"He dwelt with the bright gods of elder time, On earth and in their cloudy haunts above; He loved them, and in recompense, sublime, The gods, alas! gave him their fatal love."

P

JERHAPS no other English poet ever lived so exclusively in "the cloudy haunts of the bright gods above" as did John Keats. From the time when he read Lempriere's Classical Dictionary with his heart afire for that wonderful world of old, with its fair gods and fairer goddesses, its dancing fauns and smiling nymphs, to the days when he sent out his last volume containing the all-perfect “Ode on a Grecian Urn" for the delectation of potent scribblers in quarterly reviews, he was true to Diana and Apollo, to Flora and the great god Pan. This son of a hostler, this surgeon's apprentice, was never quite at ease in our matter-of-fact modern world, where a tree is but a possible mast for a ship and not a sacred haunt for a dryad; where shells are shells and not the many colored horns of wreathed Tritons. How little his thoughts had to do with lancets and scalpels we may imagine from his reply to Cowden Clarke, who asked him about his studies at the hospital. "The other day," he wrote, "during the lectures there came a sunbeam into the room and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairy-land." What were the sapless generalizations of science to such a mind? what all the marshalled array of facts and proven theories? For him truth and beauty were identical. He drew no line between the world of the imagination and

that which seems real to the senses; but of both he demanded beauty, and that secured, he felt that truth could not be very far distant. In search of this ideal beauty he went by a sort of instinct to the classic world of Greece and Rome, to the wonderland where his own creed was implicitly believed, if not explicitly earth, a synthesis was perfected in which professed; where, if ever on the sad old truth and beauty had equal share, and there was a certain final identification of the two such as we always find in art that is truly great.

And in that ancient world he found many a wonder-tale, reveled in many a myth-marvel. But there was none that held for him so heavy a burden of mysterious delight as the story of Endymion, the beautiful shepherd boy whom Diana kissed as he lay asleep on Mount Latmos. This was his favorite myth and its elaboration into a poem of some length was one of his darling ambitions. In "I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill" in his first volume of verse he alludes to the love of Cynthia and Endymion and speculates as to the origin of the tale. He decides that the inventor must have been some poet and lover whose heart was so filled with pity for Cynthia's moonlit sheen, wasted all unloved, that he created Endymion to receive her soft caresses on Mount Latmos' dreamy crest.

"The poet wept at her so piteous fate,
Wept that such beauty should be desolate.
So in fine wrath some golden sounds he won
And gave meek Cynthia her Endymion."

Keats rationalizes the myth to some extent, so that the moonlight symbolizes poetic inspiration which comes from above, and Endymion is the young

poet who sleeps and dreams dreams truer than all life's so-called realities. The fact that this story had taken an early hold on Keats' mind, that it had a certain fascination for him, makes it all the sadder that his second volume, the four books of "Endymion," should have failed to satisfy either himself or his reviewers. "It is just that this youngster should die away-a sad thought for me," he writes in the preface. The luxuriance of his gifted imagination had run riot in the peculiarly fertile soil of Greek legendary lore and had been all but stifled by the vitality of its own rich overgrowth. The myth had been elaborated, incident after incident had been invented, until the perfect simplicity of the original version, the very suggestiveness that had appealed to Keats' own fancy, was all but lost. And yet “Endymion" is worth keeping. It is an attempt to retranslate into full, rich life some of the joy and gladness of old Greece; to tell again some experiences that the human heart would not willingly forget. How much of promise there is in the treatment of the theme! What haunting beauty in many of the lines! If, as the first verse of "Endymion" as

sures us,

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever," then this English setting of an old Greek myth will never die.

Keats' dominant passion was for beauty as expressed in poetry. "Fine writing, next to fine doing, is the top thing in the world," he used to say. This explains his interest in Endymion and in all myths that center around poesy and music, for the two are closely allied. Apollo, the god of poetry and prophecy; Cynthia, his sister; Mercury, the inventor of the lyre; the story of Pan and Syrinx; of Orpheus; of Amphion and the wonders wrought by his music in the building of the Theban wall-all these he lingers over with a

special fondness. He has forty-seven distinct references to Apollo, the

"God of the golden bow,
And of the golden lyre,
And of the golden hair,
And of the golden fire,
Charioteer

Of the patient year."

To Cynthia he has thirty-five allusions. under three titles; Cynthia, Diana and Phoebe. It is Cynthia whom Endymion loves. His prayer to her in the temple is exceptionally beautiful:

"O Haunter chaste

Of river sides, and woods, and heathy waste, Where with thy silver bow and arrows keen Art thou now forested? O woodland Queen, What smoothest air thy smoother forehead woos?

Where dost thou listen to the wide halloos Of thy disparted nymphs? Wheresoe'er it be,

'Tis in the breath of heaven; thou dost taste Freedom as none can taste it, nor dost waste Thy loveliness in dismal elements; But finding in our green earth sweet contents

There livest blissfully."

