Lord Houghton records, on the authority of Charles Armitage Brown, that 'Hyperion' was begun after the death of Tom Keats, when the poet took up his residence at Wentworth Place; but Mr. Colvin asserts somewhat positively, on what does not seem to me to be conclusive evidence, that the poem was begun in September or October 1818, at Tom's bedside. In the journal-letter to George and his wife in which the first allusion to Tom's death occurs, writing in December 1818, Keats says, "I think you knew before you left England that my next subject would be the fall of Hyperion.' I went on a little with it last night..."; and on the 14th of February 1819 he writes "I have not gone on with 'Hyperion"." In August he writes to Bailey from Winchester, "I have also been writing parts of my Hyperion'..." On the 22nd of September he says in his letter to Reynolds, "I have given up 'Hyperion'-there were too many Miltonic inversions in itMiltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or, rather, artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from Hyperion,' and put a mark,+, to the false beauty, proceeding from art, and one ||, to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul, 'twas imagination; I cannot make the distinctionevery now and then there is a Miltonic intonation-but I cannot make the division properly." This passage has been thought to refer to the Dream version of Hyperion'; but such cannot really be the case. Richard Woodhouse, in his interleaved and annotated copy of 'Endymion,' records under the date April 1819 that Keats had lent him the fragment of Hyperion for perusal. "It contains," says Woodhouse, "2 books & (abt 900 lines in all)." As the extant fragment of the Dream consists of one Canto of 444 lines, and the 62 opening lines of a second Canto, while the fragment published in 1820 consists of 883 lines, that was, no doubt, what Woodhouse had: moreover he makes, in connexion with his note, three extracts which are from the published version. He records that Keats "said he was dissatisfied with what he had done of it; and should not complete it." The other version of 'Hyperion' in the form of a Dream which Lord Houghton gave first as a revised version and then as a draft, has been shown on the distinct evidence of Brown to be a revision and of a late date. No holograph manuscript of 'Hyperion' has yet come to light; but Woodhouse appears to have had one copied into his Common-place book before it was revised finally for the impression of 1820, and to have marked or got marked in pencil some of the subsequent omissions and alterations. The transcript is made in what one would feel confident in describing as the writing of a lawyer's young clerk (Woodhouse was a lawyer): it is very carefully made; and, I do not doubt, preserves much of Keats's spelling, punctuation, and capitalling, which for lack of authority I have not used. It may be noted as a measure of the transcriber's education that Mnemosyne is invariably spelt Muemosyne (Keats's n's and u's being more or less indistinctive). In one case, Woodhouse found his boy out, and altered the u to an n. There is scarcely any doubt that this transcript was the "copy" sent to the printer in 1820 to set the poem up from. It has the usual indelible printing-house finger-marks, and, as touched up with the pencil, does not vary from the printed book in a greater degree than would be likely, if we allow for the usual amount of printing-house punctuation and a not undue revision of proofs by the author. The rest of the Common-place book was kept clean and secret while 'Hyperion' was thus "at press," by some arrangement of sealing up; for the remains of the sealing-wax are still there on the pages before and after 'Hyperion.' Woodhouse, like several of Keats's friends, thoroughly appreciated the portentous genius of the young poet of 'Hyperion' he says, "The structure of the verse, as well as the subject, are colossal. It has an air of calm grandeur about it which is indicative of true power.-I know of no poem with which in this respect it can be compared.-It is that in poetry, which the Elgin and Egyptian marbles are in sculpture." Again, at the close of his extracts from the manuscript, this judiciously admiring friend well says, "The above lines, separated from the rest, give but a faint idea of the sustained grandeur and quiet power which characterize the poem: but they are sufficient to lead us to regret that such an attempt should have been abandoned. The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former God of the Sun, by Apollo,-and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter &c., and of the war of the Giants for Saturn's reestablishment-with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the Poet's brain. How he is qualified for such a task, may be seen in a trifling degree by the few mythological glimpses afforded in 'Endymion."" Shelley in the Preface to 'Adonais' says "I consider the fragment of 'Hyperion,' as second to nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years." In a letter to Peacock he describes it as "an astonishing piece of writing," "-and again-"if the 'Hyperion' be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries". And in his unfinished Letter to the Editor of 'The Quarterly Review' he says, "The great proportion of this piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry" Medwin records in his Life of Shelley (Volume II, page 109) an opinion expressed by the poet that "the scenery and drawing of his [Keats's] Saturn Dethroned, and the fallen Titans, surpassed those of Satan and his rebellious