Читать книгу My Star Predominant - Raymond Knister - Страница 7

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Next day there was a note from Clarke, who was become a very Bohemian. He proposed a night on which he and Keats should go to see Haydon and his gallery of immortal creations. Keats would be, he promised, as punctual as the bee to the clover. He wrote a sonnet in Haydon’s honour, only to hear that Haydon would not be able to receive them, for he had to go to “Timon of Athens” at Drury Lane. Unreasonable man! But Clarke gave him Ollier’s address; Keats jumped up and put Hunt’s hint to the test.

The Olliers proved to be pleasant enough fellows, with a high regard for the judgment of Leigh Hunt. They thought it likely that if Keats should produce a number of poems sufficient for a book, and as good as those Hunt had printed and shown them, such a book should be published by them, and should do well. Keats walked home in sober exaltation. It would be done. Somehow he would complete his long attempts, and write another long poem in full–just to show his mettle, he told himself excitedly. Impossible lines and phrases and unrelated conceptions which scarcely approached words, harmonies and sense delights like half-recovered memories, ran through his brain, fevered him. He should begin this poem at once, that evening, if he could find a subject.

“Oh, John!” exclaimed Tom, jumping up from the sofa in their sitting-room. “George has found out the most splendid lodgings for us!”

“Where is it, young one?”

“In Cheapside, over a passage they call Bird-in-Hand Court, leading to the Queen’s Arms Tavern.”

“Bird-in-Hand Court,” repeated Keats thoughtfully. “Are you or George smitten with some fair barmaid in the Queen’s Arms?”

“No,” said Tom. “Don’t laugh. George spent a good deal of time, I can tell you, hunting lodgings for us.”

“While I was Hunting too, I suppose. Where is George now?”

“Bargaining with the landlady.”

“Is he indeed! There seems to be no need for me to go. George should have been the head of this family, instead of me.”

“Are you the head of the family?” asked Tom.

John picked up a cushion and threw it at him.

The walk around the corner from the Poultry to Cheapside was short, but they found that George had signed away their liberty. However, the two bedrooms and the sitting-room with plenty of easy chairs and an open hearth suited them. It would be grand, Tom told them on the way home, to have the new place in time for his birthday. It was a bargain, George struck in, and had they noticed how the old lady looked when he told her of other places?

“It will be a fine place for me to correct my book for the press.”

The other two pounced upon John. “What? Oh, didn’t I tell you? Messrs. Ollier are to put out a volume of mine next spring.”

Then the staid Cockney passers-by were given entertainment in spontaneity. At length they came to the old lodgings, with arms wound over one another’s shoulders, and without being run down by the traffic.

The books and luggage of the brothers did not give them much trouble in the moving; they managed to pile them and their own persons into a cab. In a few days they felt that they had been at 76 Cheapside a great while, though they still savoured the new sights and sounds, the half-genteel, half-sporting proximity of the Queen’s Arms, and hearsay of grimmer days, when Defoe had been manacled and made a spectacle in that street.

Tom went to see Fanny the morning of his birthday. George had obtained a situation in a counting-house in Clerkenwell, near Clarke, and was not at home. Evening found the three brothers together in the glow of their fireplace, drowsy from the good supper and the activities of the day. How shrunken seemed the world, with its mean concerns, while the great heart of London throbbed distantly like a sunken bell. Keats glanced at his brothers, whose eyes seemed to rest in a poetic, a visionary sleep upon the glow of the embers. Would that their lives could be thus tranquil throughout! Where would they be in five years–ten? George would make his way as a man among men, good, burly fellow. But what of delicate Tom? If his health never improved, he might lack means of subsistence. But he would never want so long as his brothers lived.

John sprang up: the fire was low and he picked up the scuttle and spread fresh coals over it. Before sitting down he brought paper and quill and ink. It should be a sonnet for Tom’s birthday. No, it should be “To My Brothers”. They, reading and drowsing, beyond a smile of recognition scarcely noted his occupation. By and by they cracked nuts and drank wine and quaffed the sonnet as John read it, retasting at second hand the quietness of “this world’s true joys”, in midst of the pangs of bereavements, and change, loneliness, precarious chance.

