¹ The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), I, 231. References by volume and page number to this edition are hereafter included in the text.

² Clarence D. Thorpe, The Mind of John Keats (New York, 1926), p. 50. The notion of poetic creation as imaginative release has been examined most recently within the context of Keats's imagery by Mario L. D'Avanzo in Keats's Metaphors for the Poetic Imagination (Durham, N. C, 1967). See especially Ch. iii.

³ Thorpe, p. 94.

⁴ See the important discussion in “Negative Capability,” Ch. X of W. J. Bate's John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), reprinted in somewhat abbreviated form in Keats: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Bate (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1964), pp. 51–68. It is, of course, impossible to summarize adequately Bate's views, drawing as they do on much of his previous work in eighteenth- and earlier nineteenth-century aesthetics. See in particular Bate's From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), especially the later chapters.

⁵ The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (London, 1947), iv, 463.

⁶ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Liter aria, ed. J. Shawcross (London, 1907), I, 202; ii, 16.

⁷ Although to some degree prefigured in earlier Greek thought, the conception derives largely from the cosmology of Aristotle. See George Sarton, A History of Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), ii, 242, 452, 475, 509.

⁸ The courses are noted as a part of Keats's record on a page of the Register of Apothecaries' Hall. See Amy Lowell, John Keats (Boston, 1925), i, 154.

⁹ William Babington, M.D., and William Allen, F.L.S., A Syllabus of a Course of Chemical Lectures Read at Guy's Hospital (London, 1802), p. 1. The same definition appears on the second page of the MS of Babington's lectures preserved in the Wills Library, Guy's Hospital. Keats attended lectures in 1815–16. I am indebted to Mr. A. H. Burfoot, Clerk to the Governors, and to Mr. W. H. G. Hills, Librarian of the Wills Library, for the information that, since Allen was traveling on the Continent in 1816, Keats may have attended lectures given by either Babington or Alexander Marcet, who joined Babington and Allen in bringing out a revised edition of the syllabus in 1816. According to Robert Gittings the courses in chemistry Keats attended were given by Marcet (John Keats, London, 1968, p. 49).

¹⁰ The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1930), v, 51.

¹¹ In Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton, N. J., 1946) Marjorie Nicolson has shown how for poets the two contexts, the general and the scientific, had, well before Keats's day, already begun to overlap and interassimilate. See particularly her discussion of such a central poet as Thomson and his use of “ether” (pp. 48–50). One could cite, more specifically, Keats's copy of John Bonnycastle's An Introduction to Astronomy, a school prize which, as Bate remarks [John Keats, p. 26, ii.), there is no reason to doubt the poet read. The word is there used in its general or classical sense at least four times in quotations from Ovid and Homer (in translation) and Milton (4th ed., London, 1803, pp. 146, 161, 314). Yet Bonnycastle also defines the word in his glossary of scientific terms (p. 428) and explains its relevance to Newton's ideas, albeit in much oversimplified and skeptical fashion (pp. 95–96). See also George Bornstein's “Keats's Concept of the Ethereal,” Keats-Shelley Journal, xviii (1969), 97–106, an article that appeared while my own was in press and which discusses Keats's use of the term within a quite different context.

¹² Sir Humphry Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy (London, 1839–40), iv, 140 (Davy's italics). For purposes of convenience references are to this edition rather than that of 1812, the text of which is virtually identical to that cited. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Davy are from the Elements of Chemical Philosophy and are included in parentheses within the text.

¹³ Perhaps the best discussions of ethereal fluids and their influence following Newton are contained in “The Education of a Philosopher,” Ch. ii of L. Pearce Williams' Michael Faraday (New York, 1964) and in the earlier chapters of I. Bernard Cohen's Franklin and Newton (Philadelphia, 1956). See also Carl Grabo's l Newton Among Poets (Chapel Hill, N. C, 1930), esp. Chs. vi and vii, which discuss the theories of Newton, Davy, and others and their effect on Shelley.

