we are not drawn by love of singularity, and from which we are not scared by nervous tremors; the doubt which is not the denial of anything, so much as the proving of all things; the doubt of one who would rather walk in mystery than in false lights, who waits that he may win, and who prefers the broken fragments of truth to the imposing completeness of a theory. Such is that uncertainty of a large mind, which a small mind cannot understand; and such no doubt was, in part, that of Keats, who was fond of saying that "every point of thought is the centre of an intellectual world." The passive part of intellect, the powers of susceptibility and appreciation, Keats possessed to an almost infinite degree; but in this respect his mind appears to have been cast in a feminine mould; and that masculine energy which Shakespeare combined with a susceptive temperament unfathomably deep, in him either existed deficiently, or had not had time for its development.

If we turn from the poet to the man, from the works to the life, the retrospect is less painful in the case of Keats than of Shelley. He also suffered from ill-health, and from a temperament which, when its fine edge had to encounter the jars of life, was subject to a morbid despondency; but he had many sources of enjoyment, and his power of enjoyment was extraordinary. His disposition, which was not only sweet and simple, but tolerant and kindly, procured and preserved for him many friends. It has been commonly supposed that adverse criticism had wounded him deeply and in an unworthy manner; but the charge

receives a complete refutation from a letter written on the occasion referred to. In it he says: "Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. . . . I will write independently. I have written independently without judgment. may write independently, and with judgment, hereafter. The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. . . . I was never afraid of failure."

I

There are, however, trials in the world from which the most imaginative cannot escape; and which are more real than those which self-love alone can make important to us. Keats's sensibility amounted to disease. "I would reject," he writes, "a Petrarchal coronation on account of my dying day-and because women have cancers!" A few months later, after visiting the house of Burns, he wrote thus: "His misery is a dead weight on the nimbleness of one's quill: I tried to forget it . . . it won't do. . . . We can see, horribly clear, in the works of such a man, his whole life, as if we were God's spies." It was this extreme sensibility, not less than his ideal tendencies, which made him shrink with prescient fear from the world of actual things. Reality frowned above him like a cliff seen by a man in a nightmare dream. It fell on him at last! The most interesting of all his letters is that to his brother,2 in which he, with little anticipation of results, describes his first meeting with the Oriental beauty who soon after became the object of his passion. 2 P. 224, vol. i.

1 P. 171.

"1

In love he had always been, in one sense; and personal love was but the devotion to that in a concentrated form which he had previously and more safely yearned towards as a loveliness scattered and diffused. He loved and he won; but death cheated him of the prize. Tragical indeed were his sufferings during the months of his decline. In leaving life he lost what can never be known by the multitudes who but half live; and poetry at least could assuredly have presented him but in scant measure with the consolations which the mere Epicurean can dispense with most easily, but which are needed most by those whose natures are most spiritual, and whose thirst after immortality is consequently the strongest. Let us not, however, intrude into what we know not. In many things we are allowed to rejoice with him. His life poetic, if not his external life, had been one long revel. "The open sky," he writes to a friend, "sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown: the air is our robe of state; the earth is our throne; and the sea a mighty minstrel playing before it!" Less a human being than an Imagination embodied, he passed, "like a new-born spirit," over a world that for him ever retained the dew of the morning; and bathing in all its freshest joys he partook but little of its stain.

Shelley and Keats remained with us only long enough to let us know how much we have lost

We have beheld these lights but not possessed them.1

ΧΙ

LANDOR'S POETRY

LANDOR was the earliest of our modern poets specially characterised by their devotion to ideal beauty and to classical associations. With classical literature his name has long been intimately joined, not only by many an "Imaginary Conversation" in which the heroes, poets, and philosophers of antiquity are evoked from the shades, but yet more by his poetry, formed as that was, after a classical model,— his English poetry, not less than that written with such signal merit in the Latin language. That model has its deficiencies as well as its excellences. How great are the latter is attested by the fact, that after the lapse of so many centuries, and the intervention of so many sources of interest, alien or adverse, we still meet both scholars and men of original genius who seem never at home but when they breathe the air of antiquity.

In Landor's earlier dialogue between Southey and Porson, the latter is introduced expressing a preference for ancient above modern poetry. If his opinion,

however, was expressed in the passage referred to, it has apparently undergone no change from the publication of Gebir to that of the Hellenics, a book which cannot be better described than by saying that the name has not been ill chosen. The following promise is made good:--

I promise ye, as many as are here,

Ye shall not, while ye tarry with me, taste
From unrinsed barrel the diluted wine
Of a low vineyard, or a plant ill-pruned,
But such as anciently the Ægean isles
Pour'd in libation at their solemn feasts.

The Hellenics have all the clear outline, the definite grace, and the sunny expansiveness of Greek poetry, and not less its aversion to the mysterious and the spiritual. Above all, they are classical in their peculiar mode of dealing with outward nature.

The difference between ancient and modern poetry is in some measure analogous to that between the landscape of the South and of the North. Seen through air of gemlike purity, the former is characterised by its amplitude and its definiteness. A wider horizon embraces a noble and large field,-a field, notwithstanding, distinctly limited; for in that clear air the distant mountain cuts the sky with a sharp and marked line. The landscape of the North is, on the contrary, seen as through a mist; but that mist harmonises the light and shade, freshens the near thicket with a more various colouring, and diffuses over the retiring distance a shadowy tenderness and pathos. In the former, the remote mountain looks