This was Monday night. Yet, though the brothers were more to one another than the rest of the world could be, life had to take fresh tributaries. It was fine to see and hear men whose talents stood to the fore in their time and made the judicious of England proud. And it was exciting, the young man thought, as he hurried on Tuesday night to meet Clarke.

The studio at 41 Great Marlborough Street opened from the first floor. “This is fashion,” whispered Keats almost without knowing what he said, while they waited after knocking. The November night air seemed to have given him a chill, and his teeth clicked.

Rapid and firmly planted steps approached the door, and a thickset large-headed figure stood before them; then Haydon drew them both inside. With a few brisk passes their cloaks were doffed and disposed of by the painter. He was not so tall as his way of carrying himself suggested. He was not more than thirty, but his large forehead was becoming bare. The eyes were large and glowing, the nose long but delicate-looking when seen in profile, the chin well formed, decided. But all the time he talked.

“I suppose you are surprised to find me such an emaciated wreck as I am. Intense application, I may say frenzied application, has come near to ruining my eyesight, and I fear has actually ruined my health. I spent a fortnight as a respite with Leigh Hunt, where I heard such glowing accounts of you that I am sure we are bound to be friends. Of course, what militates against my health most, however, is my own lack of care. I admit it freely. I forget to take meals in the excess of my zeal when I am painting. One cannot neglect meals and sleep persistently and expect to retain his health. But then often-times I have had very little in my pocket to buy meals with.” Haydon laughed, but Keats looked at him incredulously, scarcely believing that a man of his age and reputation would be suffered to want.

“Well, sir,” said Clarke respectfully, impartially, “you have come through a great deal and accomplished things of which England must be proud.”

“John Bull is no fool about art, let me tell you,” said Haydon warmly. “I have always consoled myself with that reflection in my battling with the Academy. When they and the connoisseurs influence the opinion of the nobility and royalty, then I know that I have one stay, and I wait until the days when the general public is admitted to my exhibitions, and then listen to honest John; and before a really majestic picture he is really tumultuous in his applause. The great heart of the public can always be counted upon.”

Haydon was a splendid talker indeed, though some of his phrases sounded as though he had said them a few times before. But quite as striking was the studio itself and its furnishings, when one could spare eyes for them. Here was “Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem”, the famous half-finished canvas upon which Haydon had been working for years. Raised upon its vast easel, it seemed yards high and rods long. And all about stood and hung more-than-life-size dashing sketches of heads, heroic studies of muscles, arms and calves, crayon and charcoal drawings of torsos taken from the Elgin Marbles.

Though a vast chandelier hung in the middle of the ceiling, its cut-glass facets diffusing light from a whale-oil lamp, Haydon picked up a smaller lamp, and began a circuit of the walls, expatiating all the time. They came to some casts. “These are as pure a bit of luck as ever fell to the lot of an artist. One day last winter when I had returned discouraged and unrecovered in health from a holiday I got leave to mould. I rushed away for a plasterer. As I went along Princes Street, two of them, Italians, were working inside a shop. I seized them, said, ‘Get some sacks of plaster and a cart, and follow me–I’ll put money in your pocket.’ As we went down to Burlington House, I warned them we might be stopped without notice, for I knew people would claim I was injuring Lord Elgin’s property. They took fire with Italian quickness, and set to with a will. We got the whole of Theseus, Illissus, Neptune’s breast, and hosts of fragments, and every day artists came and gaped unutterable things. By the time Lord Elgin was stirred up we had the cream of the collection, and every one home.”

“It would be enough to recover your health,” said Keats.

“It was, it was. Never was such fun. My eyes got better from the excitement.”

Clarke laughed. “I should have thought it ruinous.”

