under shifting guises of their wishes, feelings, and beliefs." The poets of the second order "simply fashion their creations by a kind of inventive craft, working amid materials supplied by sense, memory, and reading, without the distinct infusion of any element of personal opinion." It is evident that Keats is a poet of this second order. He is the typical poet of "art for art's sake," in the best sense of that expression. Rejecting the obligation to teach otherwise than implicitly, and the obligation to reflect common life otherwise than incidentally, he gets his inspiration from the great masters of poetry, from classical or medieval legend, and penetrates with wonderful certainty to secrets of which scholarship is popularly supposed to guard the approach. His genius is as great a mystery as that of Shakespeare. Possibly some future expert in "the nidification of mare's nests" may argue learnedly, in the face of all the evidence, that a man of Keats's limited education could not possible have written "Hyperion," just as it has been gravely argued, in the face of equally unimpeachable evidence, that the man whose education was confined to what he learned in the Stratford grammar school could not possibly have written "Hamlet" and "The Tempest." The argument seems to be that, since many persons who have enjoyed liberal educations administered in the orthodox way have, nevertheless, failed to write "Hamlets" and "Hyperions," no one who has not had these advantages could possibly have done anything of

the sort. Genius, however, has a way of achieving its purposes by means unknown to pedagogy, and what it was possible for Keats to accomplish with so rude a tool as Lemprière's "Classical Dictionary," may, nevertheless, remain entirely beyond the reach of the student who has achieved distinction in the most thorough schools of classical philology. Shakespeare, likewise, although his "small Latin and less Greek" has been too much insisted upon, was assuredly not a classical scholar in the technical sense, but he had read "North's "Plutarch," and to some purpose, as the Roman plays sufficiently testify.

Coming back to the question of the relation in which Keats stood toward the age in which he lived, we see that he absolutely rejected the notion that it is a poet's business to take, as some people will always insist that poets should take, "the ideas, manners, and customs of his own time, and in his poetic imagination weigh the essential and assign-in some measure, at least the things of to-day to their places in cosmic development.' This particular formula was given us by a writer in The Saturday Review, who objected to the pure beauty of the "Paolo and Francesca" of Mr. Stephen Phillips, just as he would doubtless have objected to the pure beauty of "Hyperion." He developed his programme in the following terms:

"The poet must grapple with underground railways, crowded public-houses, with vast neighbourhoods inhabited by jabbering human beasts, with A. B. C. restaurants, the Stock Ex

change, with parti-coloured Whitechapel High Street, the ranting daily papers, telephones, telegraphs, mutoscopes, musichalls, street-women, Hampstead artistic nibbling, Clapham chapels, Crouch End, Atlas omnibuses, Olympia, Parliament, the Yiddish group of Anarchists, the whole pell-mell of our modern life, without even going out of London."

I quote this programme as an illustration of the extremes to which the mad demand for realism in art can go, and as giving us occasion for renewed thankfulness that Keats had no such conception of the poetic function. When we read the letters of Keats, especially those written during the last three years of his life, we discover that he was not without a healthy interest in the political and social conditions of his age, although he never dreamed of finding in them the material for poetry. In his poems we shall hardly find anything more political than the praiseworthy but vague sentiment of the following lines:

"In the long vista of the years to roll

Let me not see our country's honour fade:

O let me see our land retain her soul,

Her pride, her freedom; and not freedom's shade."

But when we turn to his prose, we now and then come across passages which indicate that he is at least feeling his way toward a definite philosophical outlook upon history and modern life. We find this passage, for instance:

"I have been reading lately two very different books, Robertson's America and Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV. It is like

walking arm and arm between Pizarro and the great-little Monarch. In how lamentable a case we see the great body of the people in both instances; in the first when Men might seem to inherit quiet of Mind from unsophisticated senses, from uncontamination of civilisation, and especially from their being as it were estrayed from the mutual helps of Society and its mutual injuries-and thereby more immediately under the Protection of Providence-even there they had mortal pains to bear as bad, or worse even than Bailiffs, Debts, and Poverties of civilised Life. The whole appears to resolve into this-that Man is originally a poor forked creature subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts-at each stage, at each accent there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances-he is mortal and there is still a heaven with its stars above his head."

There is nothing very profound about this, to be sure; it is nothing more than the vague pessimism that overtakes almost every young man, when the mood is upon him, and he begins to think seriously about the meaning of life. We find a more direct reflection of the poet's immediate surroundings in the following passage:

"The example of England and the liberal writers of France and England sowed the seeds of opposition to tyranny, and it was swelling in the ground till it burst out in the French Revolution. That has had an unlucky termination. It put a stop to the rapid progress of free sentiments in England, and gave our Court hopes of turning back to the despotism of the sixteenth century. They have made a handle of this event in every way to undermine our freedom. They spread a horrid superstition against all innovation and improvement. The present struggle in England of the people is to destroy this superstition. What has roused them to do it is their distress."

Certain passages which occur in a long letter dated 1818, and written by Keats to his brother in America, seem to me to afford on the whole the most interesting reflex of his political opinion to be found anywhere in his writings.

...

"The long-continued peace of England," he writes, "has given us notions of personal safety which are likely to prevent the reëstablishment of our national honesty. There is of a truth nothing manly or sterling in any part of the Government. . . . Notwithstanding the noise the Liberals make in the cause of Napoleon, I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of Liberty than any one else could have done. Not that the Divine Right gentlemen have done or intend to do any good-no, they have taken the lesson of him, and will do all the further harm he would have done, without any of the good."

There is even something of successful political prophecy in what follows:

"The Emperor Alexander, it is said, intends to divide his Empire, as did Dioclesian-creating two czars beside himself, and continuing supreme monarch of the whole. Should he do so, and they for a series of years keep peaceable among themselves, Russia may spread her conquest even to China-I think it a very likely thing that China may fall of itself; Turkey certainly will. Meanwhile European North Russia will hold its horn against the rest of Europe, intriguing constantly with France."

It would have been well for the writer's reputation for sagacity had he been content to stop with this remarkable prediction. But he goes on to say things which we as Americans may be justified in resenting.