. The earliest
known experiment of his is the "Imitation of Spenser"--four Spenserian
stanzas, beginning--

"Now Morning from her orient chamber came,"

and very poor stanzas they are. This Imitation was written while he was
living at Edmonton, in his nineteenth year, and thus there was nothing
singularly precocious in Keats, either in the age at which he began
versifying, or in the skill with which he first addressed himself to the
task. I might say more of other verses, juvenile in the amplest sense of
the term, but such remarks would belong more properly to a later section
of this volume. I will therefore only observe here that the earliest
poems of his in which I can discern anything even distantly approaching
to poetic merit or to his own characteristic style (and these distantly
indeed) are the lines "To ----"

"Hadst thou lived in days of old,"

and "Calidore, a Fragment,"

"Young Calidore is paddling o'er the lake."

The dates of these two compositions are not stated, but they were
probably later than the opening of 1815, and if so Keats would have been
nearly or quite twenty when he wrote them--and this is far remote from
precocity. Let us say then, once for all, that, whatever may be the
praise and homage due to Keats for ranking as one of the immortals when
he died aged twenty-five, no sort of encomium can be awarded to him on
the ground that, when he first began, he began early and well. All his
rawest attempts, be it added to his credit, appear to have been kept to
himself; for Cowden Clarke, who was certainly his chief literary
confidant in those tentative days, says that until Keats produced to him
his sonnet "written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison" the
youth's attempts at verse-writing were to him unknown. The 3rd of
February 1815 was the day of Hunt's liberation, so that the endeavour
had by this time been going on in silence for something like a year or
more.

It was not till 1816--or let us say when he was just of age--that Keats
produced a truly excellent thing. This is the sonnet "On first looking
into Chapman's Homer." A copy of Chapman's translation had been lent to
Cowden Clarke; he and Keats sat up till daylight reading it, the young
poet shouting with delight, and by ten o'clock on the following morning
Keats sent the sonnet to Clarke. It was therefore a sudden immediate
inspiration, a little rill of lava flowing out of a poetic volcano,
solidified at once. This