Life Letters And Literary Remains of John Keats

enable us to contemplate the mind of the Historian, the Novelist, or the Philosopher, yet our observation will be more or less limited and obscured by the sequence of events, the forms of manners, or the exigencies of theory, and the personality of the writer must be frequently lost; while the Poet, if his utterances be deep and true, can hardly hide himself even beneath the epic or dramatic veil, and often makes of the rough public ear a confessional into which to pour the richest treasures and holiest secrets of his soul. His Life is in his writings, and his Poems are his works indeed. The biography therefore of a poet can be little better than a comment on his Poems, even when itself of long duration, and checkered with strange and various adventures: but these pages concern one whose whole story may be summed up in the composition of three small volumes of verse, some earnest friendships, one passion, and a premature death. As men die, so they walk among posterity; and our impression of Keats can only be that of a noble nature perseveringly testing its own powers, of a manly heart bravely surmounting its first hard experience, and of animagination ready to inundate the world, yet learning to flow within regulated channels, and abating its violence without lessening its strength. It is thus no more than the beginning of a Life which can here be written, and nothing but a conviction of the singularity arid greatness of the fragment would justify any one in at...