twenty-one, Alastor in 1816, The Revolt of Islam in 1817, but all of Shelley's finest work was done during the four short years in Italy from 1818 to 1822. His genius had passed through its apprenticeship and matured rapidly. Of his longer poems, Rosalind and Helen was finished at Lucca in August, 1818; Julian and Maddolo (a reflection of the companionship with Byron), the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, perhaps his masterpiece, and his terrible tragedy, The Cenci, in 1819; Epipsychidion, Adonais, and Hellas, in 1821. Of the lyrics, practically all that we have retained as most characteristic of his genius were written during this period. Lines Written among the Euganean Hills was composed at Este in October of 1818; The Ode to the West Wind and The Indian Serenade, in 1819; The Cloud, and "I fear thỳ kisses, gentle maiden,” in 1820; To Night, “Music, when soft voices die,” “One word is too often profaned,” “O world! O life! O time!" in 1821; and "When the lamp is shattered" and A Dirge, in 1822.

a

Shelley will always be to the discerning lover of poetry a shining example of success in failure, of an Arthur struggling for an ideal, failing, and yet supremely great in his failure. For Shelley sought to fix the delicate, intangible fancies that flit almost imperceptibly before our imaginations. Words are too crude a medium for this purpose: only music can approach success. Shelley was foredoomed to failure in his attempt. "Mr. Shelley's style," wrote William Hazlitt in his criticism of the Posthumous Poems, "is to poetry what astrology is to natural science passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions, - a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature, associating ideas by contraries, and wasting great powers by their application to unattainable objects." And yet, with due respect for Hazlitt's opinion, to the minds of many of us Shelley's great powers were not "wasted." His poetry strikes within us a chord which none but the greatest sound. We, too, have had our ideals, our impalpable

Fancies that broke through language and escaped; —

our visions too filmy to be expressed in rough words, yet none the less real and precious. To us his poetry seems to have been the direct breath of a soul; as Macaulay says, "not to have been an art, but an inspiration."

JOHN KEATS

WHEN genius has flowered in a man of letters, it is always customary to look back to parents or environment for the seeds and cultivation. In one man's father we note unusual force of character, marked piety, or the like; in another's mother we hear of a vivid imagination and a mind stored with old wives' tales; and to said fathers or mothers we may trace respectively the deep and scathing satire of one poet or the romantic fancies of another. No biographer has suc ceeded, however, in identifying in the parentage and early environment of Keats the germs of the love of beauty and delicacy of touch that distinguished him in an era of great poets.

John Keats was born October 29 (or October 31), 1795. His father, Thomas Keats, had come as a boy to London and worked his way up to the place of head hostler in the Swan and Hoop livery-stable, kept by a Mr. John Jennings. The head hostler married Frances Jennings, daughter of his employer, and, upon the retirement of his father-in-law immediately after, took over the business. The newly married couple lived at the stable, and it was in their rooms there that John, their first child, was born.

In 1804, Thomas Keats was killed by a fall from a horse and less than a year later the widow married William Rawlings, apparently the successor to her husband in the ownership of the livery-stable. In 1806, she left her husband and, with her children, went to live with her mother, Mrs. Jennings, at Edmonton. The stepfather, Rawlings, seems to have passed out of the knowledge and lives of the children after this time.

The family was by no means left in poverty after the death of the father. Mr. Jennings had,

upon his death in 1805, left thirteen thousand pounds from which provision was made for his wife and daughter. There was enough to permit the children to have a good education with the possibility of preparation for a profession. John and his two brothers were sent to a little private school at Enfield kept by John Clarke, where John formed a friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke, the head master's son. Keats was a bright, active, vivacious student, very pugnacious on occasions, and a natural leader among his schoolmates. During his last years at school, 1809 and 1810, all the energy of his nature seems to have turned by some inward impulse toward reading. He was at his books from morning to night, giving up the athletics of which he had been so fond and delighting in literature.

His mother died in 1810 and his guardians, desiring to train him for a profession, removed him from school in the same year and apprenticed him to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon at Edmonton. We know little of the years of this apprenticeship, except that, being near his old school, he often walked over to see Cowden Clarke and exchanged books with him, reading especially during these days Spenser and the Elizabethans. Charles Brown, intimate friend during the closing years of Keats's short life, is authority for the statement that Keats owed his own inspiration to write verse wholly to his soul-awakening upon reading Spenser. "In Spenser's fairyland," says Brown, "he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became another being; till, enamoured of the stanza, he attempted to imitate it, and succeeded.... This, his earliest attempt, the Imitation of Spenser, is in his first volume of poems."

