JOHN KEATS EKING IT OUT 47tish highlands. In rugged and already Romantically picturesque landscape, Keats
saw, really saw, things he ’d never seen. Walking westward over hilly country
toward Windermere, they stopped when the lake came into view with moun-
tains beyond in mist and clouds. “How can I believe in that?” Keats exclaimed,
“surely it cannot be!” Nothing in the world could equal it. Then a hundred
yards further: “more and more wonderfully beautiful!”
Up at dawn, they didn’t mind walking eight to ten miles before breakfast.
“We arose this morning at six, because we call it a day of rest, having to call on
Wordsworth who lives only two miles hence,” Keats writes to Tom. But Lord
Wordsworth (as he calls him) was away campaigning for a Tory candidate, so
“before breakfast we went to see the Ambleside water fall.” This “first water-
fall I ever saw” struck Keats to the core. His journal-letter to Tom shows him
“open-lidded,” exuberant at the fall’s energy and design.
The morning beautiful—the walk easy among the hills. We, I may say, fortu-
nately, missed the direct path, and after wandering a little, found it out by the
noise—for, mark you, it is buried in trees, in the bottom of the valley—the
stream itself is interesting throughout with “mazy error over pendant shades.”
Milton meant a smooth river—this is buffeting all the way on a rocky bed
ever various—but the waterfall itself, which I came suddenly upon, gave me a
pleasant twinge. First we stood a little below the head about halfway down the
first fall, buried deep in trees, and saw it streaming down two more descents
to the depth of near fifty feet—then we went on a jut of rock nearly level with
the second fall-head, where the first fall was above us, and the third below
our feet still—at the same time we saw that the water was divided by a sort
of cataract island on whose other side burst out a glorious stream—then the
thunder and the freshness. At the same time the different falls have as differ-
ent characters; the first darting down the slate-rock like an arrow; the second
spreading out like a fan—the third dashed into a mist—and the one on the
other side of the rock a sort of mixture of all these. We afterwards moved
away a space, and saw nearly the whole more mild, streaming silverly through
the trees. What astonishes me more than any thing is the tone, the coloring,
the slate, the stone, the moss, the rock-weed; or, if I may so say, the intellect,
the countenance of such places. The space, the magnitude of mountains and
waterfalls are well imagined before one sees them; but this countenance or
intellectual tone must surpass every imagination and defy any remembrance.
I shall learn poetry here.In memory’s knapsack Keats carries the “mazy” river of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
But this Eden has no “smooth river—this is buffeting all the way on a rocky
bed.” A painter who’d gone there decades earlier found the stream too “over-
grown with wood” to approach easily, “but if a path could be carried through,”
it “might be made very beautiful.” Keats liked it “buried deep in trees.”
Then suddenly the waterfall grips him. They descend halfway, “grasping the