and firmly believing that he could and would be
one; resolute to be a man--unselfish, kindly, and generous. But, though
kindly, he was irritable; though unselfish and generous, wilful and
suspicious. An affront was what he would not bear; and, when he found
himself affronted in a form--that of press ridicule and
detraction--which could not be resented in person, nor readily
retaliated in any way, it is abundantly probable that the indignity
preyed upon his mind and spirits, and contributed to embitter the days
cut short by disease, the messenger of despair to that passionate love
which had become the single intense interest of his life. The single
intense interest, along with poetry--both of them hurrying without
fruition to the grave. Keats seems to me to have been naturally a man of
complex character, many-mooded, with a tendency to perverse
self-conflict. The circumstances of his brief career--his poetic
ambition, his want of any definite employment, his association with men
of literary occupation or taste whom he only half approved, the critical
venom poured forth against him, his love thwarted by a mortal
malady--all these things tended to bring out the unruly or morbid, and
to deplete the many fine and solid, elements in his nature. With the
personal character of Keats, as with his writings, we may perhaps deal
most fairly by saying that his outburst and his reserve of faculty were
such that, in the narrow space allotted to him, youth had not advanced
far enough to disentangle the rich and various material. But his latest
years, which enabled his poetry to find full and deathless voice, were
so loaded with suffering and perturbation as to leave the character less
lucidly and harmoniously developed than even in the days of adolescence.
From "Endymion" to "Lamia" and the "Eve of St. Mark," we have, in
poetry, advanced greatly towards the radiant meridian: in life, from
1818 to 1821, we have receded to a baffling dusk.

CHAPTER IX.

We have seen what John Keats did in the shifting scene of the world, and
in the high arena of poesy; we have seen what were the qualities of
character and of mind which enabled him to bear his part in each. His
work as a poet is to us the thing of primary importance: and it remains
for us to consider what this poetic work amounts to in essence and in
detail. The critic who _is_ a critic--and not a _Quarterly_ or a
_Blackwood_ reviewer or lampooner--is well aware of the disproport