Iii monologue — Shakespeare's treatment of love & marriage, and other essays

For, evidently, it is in _Hyperion_, if anywhere, that we have to seek the afterglow of that experience of ‘grander mountains’ which, in June, he had set out to encounter. We must not indeed look in poetry of this quality for those detailed reproductions of what he had seen which Wordsworth condemned as ‘inventories’ in Scott, but which are not strange either to the lower levels of his own verse. Even in the letters written for the entertainment of a sick brother Keats rarely describes; and constantly, to others, he breaks off impatiently when he has begun. ‘My dear Reynolds--I cannot write about scenery and visitings.’ His impressions come from him in brief, sudden, unsought phrases; he left it to the methodic Brown to give the enchanting and ‘picturesque’ detail of mountains and valleys ‘in the manner of the Laputan printing-press.’ ‘I have been among wilds and mountains too much to break out much about their grandeur,’ he writes a little later to Bailey. But there is no doubt of the impression. He had hoped that his experience would ‘load’ him with grander mountains; and, in fact, as he goes on to tell, ‘The first mountains I saw, though not so large as some I have since seen, _weighed_ very solemnly upon me.’ And Brown tells us that when Windermere first burst upon their view, ‘he stopped as if stupefied with beauty.’[15]