Once he wrote, 'Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.' It is a factful of himself—lawless, radical and non-civilized, agleam in the mixed world. It is everybody—poets, burglars, nursemaids: everybody. He wrote it in a hundred other ways, but it is all in that: it is the lyric epitome of every day. Pleasure never is at home.
And 'Heard melodies are sweet,' he wrote, 'but those unheard are sweeter—
There spoke the wild delicate wiseness of his brain and the passionate delicate wonder of his heart.—John Keats! John Keats!
But everything he wrote, the Grecian Urn itself, is immeasurably less lyric than himself writing it and being it.
He is rich bright-wet living lyric for this Me in this Now though he has lain dead in Rome nearly the full hundred years.
My garbled life and my thinking hunger feed upon him.
He was the one human one who walked on in the way before him: not around the jagged little stones and icy little pools that were in it: but straight on through them all, though his lyric feet were quivering shuddering sensitive, sensitive beyond knowledge of commoner feet that walk around.
It fattens my leanest self to keep that in my constant
