bowed, he seems to have known were altars of the lesser gods. Not that he blasphemed the greater gods in doing so. He believed that the altar at the foot of the hill was a stage in the poet's progress to the altar at the summit. As he grew older, however, his vision of the summit became more intense, and a greater Muse announced to him:

None can usurp this height

But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are miseries and will not let them rest.

He was exchanging the worship of Apollo for the worship of Zeus and, like Tolstoy, he seemed to condemn his own past work as a denial of the genius of true art. Even here, however, Keats was still tortured by conflicting allegiances, and it is on Apollo, not on Zeus, he calls in his condemnation of Byron in The Fall of Hyperion:

Apollo! faded! O far-flown Apollo!
Where is thy misty pestilence to creep
Into the dwellings, through the door crannies
Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers
And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse?
Though I breathe death with them it will be life
To see them sprawl before me into graves.

But he was Zeus's child, as he lay dying, and the very epitaph he left for himself, remembering a phrase in The Maid's Tragedy of Beaumont and

Fletcher, "Here lies one whose name is writ in water," was a last farewell to an Apollo who seemed to have failed him.

The Keats who achieved perfection in literature, however, was Apollo's Keats-Apollo's and Aphrodite's. His odes, written out of a genius stirred to its depths for the first time by his passion for Fanny Brawne he does not seem to have been subject to love, as most poets are, in his boyhood-were but the perfect expression of that idolatry that had stammered in Endymion. Keats in his masterpieces is still the Prince breaking through the wood to the vision of the Sleeping Beauty. He has not yet touched her into life. He almost prefers to remain a spectator, not an awakener. He loves the picture itself more than the reality, though he guesses all the while at the reality behind. That, perhaps, is why men do not go to Keats for healing, as they go to Wordsworth, or for hope, as they go to Shelley. Keats enriches life rather with a sense of a loveliness for ever vanishing, and with a dream of what life might be if the loveliness remained. Regret means more to him than hope:

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

The world at its most beautiful is for Keats a series of dissolving pictures of "fair attitudes" that only the artist can make immortal. His indolence is the indolence of a man under the spell of beautiful shapes. His energy is the energy of a man who would drain the whole cup of worship in a beautiful phrase. His æsthetic attitude to life as æsthetic in its way as the early Pater's appears in that letter in which he

writes:

I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a field-mouse peeping out of the withered grassthe creature hath a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the buildings of a city, and I see a Man hurrying along to what? The Creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it.

In this very letter, no doubt, the disinterested philosopher as well as the æsthete speaks, but it is Keats's longing for philosophy, not his philosophy itself, that touches us most profoundly

in his greatest work. Our knowledge of his sufferings gives his work a background of

Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self

against which the exquisite images he wrought have a tragic and spiritual appeal beyond that of any other poet of his kind. The Keats we love is more than the Keats of the poems-more even than the Keats of the letters. It is the Keats of these and of the life-that proud and vehement spirit, that great-hearted traveller in the realms of gold, caught in circumstances and done to death in the very temples where he had worshipped.

2. THE ARTIFICER

It is an interesting fact that most of the writers who use words like artificers have been townsmen. Milton and Gray, Keats and Lamb, were all Londoners. It is as though to some extent words took the place of natural scenes in the development of the townsman's genius. The town boy finds the Muse in a book rather than by a stream. He hears her voice first, perhaps, in a beautiful phrase. It would be ridiculous to speak as though the country-bred poet were uninfluenced by books or the town-bred poet uninfluenced by

bird and tree, by winds and waters. All I suggest is that in the townsman the influence of literature is more dominant, and frequently leads to an excitement over phrases almost more intense than his excitement over things.

Milton was thus a stylist in a sense in which Shakespeare was not. Keats was a stylist in a sense in which Shelley was not. Not that Milton and Keats used speech more felicitously, but they used it more self-consciously. Theirs, at their greatest, was the magic of art rather than of nature. They had not, in the same measure as Shakespeare and Shelley, the freedom of the air-the bird-like flight or the bird-like song.

The genius of Keats, we know, was founded on the reading of books. He did not even begin writing till he was nearly eighteen, when Cowden Clarke lent him the treasures of his library, including The Faëry Queene. The first of his great poems was written after reading Chapman's Homer, and to the end of his life he was inspired by works of art to a greater degree than any other writer of genius in the England of his time.

This may help to explain why he was, as Mr. John Bailey has pointed out, the poet of stillness. Books, pictures, and Grecian urns are still. They fix life for us in the wonder of a trance, and, if