t part politics may play in
the life of a poet. Wordsworth said, in 1833, that "although he was
known to the world only as a poet, he had given twelve hours' thought to
the condition and prospects of society, for one to poetry." He did not
retire into a "wise passiveness" as regards the world's affairs until he
had written some of the greatest political literature--and, in saying
this, I am thinking of his sonnets rather than of his political
prose--that has appeared in England since the death of Milton.

V.

KEATS

1. THE BIOGRAPHY

Sir Sidney Colvin deserves praise for the noble architecture of the
temple he has built in honour of Keats. His great book, _John Keats: His
Life and Poetry; His Friends, Critics, and After-fame_, is not only a
temple, indeed, but a museum. Sir Sidney has brought together here the
whole of Keats's world, or at least all the relics of his world that the
last of a band of great collectors has been able to recover; and in the
result we can accompany Keats through the glad and sad and mad and bad
hours of his short and marvellous life as we have never been able to do
before under the guidance of a single biographer. We are still left in
the dark, it is true, as to Keats's race and descent. Whether Keats's
father came to London from Cornwall or not, Sir Sidney has not been able
to decide on the rather shaky evidence that has been put forward. If it
should hereafter turn out that Keats was a Cornishman at one remove,
Matthew Arnold's conjecture as to the "Celtic element" in him, as in
other English poets, may revive in the general esteem.

In the present state of our knowledge, however, we must be content to
accept Keats as a Londoner without ancestors beyond the father who was
head-ostler at the sign of the "Swan and Hoop," Finsbury Pavement, and
married his master's daughter. It was at the stable at the "Swan and
Hoop"--not a public-house, by the way, but a livery-stable--that Keats
was prematurely born at the end of October 1795. He was scarcely nine
years old when his father was killed by a fall from a horse. He was only
fourteen when his mother (who had re-married unhappily and then been
separated from her husband) died, a victim of chronic rheumatism and
consumption. It is from his mother that Keats seems to have inherited
his impetuous and passionate nature. There is the evidence of a certain
wholesale tea-dealer--the respectability of whose trade may have
inclined him to cen