give to his works that stability which made certain from the first what he half doubtingly ventured to "think" in writing to his brother, that he should be "among the English poets" after his death. It was perhaps this great earnestness, over-straining his supersensitive nature, that led to most of the faults of his more youthful productions. The line of his reading was from early times the best calculated to invigorate and inspire his style; and although he fell at first into some of the laxities of early English poets, the small damage here and there effected in this way is insignificant when compared with the good he got from his studies. Spenser very soon gained a great influence over him, as the notes to Endymion will tend to indicate; but curiously enough the early poem called an Imitation of Spenser has very little that is directly Spenserian, and is much more like an imitation of Thomson -an echo from the Spenserian galleries of The Castle of Indolence. In the opening of "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," Keats makes good use of a mental phase inspired by the earlier poem The Floure and the Lefe, and if, in the same line of reading, he caught the trick of writing such a couplet as

And glides into a bed of water lillies :

Broad leav'd are they and their white canopies

the balance is still very clearly in our favour. Now and then the debt to classic literature is a little too evident; but as a rule Keats's works are remarkably

free from other men's thoughts. It is quite exceptional to come upon such a household word as was reset for us in the lines

To where the hurrying freshnesses aye preach

A natural sermon o'er their pebbly beds;

which we cannot help placing at a disadvantage beside the lines from As You Like It (Act II, Scene 1)

And this our life exempt from public haunt

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.

But the real wonder about Keats is what a little way into the land of his poetry the reader carries with him the sense of shortcomings of this kind. Endymion bears us along in a whirl of imaginative creation; and the beauties with which it is lavishly strewn scarcely leave time for the thought that the construction wants perspicacity—a thought which will intrude at last. In work later than Endymion there are probably more passages wherein the thought or feeling, whatever it may be, is expressed with an almost absolute felicity than will be found in the like bulk of work by any other modern English poet. The Odes to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn and on Indolence, The Eve of St. Mark and La Belle Dame sans Merci, may be named among the most sustained examples of this lofty felicity. Perhaps it will be objected that the opening of the Ode to a Nightingale is not really clear, that it is not

made evident at a glance how the poet's numbness arose from being too happy in the bird's happiness,— too happy that the bird sang "of summer in fullthroated ease"; but I am not sure that the tremulous thickness of utterance arising from intense emotion is not better rendered by the means employed, even if unconsciously employed and unintentionally rendered, than it would have been if the thought had undergone a little more chastening; while the prismatic line

No hungry generations tread thee down

is Dantesque in its weird vigour,-a touch of the highest genius, bringing before us visions of many terrible things, and chiefly of multitudinous keen and cruel faces more awful in the relentless oppressiveness of their onset upon the sensitive among men than anything in the mighty visions of damnation and detestableness seen five hundred years ago in Italy. The unphilosophic obliqueness of the analogy drawn-the comparison between the lot of the individual man and that of the general nightingale - scarcely detracts from the value, as it certainly does not from the supreme beauty, of the poem-while we know not how much the pathos is enhanced by this very obliqueness of analogy.

It was late in Keats's short life before he began to give birth to grand thoughts such as those just glanced at. The mythology and poetry of the moon were perhaps longer uppermost in his thoughts than in any other poet's. Beside the Endymion that he speaks of

in his letter to Clarke of the 17th of December 1816, a poem now identified with "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," there are what we may term lunar traces throughout the early volume of Poems. Even in the poor little poem To Some Ladies, which is not even carefully finished up to its own Tom Moorish standard, seeing that the second quatrain lacks a rhyme,even in this we have talk of "Cynthia's face, the enthusiast's friend." In the Epistle to George Felton Mathew we read

in happy hour

Came chaste Diana from her shady bower,

and in the Epistle to George Keats there are the really admirable verses about the poet and what he sees beside the mere moon in heaven

Ah, yes! much more would start into his sight

The revelries and mysteries of night :

And should I ever see them, I will tell you

Such tales as needs must with amazement spell you.

Again in the Epistle to Clarke

When Cynthia smiles upon a summer's night,
And peers among the cloudlet's jet and white,
As though she were reclining in a bed

Of bean blossoms, in heaven freshly shed.

Once more in the Sonnet to George Keats

Cynthia is from her silken curtains peeping

So scantly, that it seems her bridal night,

And she her half-discover'd revels keeping.

And the Hecate character of the moon is clearly enough

alluded to in the two lines closing the Sonnet to

And when the moon her pallid face discloses,

I'll gather some by spells, and incantation.

Indeed Keats may almost be said to have made the moon and her lover his own,—so much so that Browning, in one of his two tributes to Keats, conveys a whole romanceful of meaning in a word, the word even in those glorious trochaics from One Word More:

What, there's nothing in the moon note-worthy?
Nay-for if that moon could love a mortal,
Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy)
All her magic ('tis the old sweet mythos)

She would turn a new side to her mortal,

Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman

Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace,

Blind to Galileo on his turret,

Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats-him, even !

Had Keats never passed out of the lunar phase he would still have produced a book far more remarkable than Chamberlayne's Pharonnida, a poem which bears a certain resemblance to Endymion, and which, I think, had been read by the modern poet (see page 265 of this volume); and much of even the 1817 volume must perforce have been remembered; but it is the volume published in 1820 that assures him a seat among the immortals.

Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave refers in his Golden Treasury to Keats as "a poet deserving the title 'mar