“Now these drawings of head and arms and instep,” said Keats, “must belong to this figure, do they not?”

Haydon was delighted. “To be sure they do. The model is my man Sammon, a gigantic Grenadier, a priceless fellow, factotum as well as model. But you are the first, Keats, who has ventured to identify a figure by its separate parts. Our little interchange has been enough to show me that you have great things in you. I must tell you that Leigh Hunt showed me two of your sonnets, that have the true heroic fire. Leigh and I hit it off finely––”

“He is splendid!” broke in Keats, “so ardent and sincere!”

“And the most delightful company,” concurred Haydon warmly. “Not deep in knowledge moral, metaphysical, or classical, yet intense in feeling and with an intellect for ever on the alert. I have known him for a long time. When my ‘Dentatus’ was completed he called it a bit of old embodied lightning, in the face of the Academicians.... There was a picture of fiery fury! He was with me when I took it down to the Academy, and he kept torturing me the whole way: full of fun, you understand. ‘Wouldn’t it be a delicious thing now for a lamplighter to come around the corner and put the end of his ladder right into Dentatus’ eye? Or suppose we meet a couple of dray-horses playing tricks with a barrel of beer, knocking your men down and trampling your poor Dentatus to a mummy!’ He made me so nervous with his villainous torture that in my anxiety to see all clear I tripped up a corner man and as near as possible sent ‘Dentatus’ into the gutter.”

They all laughed, but, coming next to the huge canvas, stood before it in silence. “Of course you cannot get a perfect view here. The room is not large enough, even if it were day-lit. And of course my Christ being washed out of the centre leaves the painting practically dead matter. This is the fourth time I have washed Him out, unsatisfied.”

Clarke murmured that he saw what was meant. It was a truly grandiose scheme, Keats thought. “You have an opportunity here to show all the divisions and vagaries of human character, in the faces and figures that surround the Lord as He rides into the picture.”

“That’s it! That’s it! By the Lord Harry, you’ve struck it when hundreds of connoisseurs have missed. Keats, you are a man after my own heart. It is a whole history of Christendom I am putting into this painting, not one historical moment. It is that conception that makes me a great artist,” went on Haydon, not listening. “I was not more than twenty years old when it reached me, and I fell down and thanked my Creator for such insight. The glory and good that historical painting can work for mankind is infinite. But you, Keats, you are one who will look to one horizon, not like an apprentice who showed me a painting he had done. I praised him for its colouring, ‘But,’ I said, ‘you have drawn your picture looking at two or three horizons.’”

Keats blushed as he thanked him, and was encouraged when they sat down once more to talk freely himself. Haydon, in truth, was one of the giants of the age, with Hunt and Wordsworth; and so Keats expressed himself in a sonnet he sent to Haydon next morning. And Haydon at once replied that he was sending the sonnet to Wordsworth–breath-taking thought. No man could match Haydon’s earnestness and intensity. It surpassed even Hunt.

And these were breath-taking days. On the first Sunday in December Hunt’s paper came out with the first words that had ever been printed about John Keats. An article, Young Poets. His at-long-last-enchanted eye devoured the words:

“The last of these young aspirants whom we have met with is we believe the youngest of them all, and just of age. His name is John Keats. He has not yet published anything except in a newspaper, but a set of his manuscripts was handed to us the other day, and fairly surprised us with the truth of their ambition, and ardent grappling with Nature.” Then followed a little niggling about the Chapman’s Homer sonnet. But its conclusion, Hunt claimed, was “equally powerful and quiet”. Those words ran in his mind: powerful and quiet.

But, wonder upon wonders, that same evening he was to attend a party at Hunt’s house to which Lamb and Hazlitt were expected to lend their presences. He found two guests before him. One was introduced as Cornelius Webb, a fair, stocky, awkward-bodied youth who irritated him on sight. Hunt kept Webb occupied, allowing Keats to measure lances with the other, John Hamilton Reynolds–a slender fellow whose body seemed to crumple up when he was sitting down, so that you forgot he was tall. His animated, clever, plain-featured face told a good deal about him.

