couplet. It is the same with nearly every one of Keats's most characteristic lines :- O for a beaker full of the warm South, There is a fine excess in every phrase of that stanza, most of all in the phrase by which Keats so vividly describes the swift rising and vanishing of the "beaded bubbles." And Keats's "fine excess is always spent on luxuriating in beauty, whether sensuous or spiritual. Mr. Colvin tells us that Keats's mother was a lively, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some imprudence." If so, a considerable element in that eldest child's nature, and the ardour with which he, too, luxuriated in whatever seemed to stimulate his vivid sensations and emotions, may have been in great measure due to his having inherited his mother's temperament. You see this temperament which luxuriates in enjoyment, in the enjoyment even of woe, everywhere in Keats, in his letters as well as in his poems. In both alike you see the man who in the "Ode to Melancholy" could say : Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue A "fine excess," and a fine excess in the direction of luxuriating in rare emotion, could surely never have been more aptly expressed than in these lines. The richness of Keats is, of course, anything but classical, as Mr. Sidney Colvin very justly observes, and yet it is a richness which suggests Greek feeling, not in the least from the form, but from the poet's equal passion for all beauty wherever beauty is to be found. Unlike the modern poets, Keats never dwells specially on those human affections which, in the romantic era, so much superseded the passion for mere beauty. Nothing can be less Greek than the vast profusion with which Keats pours out his sense of beauty; nothing can be less Greek than that taste for " excess," even though it be a "fine excess," with which he seeks to surprise us. I can hardly imagine anything less Greek, for instance, than this, which is so characteristic of Keats that any good critic, even though he might not recognise the lines individually, would Keats" at once :cry out Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose, Nothing can be less Greek than the famous aspiration "to cease upon the midnight with no pain," in the "Ode to the Nightingale." What was Greek about Keats was his profound love of beauty as beauty. What was the very reverse of Greek was that proneness to an artificially "fine excess " with which he piled up luxuriant details of beauty till you cease to be able to see the forest for the trees. There was something like inebriety in that tendency to push delight in beauty up to the swooning point to which Mr. Colvin calls attention. But say what we will in attenuation of his claims to admiration, Keats was a priest to all time," if not of the wonder, at least of "the bloom of the world," which " we see with his eyes and are glad." A POET'S LOVE-LETTERS IN days when the wishes of the "pious founder " are not regarded with any superstitious respect, it is, I suppose, natural that the wishes of the poetic letter-writer should be regarded with none at all. As far as one can judge from the intense and acute horror with which Keats evidently regarded the discussion of his love by a coterie of friends, the notion of confiding his love-letters to the general public, though it were more than fifty years after his death, would have been simply hateful to him. He had all the dread which every man of strong nature is sure to feel of any contact between purely personal, though very deep emotions, and the curious criticism of an indifferent world. Feelings, the only meaning of which is individual, ought to be reserved for those for whom they have a meaning. When thrown into a poetic or imaginative form, they are, of course, so far transformed by that process as to be made applicable to the feelings of a thousand different minds under similar circumstances. But while they remain in the form of passionate avowals from A to B, and are marked by all the individual detail which applies only to the circumstances of A and B, there is a certain amount of indelicacy in inviting the inspection of all the world, from which Keats certainly, for his lifetime at all events, had the most sensitive shrinking. And though I do not say that the death of both parties, the fame of one of them, and the gulf of intervening time, do not diminish to some extent the unbecomingness of publishing this kind of correspondence, yet if I may trust the impression which it has produced upon my mind, there is still something decidedly unbecoming in doing this offence to Keats's feelings; and Mr. Forman would have judged better, I think, had he recommended the owners of these letters to give them to the flames. In proportion to our admiration for a man of genius, should be our wish to consult his wishes as to the disposal of his private concerns. And what can be a more private concern to any one than the fate of letters meant only for one person's eyes, and more or less liable to appear unseemly, eccentric, wanting in reticence, if brought under the eyes of any one else? Even the truest admirer of Keats will read these letters with a sense that they are prying into what he would have kept from them, if he could. And surely it is a very bad return to make to a man of genius for the delight he has given us, thus to avail ourselves of the permanence of records to which he would certainly have given, if he had been able, no longer existence than that of the two persons of whose tie to each other these letters formed some of the most important links. You might almost as fitly reproduce the actual lovers' talks and sighs of the present day for our posterity fifty years hence, by the help of the talking phonograph, as reproduce letters of this kind, which were evidently meant to perish with the relation which they recorded and modified. Yet who would dream of making love |