In 1814, after a quarrel, the indentures of apprenticeship were canceled by mutual consent and Keats went to London to continue the study of his profession in Guy's and St. Thomas's hospitals, but his chief interest had already come to be poetry. Clarke had settled in London and Keats's intimate friendship with him was renewed. It was after a night's enthusiastic study of Chapman's Homer that Keats sent his friend the famous sonnet, “Much have I trasell'd in the realms of gold." On another occasion early in 1816, Clarke showed some of Keats's manuscript poems to Leigh Hunt and brought the poet and Hunt together. Through Hunt Keats became acquainted with Shelley, Reynolds (a young man of promise who became one of his close friends and admirers), and the painter Haydon, whose fiery ardor struck an answering enthusiasm from the poet. Keats's friendships and the encouragement he received from those to whom his poetry was shown drew him further and further from his hospital work, so that in the winter of 1816 and 1817 he definitely abandoned his profession. In March, 1817, the Poems by John Keats were published, with a dedicatory sonnet to Leigh Hunt.

Despite occasional purple patches, the poems of 1817 deserved the neglect with which they were received, - a cordial but just appreciation in Hunt's Examiner, the enthusiasm of a few friends, a fair sale for a fortnight, and then oblivion. Apparently George Keats, the poet's brother, was inclined to blame the publisher for the chilly reception accorded to the little volume. We have the letter written by the publishers, C. and J. Ollier, to George Keats: "Sir, — We regret that your brother ever requested us to publish this book, or that our opinion of its talent should have led us to acquiesce in undertaking it. We are, however, much obliged to you for relieving us from the unpleasant necessity of declining any further connexion

with it, which we must have done, as we think the curiosity is satisfied, and the sale has dropped.1

By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offered to take the book back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it. In fact, it was only on Saturday last that we were under the mortification of having our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman, who told us he considered it ‘no better than a take in.' These are unpleasant imputations for any one in business to labour under, but we should have borne them and concealed their existence from you had not the style of your note shewn us that such delicacy would be quite thrown away. We shall take means without delay for ascertaining the number of copies on hand, and you shall be informed accordingly."

Keats himself, before the full knowledge of the success or failure of his poems could be realized, went for rest and study to the Isle of Wight, from which he wrote to his friend Reynolds:

"I find I cannot do without poetry

...

the

without eternal poetry; half the day will not do it whole of it. I began with a little, but habit had made me a leviathan. . . . I shall forthwith begin my Endymion, which I hope I shall have got some way with before you come, when we will read our verses in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near the Castle." Endymion: a Poetic Romance, was published in the spring of 1818. Its imperfections Keats himself discerned, "I would write the subject thoroughly again but I am tired of it, and think the time would be better spent in writing a new romance," and in his preface he acknowledges to the public his dissatisfaction with the results of his work, but his humility did not save him from the savage onslaughts of the reviewers. The poet was known to be a friend of Hunt, so that the Quarterly ranged him as a "puling satellite of the arch-offender and King of Cockaigne, Hunt," and advised his return "to plasters, pills, and ointment-boxes." The poem has lived to confute these bitter criticisms. Faulty as it is in many ways, it has survived by virtue of the law set forth in its opening verse—

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Keats was too much occupied just at this time to feel the full sting of the Quarterly's attack, for his brother George was setting out for America to try his fortune and his brother Tom was sickening with the same disease which later carried off the poet himself. He tenderly cared for his sick brother during the last months of the illness and after the death early in December, he went to live and share expenses with his friend Brown at Hampstead. At Brown's house he again became absorbed in his poetry, working at this time upon Hyperion.

During this same period the one great love-influence came into Keats's life. He became completely fascinated with Fanny Brawne, the daughter of a widow in the neighborhood. By his friends his choice was considered unfortunate, for the independent, self-confident girl of seventeen was wholly unfitted to be a fit mate for the delicate, sensitive poet. His experience was certainly an unhappy one. The condition of his finances was such that marriage could be considered only a remote possibility, and a little later the unmistakable signs in him of the consumption that had carried off his brother removed even this possibility. He was mentally tortured between his love for Miss Brawne, his anguish at the realization that marriage was impossible, and intense jealousy at the thought of any one else aspiring to her. He was alternately raised high in hope and cast into the deepest dejection.