“It was your sonnet to Haydon that made me determined to make your acquaintance. Magnificent: ‘Great spirits now on earth are sojourning.’ Haydon ran around to me the morning you sent it, and told me about meeting you the night before. I myself dashed off a second sonnet to please him.”

“Yes, an inspiring man,” insisted Keats loyally.

“Titanic!” agreed Reynolds warmly. “His struggles are enough to stir the pulses of a ...”

“Of a crone.”

“Of a critic,” laughed Reynolds. “I’ll tell you: you are going to have something to do with that gentry before you are much older. You saw Hunt’s article about us in to-day’s Examiner?”

“A fine defiance! Whatever the old school, with its Southey and Samuel Rogers and its rule-of-thumb dotards say, there is work for us to do.” Keats was enjoying mightily this first talk with Reynolds, brisk and, though a little stiff, not strange. Here was a young fellow of his own age, who knew exactly what you were talking about, who was trying to do the same things as oneself, and who could give one’s own ideas an enchanting simplicity and a captivating difference. It made him want to laugh. He knew they could talk for days, agreeing while they disagreed, and disagreeing while they agreed. At last he had found one of his peers. Reynolds’ three little books did not matter. Fine fellow as Reynolds was, he was willing to give him that much start in the race.

Reynolds had not known that Lamb was coming, but seemed to be acquainted with him. “Lamb is an odd stick, a mind that sinks shafts in odd places to bring up strange ores. I suppose the greatest service he has done this generation is in his Specimens from the English Dramatic Poets.”

Lamb, Keats further learned, gave a queer appearance, with his stuttering and stammering; but they were because he thought of too many things at once; and they made more effective the astonishing brevities he brought forth. “I suppose no man’s odd when you understand his principle. But he’ll make you ill of laughing when he’s a bit so-so; but when he’s sober, none wiser.”

Cornelius Webb approached them. Hunt had just left the room to have the right wine brought up.

“You fellows are having a merry time! Talking of poetry, I suppose?”

“Why, yes,” returned Keats. “And critics.”

“Wordsworth and Byron are a theme I never tire on,” said Webb with a simper on his heavy features. “And are your ideas of poetry the same as Leigh Hunt’s?” he asked Keats.

Keats looked at him, and a glitter came into his eye, though his face remained placid. “I can’t satisfy myself that poetry belongs to any one mind. It seems to be a creation of Nature in men willing to look to Nature instead of fashion.”

“All things are subject to fashion,” muttered Webb.

“But you never let me see any of your verses, Webb,” interposed Reynolds.

“For me, I can’t say that I have altogether decided to be a poet,” announced Webb smartly. “I am too busy with duties for various journals.”

Voices were heard outside, and Hunt came in, looking burly and long-legged alongside one of the oddest-looking little men Keats had seen in London. His feet and legs were so small in their gaiters and buckled slippers that his square-shouldered body with its large head seemed to float insubstantially upon the dusk of the room below tables.

“Mr. Lamb, gentlemen,” said Hunt, and introduced them severally.

“I am charmed. Ch-armed, Hunt,” Lamb added, “with your literary dovecote. It ss-seems that I am being given a sight of the future.”

“Indeed,” said Hunt genially, “a great deal may be expected from men as young as these, and showing equal promise.”

“Not equal promise, I’ll be bound,” said Lamb quickly, looking shrewdly at Keats. Hunt and he briskly crossed rapiers for a few minutes.

But that head, Keats saw when Lamb sat down, was magnificent if somewhat heavily formed. From a full-face view, his countenance was rather massive and rectangular, but the profile showed a nose almost hawk-like; while the eyes gave an effect of benevolent cynicism which might change into a merry hardness or a baffled shyness at the bidding of the other expressive features.

“I will have the laugh of Hazlitt, perhaps. He once told me very elaborate directions to come here, and then he said, ‘I will come myself if I c-c-can find the way.’”

