Chief of organic numbers, Old scholar of the spheres!
read like an anticipation in the rough of the first stanza of Tennyson's masterly set of alcaics already referred to, beginning 'O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies.' To the 22nd belongs the sonnet, 'O golden tongued Romance with serene lute,' in which Keats bids himself lay aside (apparently) his Spenser,[5] in order to read again the more rousing and human-passionate pages of _Lear_. This is one of the last of his sonnets written in the Petrarchan form as followed by Milton and Wordsworth, and from henceforth he follows the Shakespearean form almost exclusively. On the 31st he writes to Reynolds in a rollicking mood, and sends him the lines to Apollo beginning 'Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,' part rant (the word is his own) pure and simple, part rant touched with genius, and giving words to a very frequent and intense phase of feeling in himself:--
Aye, when the soul is fled Too high above our head, Affrighted do we gaze After its airy maze, As doth a mother wild, When her young infant child Is in an eagle's claws-- And is not this the cause Of madness?--God of Song, Thou bearest me along Through, sights I scarce can bear: O let me, let me share With the hot lyre and thee, The staid Philosophy. Temper my lonely hours, And let me see thy bowers More unalarm'd!
By way of a sober conclusion to the same letter, he adds the very fine and profoundly felt sonnet in the Shakespearean form beginning 'When I have fears that I may cease to be,' which be calls his last. On the 3rd of February he sends two spirited sets of verses in the favourite four-beat measure, heptasyllable varied with octosyllable, of the later Elizabethans and the youthful Milton, namely those to Robin Hood (suggested by a set of sonnets by Reynolds on Sherwood Forest) and those on the Mermaid Tavern. On the 4th comes another Shakespearean sonnet, that beginning 'Time's sea has been five years at its slow ebb,' in which he recalls the memory of an old, persistent, haunting love-fancy. The two sonnets of January 31 and February 4 should be read strictly together:--
When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charact'ry, Hold like full garners the full-ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think, Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.