Melancholy. Greater lyrical poetry the world may have seen than any that is in these; lovelier it surely has never seen, nor ever can it possibly see. From the divine fragment of an unfinished ode to Maia we can but guess that if completed it would have been worthy of a place beside the highest. His remaining lyrics have many beauties about them, but none perhaps, can be called thoroughly beautiful. He has certainly left us one perfect sonnet of the first rank; and as certainly he has left us but one.
Keats, on high and recent authority, has been promoted to a place beside Shakespeare; and it was long since remarked by some earlier critic of less note that as a painter of flowers his touch had almost a Shakespearean felicity,—recalling, a writer in our own day might have added, the hand of M. Fantin on canvass. The faultless force and the profound subtlety of this deep and cunning instinct for the absolute expression of absolute natural beauty can hardly be questioned or overlooked; and this is doubtless the one main distinctive gift or power which denotes him as a poet among all his equals, and gives him right to a rank for ever beside Coleridge and Shelley. As a man, the two admirers who have done best service to his memory are, first and far foremost, Lord Houghton, and secondly Mr Matthew Arnold. These alone, among all who have written of him without the disadvantage or advantage of a personal acquaintance, have clearly seen and shown us the manhood of the man. That ridiculous and degrading legend which imposed so strangely on the generous tenderness of Shelley, while evoking the very natural and allowable laughter of Byron, fell to dust at once for ever on the appearance of that admirable and unsurpassed biography which gave perfect proof to all time that "men have died and worms have eaten them," but not for fear of critics or through suffering inflicted by reviews. Somewhat too sensually sensitive he may have been in either capacity, but the nature of the man was as far as was the quality of the poet above the pitiful level of a creature whose soul could "let itself be snuffed out by an article"; and in fact, owing doubtless to the accident of a death which followed so fast on his early appearance and his dubious reception as a poet, the insolence and injustice of his reviewers in general have been comparatively and even considerably exaggerated. Except from the chief fountainhead of professional ribaldry then open in the world of literary journalism, no reek of personal insult arose to offend his nostrils; and then as now the tactics of such unwashed malignants were inevitably suicidal; the references to his brief experiment of apprenticeship to a surgeon which are quoted from Blackwood in the shorter as well as in the longer memoir by Lord Houghton could leave no bad odour behind them save what might hang about men's yet briefer recollection of his assailant's unmemorable existence. The false Keats, therefore, whom Shelley pitied and Byron despised would have been, had he ever existed, a thing beneath compassion or contempt. That such a man could have had such a genius is almost evidently impossible; and yet more evident is the proof which remains on everlasting record that none was ever further from the chance of decline to such degradation than the real and actual man who made that name immortal. (a. c. s.)
Subjoined are the most important facts in the life of Keats. He was born, as already stated, in London on October 29, 1795. At an early age he was sent to school at Enfield, and in 1810 he was apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton. On the completion of his apprenticeship, in 1815, he removed to London for the purpose of walking the hospitals, and soon made the acquaintance of Leigh Hunt, and subsequently that of Haydon, Hazlitt, Shelley, and others. After having published some sonnets in the Examiner, of which Hunt was at that time editor, he was encouraged by the praise of his friends to give to the world a volume of Poems in 1817, and a second, entitled Endymion, a Poetic Romance, in the following year. Meanwhile, symptoms of hereditary lung-disease having shown themselves, he spent some months in visiting the English lake district and portions of Scotland and Ireland, but without re-establishing his failing health: on his return to London the despondency which had fallen upon him on this account was deepened by the death of his younger brother. Soon after this event he first became acquainted with Miss Brawne, and the friendship rapidly grew into a passion which combined with straitened circumstances and the steady progress of disease to give a tragical cast to all that remained of his brief career. In 1820 the results of his literary activity during the two preceding years were published in Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and other Poems. In autumn of the same year, having been advised to winter in a more genial climate, he sailed for Italy. The voyage proved of little advantage, and after some months of suffering he died at Rome on February 23, 1821. The Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of Keats were published in two volumes by R. Monckton Milnes in 1848; The Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, with introduction and notes by Harry Buxton Forman, appeared in 1878.
KEBLE, JOHN (1792-1866), the poet of the Christian Year, was born on St Mark's Day (April 25), 1792, at Fairford, Gloucestershire. He was the second child and eldest son of the Rev. John Keble and Sarah Maule; three sisters and one brother completed the family circle. Descended from a family which had attained some legal eminence in the time of the Commonwealth, John Keble, the father of the poet, was vicar of Coln St Aldwyn, but lived at Fairford, about 3 miles distant from his cure. He was a clergyman of the old High Church school, whose adherents, untouched by the influence of the Wesleys, had moulded their piety on the doctrines of the non-jurors and the old Anglican divines. Himself a good scholar, he did not send his son to any school, but educated him and his brother at home so well that both obtained scholarships at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. John was elected scholar of Corpus in his fifteenth, and fellow of Oriel in his nineteenth year, April 1811. In Easter term 1810 he had obtained double first class honours, a distinction which had been obtained only once before, and that by Sir Robert Peel. After his election to the Oriel fellowship, Keble gained the University prizes, both for the English essay and also for the Latin essay. But he was more remarkable for the rare beauty of his character than even for academic distinctions. Sir John Taylor Coleridge, his fellow scholar at Corpus and his life-long friend, says of him, looking back on his youth, after their friendship of five and fifty years had closed, "It was the singular happiness of his nature, remarkable even in his undergraduate days, that love for him was always sanctified by reverence—reverence that did not make the love less tender, and love that did but add intensity to the reverence." Oriel College was, at the time when Keble entered it, the centre of all the finest ability in Oxford. Copleston, Davison, Whately, were among the fellows who elected Keble; Arnold, Pusey, Newman, were soon after added to the society. In 1815 Keble was ordained deacon, and priest in 1816. His real bent and choice were towards a pastoral cure in a country parish; but he remained in Oxford, acting first as public examiner in the schools, then as tutor in Oriel, till 1823. In summer he sometimes took clerical work, sometimes made tours on foot through various English counties, during which he was composing poems, which afterwards took their place in the Christian Year. He had a rare power of attracting to himself the finest spirits, a power which lay not so much in his ability or his genius as in his character, so simple, so humble, so pure, so unworldly, yet wanting not that severity which can stand by principle and maintain what he holds to be the truth. In 1823 he left Oxford, and returned to Fairford, there to assist his father, and with his brother to serve one or two small and poorly endowed curacies in the neighbourhood of Coln. He had made a quiet but deep impression on all who came within his influence in Oxford,