“A true critic in that,” laughed Hunt.

“We must not let them impose such opinions of critics as that, Mr. Lamb,” said Cornelius Webb.

“Hunt,” said Lamb, “you must know my intention to-night. I shall undo my teeth and ‘suffer wet damnation to run through ‘em’ if you will do the like with your bottles.”

“Yes, gentlemen, we may be compelled to drink to Hazlitt and not with him, if he much longer delays his coming. But London is grown unto such a prodigious town that it is a great and awesome distance from every place to every other place.”

“Not to forget back again,” said Keats. Lamb twinkled at him, and pulled an engraved snuff-box from his tail-pocket.

“Who talks against London?” demanded an imperious voice. Hazlitt had come in unannounced, a lean figure slouching over the back of a chair, his steel-coloured eyes roving over them from beneath straggling black hair. Hunt hastened to usher him to the hearth. Lamb shifted upon his chair, and turned his head without turning his eyes, in a way which made the young fellow feel that he considered a choice, boon spirit had arrived–or a foeman worthy of his steel.

“You have saved us, Hazlitt–saved us–from an indecorum, which Milton says is the worst thing. We should have had to drink without you if you had not been here!”

“I’ll take your word for that. But don’t say a word against my London. Has she not starved with heroic thoroughness every genius these British Islands have produced? But what I was thinking of as I came up to-night was that, no matter how far I walked in Birmingham or Liverpool, I could not find company as I find it here. There, the weight given every man’s opinion is decided by the number of his acres of land or of his votes. In London a man’s social qualities and human behaviour are the measure, and lacking them he is likely to find his money as much a drawback as his boorishness.”

Lamb sneezed his snuff boisterously, and his words skipped forth like hail-pellets. “Now I know why I am so popularly received! But my receipts are more popular still.”

“None of your bad puns, Lamb,” said Hunt. “You are keeping me from introducing our young friends to Mr. Hazlitt.”

“I have met them before,” Hazlitt nodded at Reynolds and Webb. “Except Mr. Keats; and I know him through his fine sonnet in Hunt’s rag!” He sat down beside Keats, who was nearly dumb with delight. “Yes, your sonnet could scarcely be finer. I am myself such a Homer enthusiast that I’m very particular. But this touched the spot with me. Ah, Homer! Poetry bright as the day, strong as a river!”

“To thank you,” said Keats in a low tone, while the others talked, “would be to mistake your disinterested care for such things. But I must say that from the depths of taste of the author of the ‘Essay on the Principles of Human Action’, praise is to be valued at its highest!”

“What! You have read that forgotten address to Fame! Sometimes I forget that I have written it myself. That thin quarto, though, cost me seven or eight years of labour.”

“William!” called Hunt. “You would make us weep over our early follies and love’s labours lost!” Keats felt for some reason an implied criticism of himself. Hazlitt continued a monologue which gradually diverted the attention of the others.

“Ah, we weary scribes,” he groaned. “The best of us, and that means the best wits, lead a harassing, precarious life–like the handsomest faces ‘upon the town’. In the end come to no good. Who wouldn’t be one of those ‘warm’ men in the City! Look at Sir William. Calipash and calipee are written in his face: he rolls about his unwieldy bulk in a sea of turtle-soup. How many haunches of venison does he carry on his back! He is larded with jobs and contracts; he is stuffed and swelled out with layers of banknotes and invitations to dinner. Nature and fortune are not so much at variance as to differ about such fellows as he. To enjoy the good the gods provide is to deserve it.”

“A large habit of body and a flashy habit of dress cover––” Hunt began.

“D-don’t say a wolf in Lamb’s clothing,” stuttered Lamb.

“No,” said Hazlitt, “what I would have been before all else is not one of those rotund fellows, easily as they slip through life, but a painter. No one not a painter could understand that. In writing you have to contend with the world: in painting you have only to carry on a friendly strife with Nature. You sit down to your task and are happy. You never tire, because you set down not what is stale to you, but what you have just discovered. There is a continual creation out of nothing going on. But God did not intend me to be a painter. I did my part, and failed.”