angels in the 'Paradise Lost,'-possessing more human interest; that the whole poem was supported throughout with a colossal grandeur equal to the subject." Lord Jeffrey's notice in 'The Edinburgh Review' closed with these words: "There is a fragment of a projected Epic, entitled Hyperion, on the expulsion of Saturn and the Titanian deities by Jupiter and his younger adherents, of which we cannot advise the completion: For, though there are passages of some force and grandeur, it is sufficiently obvious, from the specimen before us, that the subject is too far removed from all the sources of human interest, to be successfully treated by any modern author. Mr. Keats has unquestionably a very beautiful imagination, and a great familiarity with the finest diction of English poetry; but he must learn not to misuse or misapply these advantages; and neither to waste the good gifts of nature and study on intractable themes, nor to luxuriate too recklessly on such as are more suitable." How much more truth and insight we get in Leigh Hunt's remarks in 'The Indicator' made àpropos of 'Hyperion': "Endymion' with all its extraordinary powers, partook of the faults of youth,.. The author's versification is now perfected, the exuberances of his imagination restrained, and a calm power, the surest and loftiest of all power, takes place of the impatient workings of the younger god within him. The character of his genius is that of energy and voluptuousness, each able at will to take leave of the other, and possessing, in their union, a high feeling of humanity not common to the best authors who can less combine them. Mr. Keats undoubtedly takes his seat with the oldest and best of our living poets... The 'Hyperion' is a fragment,- a gigantic one, like a ruin in the desert, or the bones of the mastodon. It is truly of a piece with its subject, which is the downfall of the elder gods." Byron, whose utterances on Keats were as a rule harsh, admitted after his death that 'Hyperion' was a fine monument," and would "keep his name.' "This was in a letter to Murray dated the 30th of July 1821: on the 18th of the previous November he had written to the same correspondent, fulminating against Jeffrey's article in the 'Edinburgh,' in praise of that little *** Keats, and averring that "At present all the men they have ever praised are degraded by that insane article." On the 12th of November 1821 (not, of course, 1831 as printed in Lord Houghton's 'Life and Letters' of Keats) Byron appears to have written in a copy of a suppressed pamphlet by him,1 against his remarks on Keats, a note in mitigation containing the following passage: 1 Although Byron suppressed the pamphlet and ordered everything about Keats to be omitted from his works, Murray disregarded the injunction, and published in 1834 both the pamphlet and the other truculent passages set out in full in the general Appendix to the Library edition of Keats. 127 "Mr. Keats died at Rome about a year after this was written, of a decline produced by his having burst a blood-vessel on reading the article on his 'Endymion' in the Quarterly Review. I have read the article before and since; and although it is bitter, I do not think that a man should permit himself to be killed by it... My indignation at Mr. Keats's depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius, which, malgré all the fantastic fopperies of his style, was undoubtedly of great promise. His fragment of 'Hyperion' seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Eschylus. He is a loss to our literature; and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to have been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was re-forming his style upon the more classical models of the language." Matthew Arnold wrote most wisely and sympathetically about Keats's poetry; and I have sometimes wished that 'Hyperion had commanded his suffrage. Ward's Poets he says epigrammatically enough-"His 'Endymion,' as he himself saw, is a failure, and his Hyperion,' fine things as it contains, is not a success." Could a fragment well be a success in the full sense of the word? The late Francis Turner Palgrave, in his notes to Keats's Poems (Golden Treasury Series, 1884) adopted the view that Keats was right to give up "Hyperion," "despite the marvellous grandeur of its execution"; but he did not make out his case very happily by classing it with Shelley's 'Prometheus Unbound,' and calling both "exercises." He says "Like the great majority of post-classical verse in classical languages, those modern myths are but exercises, (and, as such, with their value to the writer), on a splendid scale. The story of which Hyperion tells the beginning is, in fact, far too remote, too alien from the modern world: it has neither any definite symbolical meaning, nor any of that 'soft humanity' which underlies the wild magic of Lamia, and has rendered possible a picture, true not only to Corinth two thousand years ago, but to all time.