But I always preferred even to that fine poem the Prayer of the Romans:
We lift our souls to Thee, O Lord
Of Liberty and of Light!
Let not earth's kings pollute the work
That was done in their despite.
Let not Thy light be darkened
In the shade of a sordid crown,
Nor Piedmont swine devour the fruit
Thou shook'st with an earthquake down…
Let the People come to their birthright, And crosier and crown pass away, Like phantasms that flit o'er the marshes At the glance of the clean white day.
This work of Hay, with some of Emerson and The Prayer of Columbus of Whitman constitute, I think, the greatest American poetry; but the best English poetry of the nineteenth century is finer still.
I sometimes wonder whether accidents are not providential. We have almost driven God out of the universe and installed law in his stead; but curious chances and coincidences often remind us that there are more things between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
In the first volume I declared that any originality of thought I may possess is due in the first case to the fact that, when a cowboy on the trail some fifty years ago, I had no books and by the camp fire at night had to answer the obstinate questionings of sense and outward things without any help from the choice and master spirits of my time. I was forced to think because I could not read.
In the second volume I described how the second happy chance of my life willed it that all my education took place in the United States, in France and Germany, and that when I came to English literature I read and studied without preconceived English ideas. My Shakespeare book is one result of this foreign education; but all my views of English literature are untinged by English prepossessions and English prejudices.
I can still recall vividly the shock it gave me to find William Rossetti putting Shelley above Keats. Writing of the graves of the two poets in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, he first mentions Keats, and the slab of marble covering his remains with its pathetic inscription: 'Here lies one whose name is writ in water'; and, he adds, 'A few paces further on and you come to a still more sacred grave, the grave of the world-worn and wave-worn Shelley, the divinest of the demi-gods.'
'Ass, ass!' I cried, throwing the book down in an outburst of rage. But I found this judgment of Rossetti was the ordinary and accepted English judgment, and I had to take myself in hand and force myself to rationalize my overwhelming and almost instinctive prepossession in favor of Keats. I knew hundreds of verses of Shelley by heart, but one has only to read his Skylark and then Keats's Nightingale in order to realize how immeasurably superior was John Keats. And the Skylark is about the best of Shelley's work, whereas Keats, in the Ode to a Grecian Urn and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, has reached higher heights. All one whiter in Rome, every Sunday morning, I used to lay flowers on the unhonored grave of Keats; the grave of Shelley was always covered by unknown admirers.
'Keats is with Shakespeare,' I cried to myself, indignant, and Shakespeare himself had never done anything at twenty-six to be compared with Keats.
His best is the best poetry in English, except here and there some divine verse of Shakespeare.
In one of my earliest essays of poetic criticism in England I made this declaration of faith and was immediately attacked for it on all hands.
'You will come to my opinion,' was my retort, 'in a little time.' And two or three days afterwards I showed my chief critic a letter from Lord Tennyson in which he said: 'How glad I am to see this opinion which I have held for thirty years at length finding its way into print. Keats sings from the very heart of poetry and I am glad you have said it.'
A little later Matthew Arnold expressed the same opinion:
'No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness. 'I think,' he said humbly, 'I shall be among the English poets after my death.' He is; he is with Shakespeare.'
But Matthew Arnold's reasoning does not seem to me conclusive. He says:
'Notwithstanding his short term and imperfect experience, by virtue of his feeling for beauty and of his perception of the vital connection of beauty with truth, Keats accomplished so much in poetry that in one of the great modes by which poetry interprets, in the faculty of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare.'
Though Keats has once or twice reached magical interpretation of nature, only to be compared with that of Shakespeare or Blake, no one has yet noticed that in manifold richness of rhythm and in the dying fall of new cadences, the blank verse of Keats in Hyperion surpasses even the 'organ tones' of Milton.
I could, if I would, give a dozen passages to prove that, to me at least, Keats and not Shelley was the 'divinest of the demi-gods.' Yet England almost let him starve. It was thirty-seven years after his death before Keats's poems were reprinted in England, and it took fifty-odd years for him to reach his proper place, side by side with Shakespeare and Blake.
Think of his sonnet On Seeing the Elgin Marbles:
My spirit is too weak-mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
And his Ode to a Nightingale:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves has never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan…
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
The dying cadences of these lines are the finest in English verse. Think, too, of the lines in his last sonnet:
The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.
Who would have dared to say then that this half-educated, consumptive lad had written purer English than Shakespeare himself and finer blank verse than Milton, and considering his years, stands without a peer in the Pantheon of Humanity?
No wonder Shelley wrote of him, Shelley who was gifted in every way, wellborn, well-bred, well-taught, yet able to keep his personal divine inspiration through all the vicissitudes of life: … Till the future dare Forget the past, his name and fate shall be, An echo and a Light unto Eternity, … till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and name shall be An echo and a light unto eternity.
I have said little of Shelley, but he was a divine poet and some of his verses are always with me:
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou are gone, Love itself shall slumber on.
It was Keats who enforced the lesson which Shakespeare was the first to teach me, that poetry at its best is on the topmost height of thought, either lighting the feet of struggling humanity or encouraging men and women on the upward way, or by sheer beauty attuning them to the humane ideal.
After Keats came Thomson and Tennyson, of whom I have already written; and the next one who had a great effect upon me was Robert Browning. I have done a sort of portrait of him and have devoted several pages to him already in this Life of mine, but here I wish to say one or two things more.
I couldn't understand why he was not more widely appreciated in England.