“You c-create out of nothing,” said Lamb, “and you come as near creating nothing as creation can get to.”

“That is right,” agreed Hunt. “What pleasure does a painting give posterity beyond a few moments of gratified curiosity? You see a portrait of some worthy man or woman, say Mrs. Richardson looking as if she had just been chucked under the chin. What of it? You can see dozens of women like Mrs. Richardson, or men like Mr. Richardson, for all his Clarissas, any time you walk through St. James’s Park–even on the debtors’ benches. The pleasures of poetry are of a different order.”

“For my p-part,” said Lamb, “I would prefer to be Beaumont and Fletcher, if their spirits would consent to reside within this frame.”

“Oh, if we speak of persons we would have been,” said Hunt airily, “I would have been nobody but Johnson, the great uncouth. Picture him, as you easily can,” he turned to Keats, “handing ladies into their carriage–Madame de Boufflers, mother of the Chevalier–-his own wig and raiment as astounding as his manner was courtly; or snubbing some o’erweening big-wig; or taking Goldsmith’s Vicar out under his arm to sell it to a bookseller and rescue Goldsmith from the clutches of his landlady.”

“I shall follow Mr. Lamb’s example,” Webb said, a smile overspreading his face. “But my chosen two spirits would be Wordsworth and my Lord Byron.”

“Why not?” murmured Lamb.

“A wise choice, Byron,” said Hazlitt. “He towers above his fellows by all the height of the peerage. His name so accompanied becomes the mouth well, because the reader in being familiar with the poet’s works seems to claim acquaintance with the Lord. Far better this than the ragged regiment of genius.”

“Gentlemen, we are neglecting our wine, and I my office of host. Permit me.” Hunt rose, smiling with amusement and sympathy at Keats, who saw that he was purposely letting his guests take the conversation away with them.

“Oh, Hunt,” said Lamb, “you will have us all singing catches, if this keeps up. I shall sing the gentlemen a catch by and by; I should say this, for I doubt they would take my hint and request it.”

Hazlitt eyed his glass and said: “You will have us talking not of whom we would have been, but what women we would have been with.”

Hunt whistled.

“Ogni donna cangiar di colore;

Ogni donna mi fa palpitar.”

“Ogni donna who is no bluestocking,” Hazlitt amended. “I think I am safe in passing this on to our young friends. Courting a literary woman or being courted by one is to bring coals to Newcastle. I would rather that a woman did not know that I was an author. I like myself for myself, and if she is to love me under any consideration, it is not too much to ask her to do the same. But as for your flower-girls, chamber-maids, milkmaids––”

“Wh-what? Not all maids?” interjected Lamb.

“Of such as these I could give you a fine collection. Fresh, rosy-cheeked creatures! So long as they do not know you are an author. Then whatever you say is queer and has a double meaning, and you are an odd fellow, and you would be better to sue at my lady’s boudoir.”

Hunt said, “Methinks, unless I have lost the thread of the discussion, the question is parallel with that of whom one should have been: what woman in history or literature should one have consorted with?”

“Imogen, in Cymbeline,” said Keats.

“For my part,” Hazlitt rejoined, “I have always had a weakness for the beauties of the court of Charles II.”

“A winsome fellow, that Count Grammont,” cried Lamb, “Historian of the gay and gallant. Do you mind, William, Killigrew’s country cousin?”

“Do I? And how he was resolutely refused by Miss Westminster–one of the Maids of Honour,” he explained. “When Killigrew heard that she had unexpectedly–to him at least–been brought to bed of a child, he fell on his knees and thanked God that she might now take compassion on his suit.”

“And Jacob Hill’s prowess, and Miss Stuart’s garters!” They shook their heads in despair of giving the others any inkling of the delicious humour of these episodes, and drank deep anew.