¹⁴ Endymion iii.25–35. Citations from Keats's poetry are to John Keats: Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston, 1959) and are hereafter included in the text. In The Consecrated Urn (London, 1959) Bernard Blackstone discusses this passage and Keats's use of “ethereal” generally within the context of the Hermetic and alchemical philosophy of Agrippa, Burton, and the Timaeus. In my view the parallels between Keats's poetic theory and contemporary chemistry are more fundamental and revealing. See Blackstone, pp. 101, 112–113, 149–150, et passim.

¹⁵ “A Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry” (1802), Works, ii, 324–325. Cf. Woodhouse's remarks to Keats in a letter of October 1818, Letters, I, 380.

¹⁶ MS of Babington's lectures, Wills Library, Guy's Hospital, p. 4.

¹⁷ Miscellaneous Lectures, Works, viii, 283.

¹⁸ See also lv, 60–61, where Davy cites Black's law.

¹⁹ A Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (1802), Works, ii, 387.

²⁰ A. F. Fourcroy, Elements of Chemistry and, Natural History (Edinburgh, 1800), iii, 476.

²¹ A Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, Works, ii, 393 (Davy's italics). Cf. also ii, 445.

²² The First Principles of Chemistry, 2nd ed. (London, 1792), pp. 1–2.

²³ See Andrew Ure, ? Dictionary of Chemistry, 1st ed. (London, 1821), “Evaporation.” The term is also defined by Nicholson, p. 34, as well as used throughout Babington's lectures, pp. 41, 43, 60, 65, et passim.

²⁴ Nicholson, p. 34. The term is similarly defined in Babington's lectures, p. 65. Cf. Ure, “Distillation.”

²⁵ Ure, “Abstraction.”

²⁶ Ure, “Sublimation.” The term is also defined by Nicholson, pp. 34–35.

²⁷ In the Syllabus of a Course of Lectures Read at Guy's Hospital by Babington and Allen, the authors note, under the topic of “Caloric,” that “To the head of Evaporation may also be referred the process of Distillation, and Sublimation” (pp. 8–9; authors' italics).

²⁸ Spirits are of various kinds but usually produced by exposing wine, beer, or other fermented liquors to distillation (see Nicholson, p. 466). Cf. Keats's remarks to Woodhouse on wines “of a heavy and spirituous nature” compared with “the more ethereal Part” of the grape which “mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments” (ii, 64). Ure asserts (under “Essences”) that “Several of the volatile or essential oils are called essences by the perfumers,” and Babington and Allen note (p. 134) that they are obtained by distillation.

²⁹ The term is defined as a synonym for oxygen gas by Babington and Allen (p. 10). See also Fourcroy, in, 479, and Davy's section “Of Empyreal Undecompounded Substances,” iv, 165–180.

³⁰ A number of the terms considered in this paper have been usefully tabulated and examined by Newell F. Ford in The Prefigurative Imagination of John Keats (Stanford, Calif., 1951). While right in attacking transcendental interpretations of “essence,” Ford is not sufficiently exact when he takes the term as virtually equivalent to natural forms or objects or when he writes that “if Keats had written ‘An essense [sic] of beauty is a joy forever’ his meaning would not have been missed” (pp. 14–15).

³¹ The Neoplatonic reading, which has its roots in the criticism of Sir Sidney Colvin, Robert Bridges, and Ernest de Selincourt, is most systematically advanced by Claude L. Finney, The Evolution of Keats's Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), i, 291–305. Ford's attack, beginning with “The Meaning of ‘Fellowship with Essence’ in Endymion,” PMLA, LXII (1947), 1061–76, was combined with an erotic reading of the poem in “Endymion—a Neo-Platonic Allegory?” ELH, xiv (1947), 64–76, an interpretation expanded in the booklength study cited above. See also E. C. Pettet, On the Poetry of Keats (Cambridge, Eng., 1957), pp. 123–202.

³² Earl Wasserman has presented perhaps the most coherent argument to date for relating the Hermes episode to the action that follows by noting the part it plays in establishing that “contrast between union with essence under the conditions of the ideal world and union with essence in the world of mutability” that he sees at the heart of the drama. See The Finer Tone: Keats' Major Poems (Baltimore, Md.,1953), pp. 158–164.

³³ The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Haydon, ed. Aldous Huxley (London, 1926), i, 269.