The Muses, daughters of Jupiter and Mnemosyne, who preside over song and prompt the memory, are named twentyfive times; the story of Pan and Syrinx is interwoven into several poems. The hymn to Pan in the first book of "Endymion" is one of the most perfect things Keats ever did. The chorus sings:

"Bethinking thee how melancholy loth Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx-do thou now, By thy love's milky brow!

By all the trembling mazes that she ran,
Hear us, great Pan!"

There is a passage in an earlier work which tells

"How fair, trembling Syrinx fled Arcadian Pan, with such a fearful dread. Poor nymph,-poor Pan-how he did weep to find

Nought but a lovely sighing of the wind Along the reedy stream; a half-heard strain Full of sweet desolation-balmy pain."

An exquisite couplet, which was excluded for some reason from the second book of "Endymion," compares the poet's voice to

"The low voice of Syrinx when she ran. Into the forests from Arcadian Pan."

But Pan is not only the inventor of the pandean pipes; he is also the ruler of flocks and shepherds. In Arcadia he wanders over mountains and valleys, amuses himself in the chase and joins in the frolics of the nymphs. Pan, in Greek, signifies all, and this deity has come to be considered as in some sense a symbol of the cosmos, a personification of nature, the very heart of the whole pagan system of hierarchical gods and goddesses. From this point of view, also, Keats is interested in Pan, and indeed in the whole cycle of myths which grew out of first attempts in the way of explaining natural phenomena. He refers to Pan as

"A symbol of immensity,
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown."

He calls him "a forester divine," "a satyr-king," "winder of the horn," of the horn," "breather round our farms," "the dread opener of the mysterious doors leading to universal knowledge." He laments. that in this age,

"Under pleasant trees

Pan is no longer sought." Aeolus, ruler of the winds; Aurora and the pageant of the dawn-coming; Vesper, and the glories of the dying day; the nymphs and naiads, dryads and fauns. who wander through leafy brakes and make the green woods ring with their merry laughter; Bacchus, with his crew. and all the wild revelry of the vintage season; Apollo, as the sun-god; Diana, the moon; and Jove, the great Allfather, the wielder of lightning-flashes and thunderbolts-these Keats weaves

into his song with genuinely classic simplicity of feeling. He has all the fresh wonder of the Greek mind and heart in the presence of natural beauty. "What is in thee, Moon," he asks, "that thou shouldst move my heart so potently?" The tinge of pantheism is strong, and yet there are times when his view of nature is plainly Christian; when he looks upon the visible vesture of things as a tangible expression of the Infinite, worthy of love and reverent admiration. He says in a letter to a friend: "In truth the great Elements we know of are no mean comforters: the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown; the air is our robe of state; the earth is our throne; and the sea a mighty minstrel playing before it, able like David's harp to make such a one as you forget almost the tempest-cares of life."

The mission of poetry, according to Keats, is the same as that of natureto help men forget the tempest-cares of life. He tells us :

"They shall be counted poet-kings

Who simply sing the most heart-easing things"

And so from his work he rigidly excludes what is merely ugly and heartbreaking in mythology and turns always to what is bright and beautiful. Myths connected with death and Hades are all but omitted. Pluto is mentioned five times, but in connection with Proserpine, who represents life and joy. Keats agrees with the Greeks in regarding any sort of life here on earth as more desirable than the shadowy, unreal existence of departed souls. He names only one of the Furies, those serpent-wreathed goddesses who punish criminals by their secret stings. In the second book of "Endymion" the young shepherd has "Visions that might have dismayed Alecto's

serpents."

The Fates are introduced six times, and usually as unkind or revengeful. And

yet they are not always irresistible; for in "Endymion" III we read:

"Aye, 'bove the withering of old-lipp'd Fate A thousand Powers keep religious state, In water, fiery realm and airy bourne."

The Gorgons, monstrous females with huge teeth like those of swine, brazen claws and snaky hair, are alluded to in one passage:

"Not far hence (sat) Atlas, and beside him prone

Phorcus, the sire of gorgons."

The sad lots of Ixion and Iapetus are referred to in "Hyperion," but not dwelt on or developed to any extent. There is one allusion to the Cyclops and to the master of their cave, Polyphemus. The weirdness of the one round eye set in the middle of their foreheads; the story of their inhospitality to Ulysses when he visited their island; the way Polyphemus feasted on the Greeks after dashing out their brains these surely are not "heart-easing things," and so Keats passes them by. He prefers the Hours and the Graces; Aeolus, Boreas and Zephyrus: Venus and Cupid; or even sadder characters like Daphne, Adonis, Echo, Hyacinthus and Narcissus, where a pleasant melancholy enfolds the whole and lends a strangely tender sort of beauty. The perpetuation of Beauty for its own sake; the annihilation of the ugly because of its opposition to Beauty-this was the finality of Keats' artistic creed.

