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from pictures and works of sculpture is not only very interesting in itself, it is a lesson, never unneeded, in the freedom with which all creative artists use their materials. 'Je prends mon bien où je le trouve,' said Molière, and he might have added, speaking not only for himself but for all poets, and I deal with it exactly as it suits me.' People insist on fancying that poets copy their predecessors and that novelists photograph individuals. The truth is, of course, that, if they do, they are not artists but mechanics. It is a very useful lesson in criticism which is provided by the page in which Sir Sidney gives his reasons for thinking that the famous description of Bacchus and his rout in Endymion' had other sources than Titian's glorious picture in the National Gallery; and that for them recourse must be had to a certain type of sarcophagus, specimens of which, as it happens, had been brought to England just before Keats wrote the poem. A still better instance of the same kind is Sir Sidney's suggestion that painting as well as sculpture played its part in giving Keats the enchanting vision of his Grecian Urn. Does not this very epithet 'enchanting-the first and most natural that seems to offer itself about the poem, one which I took almost by accident and without thinking about it—itself suggest something in the poem which could not be got from that noblest and severest of all beautiful things, Greek sculpture?

So we find Sir Sidney claiming that the German and other critics who have written on the works of ancient art which may have influenced Keats have not covered all the ground; and that, to do so, we must look to painting as well, and in particular to two beautiful Claudes, 'The Sacrifice of Apollo' and 'The Enchanted Castle,' the first of which we know was exhibited in London in 1816, while the second may easily have been known to Keats through Woollett's engraving. The two pictures first unite to provide the material for the description of a sacrifice in the Epistle to Reynolds which the poet himself believed was a recollection of Titian. Then 'The Sacrifice,' as everyone will recognise in future now that Sir Sidney has pointed it out, provides the hint for the wonderful fourth stanza of the Grecian Urn,' and not merely for the sacrifice itself, the altar and the victim and the priest, but also for these lovely lines:

'What little town by river or seashore,
Or mountain, built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? '

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And finally, the other Claude, The Enchanted Castle,' returns to give us the two famous lines which have more of romance in them than any other lines of Keats, perhaps more than any lines in all English poetry:

'Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.'

The whole of Sir Sidney's treatment of this subject deserves study as showing the way in which one poet fused materials, drawn from many sources of memory and touched afresh by imagination, into a new creation more real than any reality. People talk of a poet writing with his eye on the object. Wordsworth says somewhere that he could not do that; and still less could Keats. Even the French painter, Degas, who seems to some people to have loved ugliness as much as Keats loved beauty, could not paint with the object before him. In all these cases, as preeminently in Keats, the eye must industriously do its preliminary work; who can compare with Keats in the eye that has seen, the ear that has heard, the memory that has retained, every delightful thing in Nature or in Art of which his few years had given him the experience? But, when he is to use them, the mind and not the eye is master, and deals with them as it will. Unconsciously perhaps; for our imagination is even more unconscious of its elements than our will. It is likely enough that Keats never once thought of 'The Enchanted Castle' as he wrote the 'Ode to the Nightingale'; but it had sown its secret seed in him, and the 'magic casements' and 'perilous seas' were the fruit. The subject of Keats's debt to works of art receives pictorial illustration here by the reproduction of several of those referred to, the two Claudes, a sarcophagus relief and three or four vases, the Townley, the Borghese, the Sosibios, and one of Piranesi's. The other illustrations include three portraits of Keats, portraits of Leigh Hunt and Haydon, and facsimiles of part of Keats's autograph of Isabella and of part of a letter of Haydon to Mrs Browning which includes a sketch of Keats. One other feature of the book deserves mention. It is provided

with an exceptionally complete Index which occupies forty pages. There is only one deficiency. The book lacks the one or two blank pages at the end which every book of this sort should have, in order that the studious reader may make notes of points of special interest to himself. No Index can be full enough to do this work for everybody. This is one of the things which publishers ought to remember but constantly forget.

