[386]
On leaving school he was apprenticed for five years to a surgeon at
Edmonton. His master was a Mr. Hammond, "of some eminence" in his
profession, as Lord Houghton takes care to assure us. The place was of
more importance than the master, for its neighborhood to Enfield enabled
him to keep up his intimacy with the family of his former teacher, Mr.
Clarke, and to borrow books of them. In 1812, when he was in his
seventeenth year, Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke lent him the "Faerie Queene."
Nothing that is told of Orpheus or Amphion is more wonderful than this
miracle of Spenser's, transforming a surgeon's apprentice into a great
poet. Keats learned at once the secret of his birth, and henceforward his
indentures ran to Apollo instead of Mr. Hammond. Thus could the Muse
defend her son. It is the old story,--the lost heir discovered by his
aptitude for what is gentle and knightly. Haydon tells us "that he used
sometimes to say to his brother he feared he should never be a poet, and
if he was not he would destroy himself." This was perhaps a
half-conscious reminiscence of Chatterton, with whose genius and fate he
had an intense sympathy, it may be from an inward foreboding of the
shortness of his own career.[387]
Before long we find him studying Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and afterward
Milton.
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