tirely the oft-repeated "night," and all alike miss thereby much. of the deeper meaning of the poem.

In the first division of the poem (stanzas i-iii) the poet, after first stating the fact of his sorrow, expresses the strong desire to be transported beyond it all, as he poetically puts it, by " a draught of vintage." The sorrow of his brother's death had clouded his life and driven out all happiness. The happiness of the nightingale put his own unhappiness in stronger light, and made it appear greater by contrast. From it all he desires to get relief by fading away to the happy world of the nightingale.

Keats at this time was in great sorrow over the death of his brother Tom, who had died on December the first, only a few weeks before. He had seen Tom suffer, and had nursed him through the horrors of a consumptive's lingering sickness and death, "Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies," and had had some intimations that he himself was following fast in the same way. This in itself would be sufficient to justify his sorrows, and put himself in deep contrast to the exultant happiness of the nightingale.

In addition to this, however, Keats had a deeper and more spiritual cause of unhappiness. No doubt Tom's death had contributed to bring it about, but Keats was now in the mood Wordsworth speaks of in Tintern Abbey as "the burden of the mystery," and as "the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world." Keats was now passing from the stage of the youthful poet and lover of beauty to the philosophic age in which he was no longer content merely to enjoy and glory in the fulness of life and the unimpaired beauty of the world as seen through his poetic imagination. His development had been exceedingly rapid, and he had passed almost unobserved even by his friends from the poet to the philosopher, but not without knowing it well himself.

A recent very illuminating paper calls attention to the fact that in the spring of 1819, when this and other poems were composed, Keats was passing through a sharp crisis in the life of the spirit.2 He had, no doubt, been greatly influenced by Wordsworth and Coleridge, both of whom were philosophical poets, who had under

"The Real Tragedy of Keats," by G. R. Elliott. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, September, 1921.

gone similar crises in their poetic and spiritual development. As a consequence of this crisis Keats was no longer satisfied with the brilliant but æsthetic achievements of his poetry to date. Keats knew himself to be turning philosopher, and welcomed the change, but the change came about only with great heaviness of spirit. He willingly gave up the poetic innocence of his youth for the more profound mystery of life that came with the philosophic mind, but, like the Ancient Mariner's Wedding-Guest, he became not only a wiser but a sadder man.

As much as a year before this (April, 1818), he gave evidence of a spiritual struggle over the question of poetry and philosophy, and concluded, as he says in a letter to Taylor (24 April, 1818) to "turn all my soul to the latter," that is, to philosophy. The crisis was reached at the time of the composition of Lamia, a few months after the Ode to the Nightingale, in the summer of 1819, and then he settled once for all his attitude to philosophy. He concluded that though philosophy did rob the earth of some of its poetic charm and beauty, nevertheless, truth was better and was to be sought at all hazard.

The second image of the Ode, that of the nightingale in its forest darkness, may now be seen to have a deep significance. Its most obvious meaning is that Keats loved the quiet and the stillness, and even the darkness of the night more than the gaudy day. Keats was essentially a poet of repose and quiet. In Endymion he says, sympathetically:

But the crown

Of my life was utmost quietude. (Book III.)

No poet has ever been more a worshipper of the Queen-Moon and the Night than the author of Endymion. He loved it not merely as a physical experience, but it was also symbolic of the hunger of his spirit for quietness and calm. Though city-born, London delighted him no more than it did Wordsworth, and Hampstead was a quiet relief to his tired spirit. He delighted in such imagery as that in his own Ode on a Grecian Urn, for there he could see the "bride of quietness," and could enjoy the " unheard melodies," which are sweeter. It is surprising the number of references in his poems and letters to the delights of quietness. His spirit seemed to long for quietness and silence.

The deeper thought, however, is that Keats had begun to feel that his life and work were rapidly closing, and leaving an unfulfilled ideal of poetic work. But he was becoming reconciled to this, and said he was "half in love with easeful Death." Under these conditions he almost wishes to die. In the sonnet on Why did I laugh to-night he spoke of midnight as a fitting time to die, and said: "Yet would I on this very midnight cease." It is under similar conditions in the Ode that he thinks he could give up his "quiet breath," for

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.

He thinks the quiet of the midnight hour the most fitting time to die, when the nightingale is pouring forth its soul "In such an ecstacy." Never was a fond wish more completely denied suffering humanity, for Keats breathed his last in the arms of Severn almost at high noon.

Passing on, the poet contrasts the immortality of the nightingale's song, the same song having been heard by Ruth, with the transitoriness of human life and of his own song. By implication he desires personal immortality, as he had said directly in his letters. And he had earnestly hoped and labored to attain poetic immortality. But this bright hope, like the voice of the nightingale, passes away, and the world comes back upon him with "the weariness, the fever, and the fret," as before.