And yet, unhappy and disturbed as he was at this time, he did his best work between the summer of 1818 and the spring of 1820. The poems of this period were published in July of the latter year, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, including the Ode: Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ode on a Grecian Urn, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Lamia, and To Autumn. On February 3, 1820, his grave condition, suspected for a year previous, became evident to him when he saw a drop of blood from his mouth: "It is arterial blood - I cannot be deceived in that color . . ." he said to his friend Brown; "I must die."

He was warned that he could not survive another winter in England, so, very reluctantly, he set out, September 18, for Naples, accompanied by an artist friend, Joseph Severn. The two friends went to Rome and settled in the Piazza di Spagna. There, on the 23d of February, Keats died. Four days later he was buried in the Protestant cemetery near the pyramid of Caius Sestius.

In thinking of Keats's poetry, we return to what he wrote his friend Reynolds: "I find I cannot do without poetry without eternal poetry; half the day will not do it - the whole of it." No poet was more fully absorbed in poetry than Keats. To him it was a passion, it was life itself. His was a mind peculiarly susceptible to beauty, beauty in the external world, beauty of thought and imagination, and beauty of language. As he was fed upon the Elizabethans in his youth and his young manhood, so his poetry, with its richness of imagination and its beauty of expression, takes us back to Spenser and Shakespeare. To Matthew Arnold, Keats is "the poet, who evidently caught from Spenser his sweet and easy-slipping movement, and who has

...

exquisitely employed it; a Spenserian genius, nay, a genius by natural endowment, richer prob- ably than even Spenser; . . . an Elizabethan born too late.” His life was short, his quantity of poetry was very small, but the quality of his poetry, of his best poetry, is of the highest order. "He would have been among the very greatest of us if he had lived," said Tennyson; "there is something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything he ever wrote.”

MATTHEW ARNOLD

MATTHEW ARNOLD, oldest son and second child of Thomas Arnold, the famous head master of Rugby, was born at Laleham, near Staines, December 24, 1822. Dr. Thomas Arnold, himself a writer, was one of the noblest and most accomplished characters of his age, endowed with an earnestness and sincerity that made him all through his life a great force for good. Mary Penrose, Matthew Arnold's mother, the youngest daughter of the Reverend John Penrose, rector of Fledborough in Nottinghamshire, was a woman of striking beauty and unusual dignity of appearance, as well as of fine education and natural ability. Until her death Matthew kept up with her an affectionate and sympathetic correspondence. At the time of Matthew Arnold's birth his father was three years out of Oxford tutoring pupils for the University. Thomas Arnold was not appointed head master of Rugby until 1828.

If ever a man were in danger of being spoiled by overmuch education, Matthew Arnold was that man. Brought up in strictly conventional albeit high-minded environment, at school in Laleham from eight until he was fourteen, at Winchester two years, at Rugby four (1887-41), winning a scholarship at Oxford in 1840 and matriculating at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1841. Arnold ran the risk of having all of his native genius snuffed out by the powerful influences of the formal academic training. Advantageous as such training undoubtedly is in most respects, it cannot be doubted that strict academic bonds tend in many cases to cramp original impulses during a youth's most impressionable years. What Arnold might have been under different circumstances it would be rash to conjecture: we can marvel that he rose to such heights as he

did.

Of his college days we know little. He had written verses even before he went to Oxford having won a Rugby prize with a poem entitled Alaric at Rome, and at Oxford he won the Newdigate prize by a poem entitled Cromwell. Neither poem is noteworthy. Among his friends at college were John, Duke Coleridge, later Lord Chief Justice, and J. C. Shairp, later Principal of United College, St. Andrew's. His quick intellect and (on the testimony of his brother) his fashionable dressing made him popular among a certain set: "His Olympian manners," writes Max Müller, "began even at Oxford; there was no harm in them, they were natural, not put on The very sound of his voice and the wave of his arm were Jove-like." In the final examination for classical honors Arnold was in the second class, but in the next spring (1845) he was elected to a fellowship at Oriel.