-Yet, with such strange vital force has he penetrated into the Titan world, and all but given the reality of life to the old shadows before him, that, had this miracle been possible, we may fairly say that Keats would have worked it." With due submission, I hold that the miracle was possible to him, and that, had he chosen he would have worked it. As to the lack of "definite symbolical meaning," I would also demur: here I should side with the late Mrs. Owen and Professor Colvin. Mrs. Owen (John Keats a Study, 1880, page 104) had held "the idea underlying" Hyperion' to be "the unity of all existence." "In its stately power, its dignified strength, and solemn melody," she says, 'Hyperion' "fitly represents the eternal music of the world's progress." Mr. Colvin, after noting that, in the story of the war of Titans and Olympians Keats had "nothing to guide him except scraps from the ancient writers, principally Hesiod, as retailed by the compilers of classical dictionaries," says that, "as to the essential meaning of that warfare and its result-the dethronement of an older and ruder worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers,-as to this, it could not possibly be divined more truly, or illustrated with more beauty and force, than by Keats in the speech of Oceanus in the Second Book. Again, in conceiving and animating these colossal shapes of early gods, with their personalities between the elemental and the human, what masterly justice of instinct does he show,-to take one point only-in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realize their voices." Mr. Colvin goes on to assert boldly that, with "a few slips and inequalities, and one or two instances of verbal incorrectness, Hyperion as far as it was written, is indeed one of the grandest poems in our language, and in its grandeur seems one of the easiest and most spontaneous." And he gives excellent reasons for the faith that is in him, adding: "The influence, and something of the majesty, of Paradise Lost are in truth to be found in Hyperion: and the debate of the fallen Titans in the second book is obviously to some extent modelled on the debate of the fallen angels. But Miltonic the poem hardly is in any stricter sense. Passing by those general differences that arise from the contrast of Milton's age with Keats's youth, of his austerity with Keats's luxuriance of spirit, and speaking of palpable and technical differences only:-in the matter of rhythm, Keats's blank verse has not the flight of Milton's. Its periods do not wheel through such stately evolutions to so solemn and far-foreseen a close; though it indeed lacks neither power nor music, and ranks unquestionably with the finest blank-verse written since Milton,-beside that of Shelley's Alastor,-perhaps a little below that of Wordsworth when Wordsworth is at his infrequent best. As to diction and the poetic use of words, Keats shows almost as masterly an instinct as Milton himself: but while of Milton's diction the characteristic colour is derived from reading and meditation, from an impassioned conversance with the contents of books, the characteristic colour of Keats's diction is rather derived from conversance with nature and with the extreme refinements of physical sensation. He is no match for Milton in a passage of this kind : Eden stretch'd her line From Auran eastward to the royal towers But then neither is Milton a match for Keats in work like this : throughout all the isle There was no covert, no retired cave Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, Though scarcely heard in many a green recess. "After the pomp and glow of learned allusion, the second chief technical note of Milton's style is his partiality for a Latin use of the relative pronoun and the double negative, and for scholarly Latin turns and constructions generally. Already in Isabella Keats is to be found attempting both notes, thus:— With duller steel than the Persean sword They cut away no formless monster's head Similar Miltonic echoes occur in Hyperion, as in the introduction already quoted to the speech of Oceanus: or again thus : Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope But they are not frequent, nor had Keats adopted as much of Milton's technical manner as he seems to have supposed." The "Other Version of 'Hyperion"" in "the form of a Vision," in which, as already stated, Keats worked up parts of the following fragment with much addition, will be given in its order in the third volume. H. B. F. HYPERION. BOOK I. DEEP in the shady sadness of a vale 5 Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, 10 Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds Mr. W. T. Arnold has pointed out what he describes as a "confusion" which may be intentional in making Hyperion the god of the sun: "strictly speaking," he says (Clarendon Press 'Hyperion, Book I'), "the legend was that Hyperion was the father of Helios (the sun). But as Helios is sometimes called Hyperion in the poets (though in this case the name means son of Hyperion, and is short for Hyperionion), Keats' [sic] confusion, even if it is not an intentional one, is natural enough." 9. In the Woodhouse transcript Robs not at all the dandelion's fleece; a reading which Keats's unerring instinct would reject on consideration on account of the lack of dignity in the word dandelion both by sound and by association. 14. It seems to me that the power of realization shown in the first decade, and indeed throughout the fragment, answers all objections to the subject, and is the most absolute security for the nobility of the result which Keats would have achieved had he finished the poem. It is impossible to over-estimate the value of such a landscape, so touched in with a few strokes of titanic meaning and completeness; and the whole sentiment of gigantic despair reflected around the fallen god of the Titan dynasty, and permeating the landscape, is resumed in the most perfect manner in the incident of the motionless fallen leaf, a line almost as intense and full of the essence of poetry as any line in our language. It were ungracious to take exception to the poor Naiad; but this particular example of the classic nymphs of the upland streams has not the convincing appropriateness of the |