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His limitation lies in the fact that he did not rise in his poetry to the acute perception of that intellectual and spiritual beauty which at once embraces and transcends the delight of the senses. "I have loved the principle of beauty in all things," he wrote in one of his letters, and had he lived he might have felt and explored more deeply the mysteries of life. In the work which he did accomplish, it is in the outward world that his glowing imagination revels. In so far he fell short of the highest; and yet it must never be forgotten how much he did, or that this much is the more because so finely done.

For exquisite and enthralling is the art of Keats in its imaginative presentation of sensuous beauty, and completely is it vitalized by the power of a living imagination. In his first published sonnet he wrote:

"'Mongst bough's pavilion'd, where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell";

and the power here shown of sending his imagination after his idea, of so embodying himself in his fancy as to realize the very atmosphere into which it takes the mind, is shown in his every page. He identified himself so fully with the

thought that it is, so to say, made incarnate and tangible before our eyes. The marvelous richness of his verse is due even more to the vividness with which the reader is made to share the perceptions of the poet than to the astonishing abundance and variety of the thought and images. Examined technically, his style, while it will yield up its ultimate secret no more than any other true poetry,

easily discloses certain means by which its results are obtained. There is unusual happiness of epithet, fine felicity of diction, delicate sensitiveness to word color, and no less to rhythmical effects; while there is almost always that directness and simplicity which seem so easy and which are so all but impossible. Above all these is the rare fitness of word to sense, the intimate union of verse and idea. Keats possessed to a high degree that all but supreme gift of being equally sensitive to thought and to the expression which conveys it. The emotion of the idea and the emotion of the language must be felt equally by the perfect poet; and no writer of the century has rivaled Keats in this dual sensibility. It would hardly be too fanciful to say that he became so completely the thought that he felt the verse in which it was clothed as the consummate actor feels the appropriateness of the robes of the character he plays. The result is that he gives us not a theme and its expression, but that ineffable product of their perfect mingling which we call poetry.

VI

As there is no other poet who has stood so high on the strength of work so inconsiderable in bulk, so there is none who under such conditions of youth and incomplete accomplishment has taken in the history of the development of our literature a place so assured. There is no stronger link between the poetry of the Elizabethan time and that of the Victorian school than John Keats; and the more closely this statement is examined the more suggestive and the more accurate in substantial effect it is found to be. The spirit of poetic beauty abode in the wilderness throughout the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries; and if Milton sometimes went in stately austerity to declare his allegiance,

if Dryden made hasty tryst now and then at her hidden shrine, and although Herrick and Waller and one and another lyricist now and again caught glimpses of her bright robe gleaming through the dry and barren thickets, it was not until Shelley and Keats brought her back in triumph that she came again to her long vacant throne. Burns had thrilled with the joy of her approach; Wordsworth had made clear the way of her coming; Coleridge had gone out into the desert to see and to hail her nearing; but it was with Keats and Shelley that she came again to bless the haunts of living men.

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The influence of Keats upon later poetry is a theme which might be considered at much length without exhausting the subject. Both in verse forms and in poetic diction has his work affected all that has come after. Keats rediscovered the delight and wonder that lay enchanted in the dictionary," Lowell says happily. His rich and imaginative diction, his felicity of epithet, his fine fitness of phrase, have left their unmistakable trace on almost every page of Tennyson and, indeed, quickened almost all genuine poetry which has been written since his time. His influence is especially apparent in the work of the pre-Raphaelite school, which almost seems to presuppose him as a necessary antecedent. It is curious to note, it may be remarked in passing, how strongly his posthumous poem, “Hush, hush! tread softly!" suggests the manner of Rossetti and Swinburne. It is hardly possible to read this passionate lyric without wondering whether Keats, if he had lived, might not have developed in a line which would at once have anticipated and outdone the triumphs of these later singer in the vein which is peculiarly their own. Poetry is the expression of a civilization of a people rather than of an individual, and the emotional developments which Rossetti and Swinburne have phrased in our own day were already

in progress when Keats wrote. He was of a genius so acutely sensitive and receptive as to respond to the faintest quiverings in the spiritual and emotional atmosphere, so that he might well have been sufficiently in advance of his time to feel those thrills of which the majority of his countrymen were unconscious until almost half a century later.

Speculations of this sort, however, are rather fascinating than profitable, and deserve mention here only as having some bearing upon the question of the influence of Keats. It is enough in a study so brief as this must be, to point out the place which our poet held as a connecting link between the Elizabethans and the brilliant writers of the Nineteenth century. Less philosophical than Wordsworth, less lyric than Shelley, less spiritual than either; originating little in form or in treatment, Keats has yet been an influence no less vital than they. He has handed on the torch which lighted the greatest epoch of English poetry, and the sympathetic student of his poetry is hardly likely to wonder at the conclusion to which Sidney Colvin comes in saying that it seems to him "probable that by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shakespearian spirit that has lived since Shakespeare."

BIBLIOGRAPHY,

A complete bibliography of the literature relating to Keats would occupy too much space and would hardly be in place in a volume of the nature of the present. The student may, however, be glad of some guide to the best editions and criticisms.

Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats; with notes and appendices, by H. B. Forman. 4 vols. (Exhaustive edition, containing, with small supplementary volume, all of the writings of Keats which have been printed, including letters.)

Poems of Keats; with notes, by Francis T. Palgrave. (Contains almost all of the poems which are of importance, with sympathetic and scholarly notes.)

Poetical Works of John Keats; edited by William T. Arnold. (The introduction contains an analysis of the elements of the poet's style.) Life, by Sidney Colvin. (English Men of Letters Series. On the whole the best biography.)

Life and Letters, by R. Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton. (Second edition, 1867. This was the first authoritative life, and is of much value, although later documents have shown that it is incorrect in a number of particulars. It has served as the basis of all subsequent studies upon the life of the poet.)

Life, by William M. Rossetti. (Great Writers Series. More critical, but also less sympathetic than Colvin.)

Letters of John Keats, edited by Sidney Colvin.

Among the most important essays are those by J. R. Lowell (Among My Books, 2d series), Matthew Arnold (Essays in Criticism, 2d series), and A. C. Swinburne (Miscellanies).

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