I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.’
Here is no waste of creative force; no transparent suasion of rhyme, such as in earlier days was wont to break the spell of vision; no starting off to the two-and-thirty palaces of sublimity; no flinging forth of half-realised pearls of conception. The cool fancy weaves its web with contained purpose; and the unexhausted imagination sees rising up before it the woe-begone face of him who lingers long in solitary places, that are silent of the song of birds, and who is desolate as are the groves they haunted. The ballad is simple and direct, but not of a simplicity and directness proper to prose. In this poem the poet moves through an atmosphere peculiar to poetry, lacing and interlacing his combinations of thought and measure, incorporating his meaning with his music, thinking to the melody of his song, and listening to the beat of rhythm echoing always ahead of him. The beautiful fragment, the ‘Eve of St. Mark,’ will furnish the necessary supplement to these remarks; and if it be objected to what is here advanced that the Ariosto-like ‘Cap and Bells,’ and the loosely-knit ‘Otho the Great,’ do not prove that Keats's method was maturing, it must be replied that the structural imperfections of the latter should not be charged against him, and that the poor babble Of the former shows only that Keats, like every lesser man, was subject to hours of inequality such as may not fairly be measured against his best and happiest moments.
The sonnets evidence his progress. The fine one on Chapman's 'Homer' came early, it is true, as also did the fanciful one on the 'Flower and Leaf;' but these came leashed with many a sorry draft, such as no judicious lover of Keats would grieve much to see suppressed. Later came 'The Day is gone,' 'As Hermes once,' 'On the Elgin Marbles,' 'Why did I laugh to-night!' and 'To Homer,' a sonnet containing that, perhaps, finest single line in Keats:
There is a budding morrow in midnight;'
and lastly came 'Bright Star.'
If, then, it is allowed that Keats was advancing in all that constituted his glory as an artist, and that, had he lived to the average age of man, he would have perfected his hold on that direct simplicity of method which is a treasure no true artist may forego, what shall we say of his progress and his prospect in all that constituted his value as a teacher? The word may startle some to whom Keats has seemed simply an imaginative youth, sometimes ecstatically inspired, moving forward in the world in moods intellectually and sensuously vacillating, and scarcely known to himself. And, indeed, it is easy to waste words in digging beneath the surface of his poetry for ethical meanings that were never hidden there; but it is quite as easy to undervalue his sense of what was due from him as a man. 'True,' he said, 'we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hands into its breeches-pocket;' but in a higher and happier moment he said, 'I find earlier days are gone by; I find I can have no enjoyment in the world but continually drinking of knowledge; I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some do it with their society; some with their art; some with their benevolence; some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good-humour on all they meet; and in a thousand ways, all
