Thursday August 18.
I finished Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St Agnes & Hyperion,[1] before breakfast. The three first disapointed me. The extracts I had seen of them, were undeniably the finest things in them. But there is some surprising poetry—poetry of wonderful grandeur, in the Hyperion. The effect of the appearance of Hyperion, among the ruined Titans, is surpassingly fine.[2] Poor poor Keats. His name shall be in my “Poets Record.[”][3] Like his own Saturn, he was dethroned from the seat which his genius claimed: and in the radiance of his own Hyperion, will he appear to posterity—in
“splendour, like the morn,
Pervading all the beetling gloomy steeps
All the sad spaces of oblivion.”[4]
I talked to Mr. Curzon until three, when we dined. Afterwards he went away;—& we went out. Gathering mushrooms. I am glad we were so employed. It gave me an excuse for rambling away by myself, & letting my mind roll itself out, as the chart of a sad voyager. I knew, poetry wd. do me no good just now. I knew right. My spirits are very very cloudy! I wish one wish!-- Vain,—as if I wished a thousand!— No letters today!—but a parcel from Worcester, containing a little edition of Reynolds’s Lectures for Eliza Cliffe,[5] & Holwell’s Dionysius.[6] I looked over some of Dionysius: a good part of his letter to Gnaius Pompeius,[7] which defends his criticism on Plato; while they were playing chess. I dont think that I shall sit down seriously to Dionysius, before I have finished Theophrastus, & read Isocrates’s Panegyricus. Bro is better today, but not well.
1. John Keats, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (London, 1820).
2. At the conclusion of Bk. II of “Hyperion.”
3. Wellesley has three manuscript versions of this early poem, one of which was published in Anthony Munday and Other Essays, by Eustace Conway (New York, 1927). Keats is not mentioned—perhaps E.B.B. contemplated a further revision.
4. Lines 357–359.
5. This suggests that E.B.B. bought for Eliza the 12mo edition of the Discourses, which formed volume 20 of The British Prose Writers (London, 1820).
6. William Holwell, ed. Selecti Dionysii Halicarnassensis de Priscis Scriptoribus Tractatus (London, 1766). E.B.B.’s copy of the 1778 edition formed Lot 625 of Browning Collections.
7. Ed. cit., pp. 105–127 of the Latin text, and pp. 171–189 of the Greek text.