Keats, then, in this poem has revealed himself, and has shown not only his changing attitude of mind, but has given us a brief though all-important chapter in the history of his spirit, and at the same time a glimpse into his view of human life and of death.

A. W. CRAWFORD.

University of Manitoba.

REVIEWS

Immermann. Der Mann und sein Werk im Rahmen der Zeit- und Literaturgeschichte. Von HARRY MAYNC. München, C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1921. 627 pp.

Die Heidelberger Romantik. Von HERBERT LEVIN. München, Verlag Parcus & Co., 1922. 153 pp.

Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im Spiegel der nationalen Entwickelung von 1813-1918. Von WILHELM KOSCH. München, Verlag Parcus & Co., 1922. 44 pp.

Wieland's Attitude toward Woman and her Cultural and Social Relations. By MATTHEW G. BACH. New York, The Columbia University Press, 1922. 100 pp.

We have to do here with the most inclusive and ramifying biography that has ever been written of a German poet, the most detailed invoice thus far drawn up of the facts connected with what is conveniently known as Heidelberg romanticism as distinguished from that of Jena and Berlin, the beginnings of the most patriotic history of German literature within the period to be covered, and a quite typical and certainly not contemptible American dissertation. If the last work seems out of place in this composite review, I hasten to add that I am interested here, not merely in the ideas the authors elaborate and the ingenuity they display in framing their investigations, but also, and rather, in these four works as so many distinct types of scholarship in German. But should even this appeal to anyone as an inadequate reason for the inclusion of a treatise on Wieland, it may be said in further defence that he too was a romanticist-just as Wolfram von Eschenbach was, or Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerhart Hauptmann may be. If, moreover, there was one German writer during the first half of the last century more than another who was sympathetically familiar with such works of Wieland as Agathon and Don Sylvio von Rosalva it was Karl Immermann.

1 This is merely the first Lieferung of Kosch's projected work. There are to be three volumes in all. The first is to treat German literature from 1813 to 1848, and will be divided into fifty sections of which this Lieferung contains the first two: "Arndt und Schenkendorf" and "Die alte deutsche Burschenschaft."

Maync's great life of Immermann opens afresh the Immermann problem. As a writer of fiction he is dead with the exception of Der Oberhof, a work he never wrote, in actuality, and which, in the opinion of many students, should never have been amputated from Münchhausen and published separately. As a critic, a writer of travel sketches and history he never quite reached a high degree of perfection. But a great mass of material has been written on him, particularly in comparison with the meagre studies we have of German poets of superior distinction, or at least of greater innate gifts.

2

The Hempel edition of Immermann, edited by Boxberger, contains 88 pages of biographical matter apart from detailed introductions to each of his separate works. Max Koch did Immermann full justice in the four-volume edition in the Deutsche NationalLiteratur series. Franz Muncker adopted the same scheme in the Cotta edition of six volumes. Werner Deetjen edited him in three large volumes, Deutsches Verlagshaus Bong, and Maync himself said, one would have thought, the last word in his edition of five volumes, Bibliographisches Institut. Of the monographs that have been written on Immermann there is no end, for more are still to come. And a possible piece of work would be a study in the development of editing Der Oberhof.*

A complete list of the studies on Immermann can be had from Mayne's biography, pp. 595-597; Karl Lebrecht Immermann by the present writer. pp. 142-147, and an article in Modern Language Notes, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1. The Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift of March-April, 1922, contains an article by Joseph Risse, entitled "Immermann und die neuere Forschung" which brings the subject up to date.

Of the works that are promised on Immermann, Harry Maync is at present engaged on a complete commentary to Münchhausen. It will be recalled that Ferdinand Freiligrath was asked to write this nearly threequarters of a century ago, when the allusions were still fresh, but declined on the ground of inability. The late Richard M. Meyer also had in mind the compiling, or composing, of such a work. The Immermann Mss. now in the Stadtbibliothek at Dortmund are to be edited by Joseph Risse, who even speaks, in Goethean language, of the joy he is experiencing as a result of having unearthed the Ur-Alexis.

Two new editions of Der Oberhof have just appeared: (a) Der Oberhof. Erzählung. Mit einer Einführung von Prof. Dr. Viktor Kubelka. Reichenberg, Gebr. Stiepel, 1921. 383 pp. (b) Der Oberhof. Die Geschichte eines westfälischen Hofes. Eingeleitet und herausgegeben von Fritz Budde. Dortmund, Gebr. Lensing. 1922. 242 pp.