh Hunt. If the original manuscript of that poem a legitimate sonnet, with every restriction of rhyme and metre could now be produced, and the time recorded in which it was written, it would be pronounced an extraordinary performance: added to which the non-alteration of a single word in the poem (a circumstance that was noted at the time) claims for it a merit with a very rare parallel. The remark may be here subjoined that, had the composition been previously prepared for the occasion, the mere writing it out would have occupied fourteen minutes; and lastly, when I refer to the time occupied in composing the sonnet on "The Grasshopper and the Cricket," I can have no hesitation in believing the one in question to have been extempore.

"The poem which commences the volume," says Lord Houghton in his first memoir of the poet," was suggested to Keats by a delightful summer's day, as he stood beside the gate that leads from the battery on Hampstead Heath into a field by Caen Wood;" and the following lovely passage he himself told me was the recollection of our having frequently loitered over the rail of a foot-bridge that spanned (probably still spans, notwithstanding the intrusive and shouldering railroad) a little brook in the last field upon entering Edmonton :

Linger awhile upon some bending planks
That lean against a streamlet's rushy banks,
And watch intently Nature's gentle doings;
They will be found softer than ring-dove's cooings. ]

How silent comes the water round that bend!
Not the minutest whisper does it send
To the o'erhanging sallows; blades of grass
Slowly across the chequered shadows pass.
Why, you might read two sonnets, ere they reach
To where the hurrying freshnesses aye preach
A natural sermon o'er their pebbly beds;
Where swarms of minnows show their little heads,
Staying their wavy bodies 'gainst the streams,
To taste the luxury of sunny beams
Tempered with coolness. How they wrestle
With their own delight, and ever nestle
Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand!
If you but scantily hold cut the hand,
That very instant not one will remain je

But turn your eye and they are there again.

He himself thought the picture correct, and acknowledged to a partiality for it.

Another example of his promptly suggestive imagination, and uncommon facility in giving it utterance, occurred one day upon returning home and finding me asleep on the sofa, with a volume of Chaucer open at the "Flower and the Leaf." After expressing to me his admiration of the poem, which he had been reading, he gave me the fine testimony of that opinion in pointing to the sonnet he had written at the close of it, which was an extempore effusion and without the alteration of a single word. It lies before me now, signed "J. K., Feb., 1817." If my memory do not betray me, this charming out-door fancy-scene was Keats's first introduction to Chaucer. The "Troilus and Cresseide" was certainly an after-acquaintance with him; and clearly do I recall his approbation of the favorite passages that had been marked in my own copy. Upon being requested, he retraced the poem, and with his pen confirmed and denoted those which were congenial with his own feeling and judgment. These two circumstances, associated with the literary career of this cherished object of his friends' esteem and love, have stamped a priceless value upon that friend's miniature 18mo copy of Chaucer.

The first volume of Keats's minor muse was launched amid the cheers and fond anticipations of all his circle. Every one of us expected (and not unreasonably) that it would create a sensation in the literary world; for such a first production (and a considerable portion of it from a minor) has rarely occurred. The three Epistles and the seventeen Sonnets (that "Upon first looking into Chapman's Homer" one of them) would have ensured a rousing welcome from our modern-day reviewers. Alas! the book might have emerged in Timbuctoo with far stronger chance of fame and approbation. It never passed to a second edition; the first was but a small one, and that was never sold off. The whole community, as if by compact, seemed determined to know nothing about it. The word had been passed that its author was a Radical; and in those days of Bible-Crown-and-Constitution" supremacy, he might have had better chance of success had he been an Anti-Jacobin. Keats had not made the slightest demonstration of political opinion; but with a conscious feeling of gratitude for kindly encouragement, he had dedicated his book to Leigh Hunt, Editor of the Examiner, a Radical and a dubbed partisan of the first Napoleon; because, when alluding to him, Hunt did not always subjoin the fashionable cognomen of "Corsican Monster." Such an association was motive enough with the dictators of that day to thwart the endeavors of a young aspirant who should presume to assert for himself an unrestricted course of opinion. Verily, "the former times were not better than these." Men may now utter a word in favor of "civil liberty" without being chalked on the back and hounded out.

Poor Keats! be little anticipated, and as little merited, the cowardly treatment that was in store for him upon the publishing of his second composition the "Endymion." It was in the interval of the two productions that he had moved from the Poultry, and had taken a lodging in Well Walk, Hampstead - in the first or second house on the right hand, going up to the Heath. I have an impression that he had been some weeks absent at the seaside before settling in this district; for the "Endymion" had been

begun, and he had made considerable advances in his plan. He came to me one Sunday, and we passed the greater part of the day walking in the neighborhood. His constant and enviable friend, Severn, I remember, was present upon the occasion, by a little circumstance of our exchanging looks upon Keats reading to us portions of his new poem with which he himself had been pleased; and never will his expression of face depart from me; if I were a Reynolds or a Gainsborough I could now stamp it forever. One of his selections was the now celebrated Hymn to Pan" in the first book:

Whose silent wheels, fresh wet from clouds of morn,
Spun off a drizzling dew.

Keats was indebted for his introduction to Mr. Severn to his schoolfellow Edward Holmes, who also had been one of the child-scholars at Enfield; for he came there in the frock-dress.

Holmes ought to have been an educated musician from his first childhood, for the passion was in him. I used to amuse myself with the piano forte after supper, when all had gone to bed. Upon some sudden occasion, leaving the parlor, I heard a scuffle on the stairs, and discovered that my young gentleman had left his bed to hear the music. At other times, during the day, in the intervals of school-hours, he would stand under the window, listening. At length he entrusted to me his heart's secret, that he should like to learn music; when I taught him his tonic alphabet, and he soon knew and could do as much as his tutor. Upon leaving school, he was apprenticed to the elder Seeley, the bookseller; but, disliking his occupation, he left it, I think, before he was of age. He did not lose sight of his old master, and I introduced him to Mr. Vincent Novello, who had made himself a friend to me; and who not merely with rare profusion of bounty gave Holmes instruction, but received him into his house and made him one of his family. With them he resided some years. I was also the fortunate means of recommending him to the chief proprietor of the Atlas newspaper; and to that journal, during a long period, he contributed a series of essays and critiques upon the science and practice of music, which raised the journal into a reference and an authority in the art. He wrote for the proprietors of the Atlas an elegant little book of dilettante criticism, "A Ramble among the Musicians in Germany." And in the latter period of his career he contributed to the Musical Times a whole series of masterly essays and analyses upon the masses of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. His own favorite production was a "Life of Mozart," in which he performed his task with considerable skill and equal modesty, contriving by means of the great musician's own letters to convert the work into an autobiography.

I have said that Holmes used to listen on the stairs. In after years, when Keats was reading to me the manuscript of The Eve of St. Agnes," upon the repeating of the passage when Porphy ro is listening to the midnight music in the hall below,

The boisterous midnight festive clarion,
The kettle-drum and far-heard clarionet,
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone:
The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone, -

"That line," said he, "came into my head when I remembered how I used to listen in bed to your music at school." How enchanting would be a record of the germs and first causes of all the greatest artists' conceptions! The elder Brunel's first hint for his "shield" in constructing the tunnel under the Thames was taken from watching the