THE first beauty in my life is John Keats.
In John Keats is my faith in some resurrection.
Without John Keats human nature feels to be something broken, menacing, unspeakably despicable and lost—lost in the shade. With John Keats the lights break across it and reflect the blazing yellow sun again from eyes and foreheads and fingers and shining hair.
There are world-and-human things which it thrills me to think about and dwell on: Nathan Hale on the British gallows: the charge of Pickett's Confederate infantry at Gettysburg: Henry V, prince among kings and men, at Agincourt: Charlotte Corday in prison: Columbus with his felon crews sailing westward: Susan B. Anthony—a woman made in a strange still heroic splendor half-incredible: Alexander Hamilton: Arnold Winkelried: the sea-worn Pilgrim women disembarking into bitter Novemberness.
Those thrill me because they are brave persons and brave things full of idealistic strife: but they still are made of very struggling-garbled world-stuff—they are mere human fabric—till I think of John Keats: and at once they grow in-