Of actual novelty there is not and could not be a great deal. There are a few new facts, such as, for instance, that Keats left school in 1811 and not in 1810, and that he was entered at Guy's Hospital not in 1814 but in 1815; matters of little enough importance, both of them, but well to have got right instead of wrong. Of far greater interest are such discoveries as that the famous Sonnet, Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art,' was not written, as had been supposed, for Severn off the English coast as he and Keats started for Italy. It exists, in a slightly different form, given here, in a transcript made by Keats's friend, Charles Brown, and dated 1819; and Sir Sidney Colvin gives his reasons for thinking that it was written in the last days of February of that year, a few days after the engagement to Fanny Brawne. By this discovery it loses the pathetic interest which it owed to the belief that it had been Keats's unconscious farewell to poetry. But it gains another kind of interest. Those who love Keats have great difficulty in not actually disliking the unpleasantly named girl to whom he gave himself with such destructive violence of poorly reciprocated passion. But, after all, what Keats loved they cannot hate; and they must rejoice to know that, whatever injury Fanny Brawne's acceptance of his love may ultimately, through his weakness and her triviality of character, have done to his happiness and health and poetic powers, its first days produced not torment or jealousy or failure, but one of the most beautiful things that ever came from his genius. The changes he made when he wrote the poem out again for Severn are enough to show that his instinct for language was never finer than in his last months, so long as it was employed upon its proper business. The rhymes are the same in both versions;

the alterations do not affect either the structure or the general sense of the sonnet. But much of the magic of the final version is due to the verbal changes introduced into Severn's copy. The star 'in lone splendour hung aloft the night' is something that it was not when it was 'hung amid the night'; the softness and ease which is the note of the whole had been impeded by the inverted metrical stress of nature's devout sleepless Eremite' and is restored by the substitution of 'patient' for 'devout'; the 'moving' waters, which recall, and may unconsciously echo, Wordsworth's:

'Listen! the mighty Being is awake,

And doth with his eternal motion make,
A sound like thunder-everlastingly';

are, in Brown's transcript, perhaps by his mistake, the 'morning' waters, which loses all the suggestion of the tides for ever travelling round the earth on their errand of purification.

'Pillowed on my fair love's ripening breast'

was at first

'Cheek-pillow'd on my Love's white ripening breast'; and the final couplet was

'To hear, to feel her tender taken breath
Half-passionless, and so swoon on to death.'

This last line was known to Lord Houghton and was given by him as a variant, from what source he does not state. The departure from it in the final version is not, as it seems to me, so certainly an improvement as the other changes. It is doubtful whether the sonnet gains by the new version which makes death not a sequence but an alternative,

' And so live ever-or else swoon to death,'

or by the omission of the word 'half-passionless,' which confirms the 'sweetness' of the 'unrest.' But the most unquestionable gain of all is one curiously enough not mentioned by Sir Sidney Colvin. It is in the eleventh line, which originally ran :

'To touch, for ever, its warm sink and swell.'

Keats must have felt that the associations of the word 'sink' as a substantive were absolutely fatal, as in fact they are; and the line took the form we know:

'To feel for ever its soft fall and swell.'

This is probably the most interesting and important of the novelties in the book; though others, such as the discovery that the 'Ode to Psyche' was almost certainly written not last but first of the five Odes, also have their interest.

But the object of the new Life was not, I take it, to give novelties or discoveries to the public. That was impossible. There could not, in the nature of the case, be many things to say about Keats which were both new and true; and Sir Sidney does not belong to that school of writers, so fashionable a few years ago, who think that the way to write history or biography is on every occasion to turn the facts upside down, give us black for white, round for square, and generally to substitute epigrams and paradoxes for sense and truth. His object in returning to Keats was something much more modest than this. It was to gather together all that is known about Keats, the little which is new, the much which is old, the whole of the truth about his life and his character and his writings, and to present it to the public in final and authoritative shape. That he has done. It is to be hoped that the second edition, which it is understood is in preparation, will correct the misprints of the first, one at least of which is most unfortunate, especially as it also occurs in Mr de Selincourt's edition of the poems, and therefore, between these two high authorities, might have a chance of establishing itself in anthologies and elsewhere. It occurs in the fine sonnet, 'When I have fears that I may cease to be.' Both Mr de Selincourt and Sir Sidney-the latter perhaps transcribing the former-print in the fourth line:

'Hold like full garners the full-ripened grain.'

It should, of course, be rich garners'; 'full' is a mere misprint, without any authority.

Perhaps the poem for which Sir Sidney Colvin here does most is the too much neglected 'Endymion,' Keats's