Keats' manner of introducing myths and mythological allusions into his writings would make an interesting study. One of the most obvious ways is by the use of simile and metaphor. "For as Apollo each eve doth devise A new appareling for western skies; So every eve, nay every spendthrift hour Shed balmy consciousness within that bower." "Endymion," III, 463.

"More subtle cadenced, more forest wild
Than Dryope's lone lulling of her child;
And nothing since has floated in the air
So mournful strange."

"Endymion." I, 493.

Allusion and epithet is epithet is another method often employed:

"No leaf doth tremble, no ripple is there On the river-all's still and the night's sleepy

eye

Closes up and forgets all its Lethean care.” Cimmerian, Circean, Hesperean and Orphean are used in this way many times. But Keats' favorite plan in dealing with a myth is to incorporate the whole story into a poem, as in "Endymion" or "Hyperion." Into both of these works numerous short stories are interwoven; for instance, in "Endymion" we find accounts of Glaucus and Scylla, of Pan and Syrinx. Keats delights in recasting these old tales, and when he does not find the classic 'version as interesting as he thinks it ought to be, he simply invents incidents and characters until he feels that the story is worth telling. For in the myth-world

he is not a mere visitor, who looks and wonders but dares not touch. He feels at home, and with the assurance of a friend he transforms the old narratives, telling them anew in his own way. And his way never violates the spirit of the original version, for he had felt the living spell of Greece, he had caught something of the soul of old Attica.

"Whom the gods love die young" we are told, and Keats was only twentysix when he was laid away in the little Protestant cemetery at Rome. He was not a Christian believer, and his paganism could hardly be called a creed. His last words were: "I am dying-I shall die easy; don't be frightened-be firm and thank God it has come." Was the "thank God" conventional and would he just as soon have said "thank the gods?" He wrote his own epitaph: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But posterity has added: He was the author of "Endymion" and of an "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

A

UNT PENNY was not whiteoh, no! Aunt Penny never claimed to be white, and she never claimed that any of her relatives were white-oh, no!

You could not please Aunt Penny better than to tell her she was black-solid, fadeless black, with not a white speck anywhere except in her eyes, and the pearly gleaming of her splendid teeth.

No; I'll affirm that she was irredeemably black, and so would you if you had seen her.

Miss Lily Washington, her granddaughter, was quite as hopelessly black as the old woman, but she assumed numerous airs, as did Miss Daisy Washington, another progressive grandchild of the same sable complexion.

These "smart" young ladies did not visit the old woman because they cherished any particular love for her, but because their healthy appetites persisted in outgrowing the larder at home.

Aunt Penny and Uncle Nero were workers, they were, and there was always something good to eat in the house. The girls tried to repay the old folks by giving them lessons in etiquette from their own limited knowledge, but the old folks didn't want any pay.

"Oh, grandma, I'se quite shocked to see yo' go out in de street in such ragged habitation quite shocked, indeed!" Miss Lily drawled.

"Oh, yes," supplemented Miss Daisy; "deed it is bad form, an' grandpa quite shocks my morsels, too!"

"Huh-huh! Seems laik yo' alls doan nebber git shocked when yo' comes hyear to eat chicken an' collards, an' sich. Dat ain't bad form—uh,uh! Ef yo'd scrub yo' alls house er little mo' an'

galvant de street er little less, yo'd hab er heap mo' brains dan yo's got-huh!" Aunt Penny delivered this speech with many vigorous nods.

"Oh, grandma, it ain't progressive to scrub an' wash! We b'longs to de Boston Literary Society, we does, an' we got to keep up in de latest style. Mr. Alonzo Brown say dat we is de most stylish young ladies in our set," replied Miss Lily.

"Huh, I bet dere ain't er morsel toh eat in yo' house right now! Yo' pa am de biggest sorter fool to 'low yo' to kerry on dat way, 'cause his health am mighty po'ly, an' he's likely toh drap off any time sudden-den wha' yo' gointer do, eh? Huh! Better larn toh wuck, gals!"

The Misses Washington departed. wrathfully after listening to this offensive speech, and they declared they would never visit their grandparents again, but Aunt Penny was not troubled by this declaration, for she had heard it before. She was honest to herself, and that is the fundamental principle of all laws of honesty..

Uncle Nero was hoeing the potato patch and Aunt Penny went out to help him.

"Tink we's gointer hab rain, ole 'oman-rain an' wind, 'cause de fish hawk fly high an' holler loud," he said, straightening his back for a few minutes.

"Uh, huh, dass wot I t'ink, too, 'cause yo' kin hear noises long ways off, an' dass er sho' sign," she replied. Then they both worked on in silence. Twilight was fast approaching, and the chickens were clustered together at the back door waiting for their supper. The cow, Star Face, was stretching her neck.