“But the killingest passage,” went on Lamb, “was the Chevalier Hamilton’s assignation with Lady Chesterfield, when she kept him shivering all night in an old outhouse.”

The little blind god with the bow was a fellow of broad mischief, nor, Hunt opined, were the pangs always sublime that he inflicted. He mentioned Ariosto and Pulci, and the immortal Boccace; while Webb informed the company that the Greeks did pretty well in that sort, as in Petronius. The evening, Reynolds murmured, was coming to its shank end. Apropos of this, perhaps, Lamb addressed Webb.

“Thirty years ago I was a jester to a morning paper, and a fashion of flesh, or rather pink, coloured hose for the ladies came up. Conceits upon this subject I found sovereign, and always eagerly lapped up.”

Hazlitt burst into a great roar, and the company joined him, rising to break up by unspoken consent. Webb’s ears were tinted like the ladies’ hose.

“Junkets, you have been silent all evening. What have you in dispraise or blame of the gods?” Hunt turned to Keats.

Keats filled his lungs. “I can feel in only one way after such converse. If you had asked me whom I had rather have been, I’d have said ‘Shakespeare’!”

“We’ll not accept the compliment,” muttered Lamb. “N-not unless you show us the ghost of Hamlet’s father!”

Hunt and Keats went to the door to see them off. “What a whoreson night,” said Hazlitt, stepping outside briskly. Lamb, his steps more uncertain than his tongue, clutched the arm of the iron-framed critic. Webb and Reynolds soon passed them and went ahead.

“I’m glad I agreed to stay the night with you,” Keats said, when they came back from the door and rubbed the cold from their hands. “It is late.” He grinned and yawned youthfully. “They’re great fun. But Lamb cannot stand stupid people.”

“No, that is his great fault. With unsympathetic people he becomes queerer and queerer until they wonder whether they or he are mad.... I shall get some bedding without disturbing the family if possible, and put you up on the couch, here among the memorials of our talks.”

“Thank you.” Keats sank into a chair and looked at the dying embers; at the empty chairs. Those two men had such a genius for appreciation and definition, for almost creating the characters of great poets, that they were placed above the rank of any poets save the greatest. Warmth swelled his heart. When he had bidden Hunt good-night, undressed, and lain down upon the couch, his mind was thronged with the presences and voices of this and other evenings. The room was a wonderful room in his life. “Small as an old mansion’s closet,” as Hunt had said, it was alive. Here were books and portfolios and prints at which they had looked together, while the summer rain, fragrant as now the winter’s rain was chill, drenched the windows. Here were statuettes of the masters of song, and prints from Nicholas Poussin and Stothard that showed trains of nymphs, and marble columns, two fair girls bending over a toddling child, more nymphs soothing Diana’s timorous limbs–a free and airy world into which his spirit flew every time his glance was raised. But the room was alive with other spirits now. Somehow, not for themselves or what they said, they symbolized poetry. They made him resolve to give the utmost fibre of his being for poetry and count death itself a luxury. He had gained, surely for the first time, a glimpse of the vast idea of poetry swinging onward before him, and it was time that he gave forth his vision and his creed. Oh for ten years, ten years in one night, in which to overwhelm oneself in the realms of Flora and Pan, steeping the senses in beauty, beauty of sight and smell of growing fruit, of white-handed nymphs in shady places, kisses wooed from averted mouths, as on and on and on you fare into that fadeless land!

He roused from his doze.

Sterner than this was the life of poetry, once this lucent and luscious beauty had penetrated the soul; mighty workings, toil in awed solitude, utmost searchings for the dark mysteries of the human soul, maddest leapings from mountain crags into the blue. ... The blue ocean dim, with its isles, must be explored more humbly, more fearlessly. He should rise and begin his poem; he should sleep; sleep too was lovely luxury, maker of poets, like the moon. He lay and looked upon the firelit room, and lived his ten years. Nothing troubled him but happiness, and he lay there awake until morning.