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These will in throngs before my mind intrude:

       But no confusion, no disturbance rude

       Do they occasion; ’tis a pleasing chime.

       So the unnumber’d 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.

      Technical points worth attention here are the bold reversal of the regular accentual stress twice over in the first line, and the strained use of ‘store’ for ‘fill’ and ‘recognizance’ for ‘recognition.’ But the main interest of the sonnet is its comparison of the working of Keats’ miscellaneous poetic reading in his mind and memory with the effect of the confused but harmonious sounds of evening on the ear, — a frank and illuminating comment by himself on those stray echoes and reminiscences of the older poets which we catch now and again throughout his work. Such echoes and reminiscences are always permitted to genius, because genius cannot help turning whatever it takes into something new of its own: and Keats showed himself from the first one of those chartered borrowers who have the right to draw inspiration as they please, whether direct from nature or, in the phrase of Wordsworth,

      From the great Nature that exists in works

       Of mighty poets.

      Compare Shelley in the preface to Prometheus Unbound:— ‘One great poet is a masterpiece of nature which another not only ought to study but must study.’

      Most of the remaining sonnets can best be taken in groups, each group centering round a single theme or embodying a single mood or vein of feeling. One is what may be called the sex-chivalry group, including the sequence of three printed separately from the rest and beginning, ‘Woman, when I behold thee flippant, vain’; that beginning ‘Had I a man’s fair form’; that addressed to Georgiana Wylie, with its admirable opening, ‘Nymph of the downward smile, etc.,’ and its rather lame conclusion; to which, as more loosely connected with the group, and touched in some degree with Byronic suggestion, may be added ‘Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters.’ That excellent critic, the late F.T. Palgrave, had a singular admiration for the set of three which I have placed at the head of this group: to me its chief interest seems not poetical but personal, inasmuch as in it Keats already defines with self-knowledge the peculiar blend in his nature of ardent, idealizing boyish worship of woman and beauty with an acute critical sensitiveness to flaws of character defacing his ideal in actual women: a sensitiveness which grew with his growth and many a time afterwards put him ill at ease with his company and himself.

      A large proportion of the remaining sonnets centre themselves more or less closely about the figure of Leigh Hunt. Two introduce him directly by name and had the effect of definitely marking Keats down, in the minds of reactionary critics, as a victim to be swooped upon in association with Hunt whenever occasion offered. The two are the early sonnet composed on the day of Hunt’s release from prison (February 5, 1815), and shown shyly as a first flight to Cowden Clarke immediately afterwards, and the dedicatory sonnet already quoted on the decay of the old pagan beauty, written almost exactly two years later. Intermediate in date between these two come two or three sonnets of May and June 1816 which, whether inspired directly or not by intercourse with Hunt, are certainly influenced by his writing, and express a townsman’s enjoyment of country walks in a spirit and vocabulary near akin to his:— ‘To one who has been long in city pent’ (this opening comes with only the change of a word from Paradise Lost), ‘O Solitude, if I with thee must dwell,’ ‘As late I rambled in the happy fields.’ There is a memory of Wordsworth, and probably also of Epping Forest walks, in the cry to Solitude: —

      Let me thy vigils keep

       ‘Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap

       Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.

      Next comes the autumn group definitely recording the happiness received by the young poet from intercourse with Hunt and his friends, from the society of his brothers in London, and from walks between the Hampstead cottage and in their city lodgings:— ‘Give me a golden pen,’ ‘Small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals,’ ‘Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there’: to which may be added the sonnet On the Grasshopper and Cricket written in Hunt’s house and in friendly competition with him.

      A second new friend, Haydon, has a pair of sonnets in the volume all to himself, including that well-known one which brackets him with Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt among great spirits destined to give the world another heart and other pulses. A few of the sonnets stand singly apart from the rest by their subject or occasion. Such is the sonnet in honour of the Polish hero Kosciusko; and such again is that addressed to George Keats from Margate, with its fine ocean quatrain (Keats was always well inspired in writing of the sea): —

      The ocean with its vastness, its blue green,

       Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears,

       Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears

       Must think on what will be, and what has been.

      Now that we are posthumously acquainted with the other sonnets written by Keats in these early years it is a little difficult to see on what principle he made his choice of the specimens to be published in this 1817 volume. Among those excluded, he may well have thought the early attempts on the peace of 1814, on Chatterton, and on Byron, too feeble, though he has included others scarcely better. That headed ‘As from the darkening gloom a silver dove’ he may have counted too conventionally pious; and that satirizing the starched gloom of church-goers too likely on the other hand to give offence. The second Haydon pair, on visiting the Elgin marbles, and the recently discovered pair on receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt, seem not to have been written (as that on the Floure and the Lefe certainly was not) until the book was passing, or had passed, the press. The last-named pair he would probably have had the good sense to omit in any case, as he has the sonnet celebrating a like laureation at the hands of a young lady at an earlier date. But why leave out ‘After dark vapours’ and ‘Who loves to peer,’ and above all why the admirable sonnet on Leander? The date of this was March 16, 1816, the occasion the gift by a lady of one of James Tassie’s coloured paste reproductions of an engraved gem of the subject. ‘Tassie’s gems’ were at this time immensely popular among lovers of Grecian taste, and were indeed delightful things, though his originals were too uncritically chosen and included but a small proportion of true antiques among a multitude of Renaissance and eighteenth-century imitations. Keats at one time proposed to make a collection of them for himself, and at another asked his young sister whether she would like a present of some. The sonnet opens with lines curiously recalling those invitations, or invocations, with which Dante begins some of his sonnets in the Vita Nuova. The last three lines are an example, hardly to be bettered, of condensed expression and of imagination kindling into instantaneous tragic vitality a cold and meagre image presented to the eye.

      Come hither all sweet maidens soberly,

       Down-looking aye, and with a chasten’d light

       Hid in the fringes of your eyelids white,

       And meekly let your fair hands joined be,

       As if so gentle that ye could not see,

       Untouch’d, a victim of your beauty bright,

       Sinking away to his young spirit’s night, —

       Sinking bewilder’d ‘mid the dreary sea:

       ’Tis young Leander toiling to his death;

       Nigh swooning, he doth purse his weary lips

       For Hero’s cheek, and smiles against her smile.

       O horrid dream! see how his body dips

       Dead-heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile:

       He’s gone: up bubbles all his amorous breath!

      More

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