should mean different things to different people. All good poetry has a double character. It is at once absolute, and "full of shadowy outlines of mysterious truth." Its absolute quality can be gauged and criticized; its "shadowy outlines" will vary with every reader. In so far as a poem is an organic entity, it changes its meaning, which is why it lasts to ever succeeding generations.

Keats was right in saying that Endymion was as good as he could make it; it was. But as a long poem, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, all working together for a total effect, it was a failure. He knew this perfectly well. Has he not spoken of "the slip-shod 'Endymion""? But his epithet was not well chosen, or only in so far that he scanted his revision of the poem. In itself, it is not slipshod; it is merely not done. One man began it and another man ended it, that is all. Yet as a heap of fragments of marvellous beauty, it is an abiding solace and an enduring work of art; and as an illustration of poetic psychology, its

value is incalculable.

CHAPTER VI

A HARD-WORKING SUMMER

WE left Keats on Friday, May sixteenth, 1817, bowling along through the lovely Kent countryside on his way to Canterbury; Canterbury, where he hoped that the remembrance of Chaucer would set him "forward like a Billiard Ball." He started from Margate in the evening, but the fifteen miles or so to Canterbury cannot, at the longest, have taken much more than a couple of hours to traverse in one of the extremely efficient coaches of those days. England was approaching the height of her coach travel just at that time; steam-boats had made their appearance, it is true, but railroads had not yet come into being. Inland the coach carried him, where there was certainly no lack of the trees which he was seeking. Nothing could be more unlike Margate than the ancient city of Canterbury, with its great cathedral, and its memories of Thomas à Becket and Chaucer.

All his life, Keats seems to have experienced a remarkable stimulation at the thought of the older poets. He had the imaginative power of throwing round any place connected with a person whom he admited, or any object which such a person might have owned or touched, a bright halo of connotations. It was the fashion of the time to do so certainly. A year later we find Haydon nearly beside himself on reading in the paper of the finding of a ring in a field at Stratford which the credulous believed might have belonged to Shakespeare. The letter he writes to Keats on the subject is an idiotic extravaganza. Keats was never at any time, nor in anything, so silly as Haydon. Where one man plays the fool, the other is deeply and genuinely stirred. I do not know if, in this instance, Canterbury and the thought of Chaucer did set him for

ward like a billiard ball, for not a single letter from Canterbury, or record of any kind of his stay there, has yet been found. The nearest approach to it is the letter from George Keats to Severn, referred to in the last chapter,' in a postscript to which George says: "John and Tom are at Canterbury." Canterbury, therefore, is a blank. It is scarcely possible that Keats wrote no letters while he was at Canterbury, but why, if he did write, has no scrap of paper dating from there ever turned up? The question is unanswerable, of course, the only shadow of a reason is that he was set forward at such a rate in his work that he had no time for letters. The probabilities are that he finished the First Book of Endymion at Canterbury. By a little tabulating of facts - which must have been known to all his former biographers, but appear to have urged them to no inquiry- I seem to have discovered evidence of a brief but joyful reaction, the sort of reaction which every sensible poet indulges in when he reaches a natural pause in a sustained composition. It has long been known that, at some time in his life, Keats visited Hastings, but apparently not much effort has been made to find out when, it being blithely assumed that the Hastings trip occurred in the early years, before our more exact knowledge of Keats begins. Yet there is in existence another letter from George Keats to Severn, which I have already made use of in a different connection,2 and this letter contains a pregnant sentence. After scolding Severn for his constant complaining, quite in the style of the letter of May twenty-second, George remarks: "John will be in town again soon. When he is, I will let you know and repeat my invitation. He sojourns at Bo Peep, near Hastings. Tom's remembrances."

This letter is dated simply "Hampstead, Tuesday," but the tone of it, compared with that of the other letter, 1 See Vol. I, p. 349. 2 See Vol. I, p. 108. 'Life of Joseph Severn, by William Sharp.

seems to place it as the last of the two, yet as following closely upon the first. It must have been written during the Summer of 1817, because, in 1816, the Keats brothers were not in Hampstead, and, in 1818, we know that, in the short time which elapsed between John's and Tom's return from Teignmouth and John's departure to Scotland, John went nowhere, being far too much occupied with George's marriage and immediate departure for America. It is barely possible that John and Tom returned to Hampstead after leaving Canterbury, and that John alone started off for Bo Peep. But this does not seem very likely, as, by that time, he was immersed in his Second Book; also it is rather far fetched to suppose that, having left the South coast, he would so soon run back to it again. What he probably did was to ship Tom back to London and betake himself to Bo Peep-of which he had doubtless heard from Haydon, with whom it was a favourite resort in the holiday spirit induced by having brought his First Book to an end. Tom may have wanted to go home, being tired of travelling for the moment, since he was contemplating a trip to Paris later in the Summer. At any rate, it is quite clear that John went to Bo Peep alone.

If this reasoning be correct, George's second letter must have been written on either May twenty-seventh or June third, so that Keats would appear to have taken five or six weeks to write his First Book.

The little fishing village with the entrancing name of Bo Peep can be found on no map to-day, it has changed its character and its designation, the latter having been dropped in favour of the egregious, pretentious, and meaningless title of West Marina, for Keats's Bo Peep is now the extreme Western end of that popular wateringplace, St. Leonards.

The only thing which Keats did at Bo Peep of which we have any cognizance was to kiss a lady. A very charming

lady, we are led to suppose, but a perpetually anonymous one, for Keats never found out her name. He met her again in London, once "when going to the English opera," another time when taking a walk; indeed, she pops in and out of his letters two or three times, but always under the soubriquet of "the lady I met at Hastings." Their intercourse seems to have gone no farther than the kiss aforesaid, but the fact of it shows Keats in a happy and enfranchised mood, thoroughly enjoying the lull between the finish of his First Book and the start on his Second.

Keats, having little ready money except what Taylor and Hessey had sent him in May, spent freely and agreeably, but spent; and in less than a month, found it necessary to apply again to the same source. The note in which he did so is postmarked June tenth,' not July tenth as in Buxton Forman's editions. The re-dating of this letter from the original holograph is most important, as it proves that Keats was already back in Hampstead early in June. This is evident because, although Keats put nothing at the top of his paper but "Tuesday Morn," the letter is addressed merely "Fleet Street," which fact means that it cannot have been written from any distant place, for, in that case, he would have been obliged to add "London." Also, June tenth was a Tuesday, while July tenth was a Thursday.

The manner in which he asks assistance is, it must be admitted, distasteful in its cool bravado, or rather the cool bravado of its opening. Keats was embarrassed, as well he might be, and his embarrassment takes the not unusual form of jaunty jocularity. He begins "My Dear Sirs, I must endeavor to lose my maidenhead with respect to money Matters as soon as possible - and I will too-so, here goes!" What goes is that "a couple of Duns" are hounding him; he had expected them to let him be "till the beginning, at least, of next month (when I am certain to

1 Author's Collection.