Upon leaving Oxford - he did not relish the life of a don - he taught for a short time at Rugby, then in 1847 became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, and in 1851 received from Lord Lansdowne an appointment as Inspector of Schools. He retained this inspectorship thirty-five years, conscientiously performing the duties of the position until his resignation it 1886. In June of 1851, a few months after his appointment, he married Frances Lucy Wightman, daughter of an excellent and highly respected judge of the queen's bench, afterwards Si William Wightman.

In the mean while Arnold had published over the initial “A." a little volume of poems, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849). As with so many first volumes, it received no atten tion and was withdrawn from circulation after a few copies had been sold. The poetry-reading public, usually few in numbers, were engrossed in the rising fame of Tennyson and Browning or looked back to the best work of the still-living Wordsworth and Rogers. The poems then selves in this little volume, including The Strayed Reveller, Mycerinus The Sick King in Bokhara,

The Forsaken Merman, and Resignation, deserved recognition: in later years all but one were reprinted and they are part of the standard editions of Arnold to-day.

Three years later (1852) when he was a man of thirty, Arnold's second volume of verse was published, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems, by "A." The reception of this volume was as unsatisfactory as that of the first, although it contained besides the Empedocles, Tristam and Iseult, A Summer Night, On the Rhine, Absence, The Buried Life, Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann, and Lines Written in Kensington Gardens. Before fifty copies had been sold, this volume was, like the first, withdrawn.

Arnold had, however, found himself as a poet, and the next year (1853) he published a new volume, containing a republication of many poems of previous volumes, adding a number of new pieces, and subscribing for the first time his own name on the title-page "Poems by Matthew Arnold, a new edition." Among the new pieces which first appeared in this 1853 volume were Sohrab and Rustum, Requiescat, and The Scholar Gipsy. In 1855 was published Poems by Matthew Arnold, second series, containing only two new poems, Balder Dead, and Separation. With the publication of the 1853 volume and its successor in 1855, Arnold's reputation became established. The excellent critical preface to the former volume had attracted attention, too, by its clear enunciation of sound principles of his art. The practical recognition of his position came in the form of his election in 1857 to the professorship of poetry at Oxford.

Arnold held this professorship for a decade, but during that time did not identify himself especially with the University life. He did not care for the title "Professor" and did not reside at Oxford: he delivered a few lectures, enjoyed the remuneration (less than one hundred pounds a year), and published a little additional poetry. In 1858, when he entered upon the position, he published his tragedy, Merope, but the cold, frigid, reflective style made this a failure. The lyric inspiration came to him more and more seldom as the years went by. In November of 1857, he wrote Rugby Chapel; in 1859, A Southern Night; in 1861, Thyrsis (on the death of his friend Clough); and in 1881, Westminster Abbey (on the death of Dean Stanley).

With the decrease of inspirational poetry, however, came a notable flow of reflective criticism. The publication of certain of the lectures delivered at Oxford insured him a high place as a brilliant and subtle critic. On Translating Homer appeared first in 1861, and On the Study of Celtic Literature in 1867.

His official duties as Inspector of Schools continued through these years. Although the routine of the work at times wearied him, he devoted much of his best energies to the work. He welcomed his assignments to study the educational systems of continental countries and his reports Popular Education of France, with Notices of that of Holland and Switzerland (1861), On Secondary Education in Foreign Countries (1866) show how thoroughly he exerted himself in his duties. His fame as poet and critic lead us now to forget the thirty-five years of steady routine toil in the educational work of the kingdom.

Arnold's work in reflective criticism continued during these years. His powers were well shown in the series, Essays in Criticism, published in 1865 and in Culture and Anarchy in 1869. Here he attacked the stolid English “philistine" indifference to ideas in the realms of literature, politics, and religion. Between 1870 and 1877 he produced a number of essays on religion St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1875), and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877). His interest in poetry continued, though he wrote little himself, and he edited some of Johnson's "Lives," Selections from Wordsworth (1879), Selections from Byron (1881), and wrote the general introduction to Ward's selections from The English Poets. In 1883 his literary eminence was rewarded by a pension of two hundred and fifty pounds a year from the Civil List, upon the receipt of which he retired from his inspectorship. Of Arnold's private life we know very little. He discouraged all efforts to gain biographical material. His married life was continuously happy, and his affection for his family peculiarly tender and sweet. The satire with which he attacked the lethargic philistine of his own times exposed him to charges of snobbery and priggishness, but his friends have recorded touchingly their evidence to his purity and gentleness of character. "I believe that a more blameless, nay.