816 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



breathed ; almost all his great contemporaries Wordsworth, 

 Coleridge, Shelley, Byron among the number were more or less 

 drawn into the eddying current of change ; but Keats remained 

 an outsider and an alien. He felt no thrill of enthusiasm for the 

 development of knowledge and the march of the race, no young 

 man's interest in the world's travail and hope. He never troubled 

 himself to ask what direction the thought of the time was taking. 

 He only knew and only cared to know that it was drifting in 

 some direction away from the old landmarks that he loved so 

 well, and he persistently resented the change, without, perhaps, 

 even realizing what it actually meant. There was nothing, there- 

 fore, left for him, as he felt, but to emulate the " negative ca- 

 pacity" of the Elizabethans to live in the midst of all this ferment 

 without being touched by it.* So he built for himself a palace of 

 art " a lordly pleasure house " and escaped through the imagi- 

 nation from the pressure of a world in which he had no part. 



For Keats, then, knowledge emphatically meant disillusion. 

 Reality, romance these were essentially contradictory terms. 

 To explain the processes of Nature was to remove them once and 

 for all from the soft twilight of poetry, through which they 

 loomed dim but beautiful, into the lurid white glare of actuality, 

 where they stood out gaunt, naked, revolting. The sense of real 

 things constantly present to break in upon his sweetest fancies, 

 he could liken only to a muddy stream, the turbid current of 

 which was forever sweeping his mind back to darkness and noth- 

 ingness. In the well-known passage in Lamia about the rain- 

 bow, with its emphatic protest against philosophy, we have the 

 man's horror of science, so frequently revealed elsewhere in his 

 work by implication, set forth in a kind of formal declaration. 

 Such an outburst inevitably reminds us of the diatribes in Mr. 

 Ruskitf's Eagle's Nest against physiology and what he calls Dar- 

 winism perhaps the foolishest utterances to be found anywhere 

 in his voluminous writings, which is itself saying a good deal. 

 But, after all, perhaps the best commentary on the lines in question 

 is Haydon's statement that, three years before Lamia saw the 

 light, Keats and Lamb, while dining with him (Haydon), had 

 agreed together that " Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the 

 rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors." We may imagine 

 how these two sage critics would have laid their heads together 

 over the more modern legend of the cynical chemist who is said 

 to have remarked that a woman's tears had no longer any kind of 

 power over him, since he knew their precise constituent elements 

 muriate of soda and solution of phosphate ! Clearly, the aes- 



* See his remarkable letter to his brother, on Shakespeare's " negative capacity," in For- 

 man's edition of Keats's works, vol. iii, pp. 99, 100. 



