truth is that he was growing into a grasp of larger things; passing from dainty trifles to those conceptions which, rising from the small, expand and lose themselves in the grand.

And they are gone: aye, ages long ago,

These lovers fled away into the storm.

It is a common tale, this story of Porphyro and Madeline. It has been sung in a hundred ballads. Keats has told it anew-with the richness of jeweled brocade, to be sure. Yet he has done more. For these lovers, sent out into the night, the sleet, the beating winds, — and lost there by a poet's forgetfulness of satiety and domestic ills, hover forever in the imagination as the types of eternal happiness, just as Paolo and Francesca have become the types of eternal sorrow in the pitiless storms of hell.

XXII

THE ODES

THE narrative poems, naturally, have the prestige of general popularity. The odes have a greater significance to connoisseurs and readers of severe taste. We shall discuss five of these odes. In them, better than elsewhere, Keats reveals the clarifying depths of his mind. Love ceases to be an exclusive cult. He passes from that central bower of romance, by labyrinthine ways, into a profound intellectual life.

The "Ode to Psyche" might be regarded as a poem of transition. It is a palinode of the early enthusiasm for the moon. It is a deification of love as one of the minor graces. Passion is tempered into tenderness. The music here is a sustained pianissimo. Psyche, with Cupid, lies asleep, "mid hushed, cool-rooted flowers." She has had no worship as a goddess; no grove, no altar, no oracular priest. The "happy pieties" of antiquity brought her no share of homage. Like

the prince who raised the neglected cinder maiden to royal honors, Keats creates a belated cult for this forgotten child of mythology. He becomes her priest, guarding "a rosy sanctuary" of the mind, with grove and temple and choir.

And there shall be for thee all soft delight

That shadowy thought can win;

A bright torch and a casement ope at night
To let the warm love in!

The ode "To Autumn" adds a figure to English folk-lore. Autumn, a rustic deity of husbandry, is seen as a toiler amid the mellow fruitfulness of grapes, apples and nuts. She haunts the granaries. She drowses in the half-reaped furrow. She watches beside a cider press "the last oozings hours by hours." Spring has its songs. Autumn has a music, too. And it is not mournful. The redbreast whistles. The full-grown lambs bleat from the hills. The lowering clouds transfuse the sunshine and "touch the stubble plains with rosy hue." Autumn is the goddess of rich fruition. Nature, in this ode, is painted in the purely objective manner. It smells of the soil. Imagination sheds no visionary light. The mood of the poet is relief and ease, full of the Chaucerian gladness of out-of-doors. "I never liked stubble fields so much as now aye, better than the

chilly green of spring," wrote Keats just after the composition of the ode.

The world's great ode to Melancholy was etched by Albrecht Dürer on a copper plate. There one sees the tools and instruments which have given man dominion over worldly comfort and worldly knowledge. The star blazes, the rainbow glows, the magic crystal offers its illusions. And the majestic figure sits — staring with sad eyes into space - foiled. It is the ultimate symbolism of the futility of human intelligence. Keats' "Ode on Melancholy" is also a reading of fate. It is not so intellectually complex as Dürer's. It is almost wholly emotional. Yet an emotion, profoundly felt, reaches fundamental truth and becomes intellectual. The Greeks sometimes sculptured on tombstones the alto-relief of a lady about to die. The maid holds her casket of jewels, her lover clasps her hand, a friend stands beside. Her grief is the inevitable end of her joy. This is the truth which Keats has felt poignantly. He who would go in quest

of Melancholy needs no wolf's-bane, no distemper, no abnormal stimulus. Melancholy dwells not in the realm of the morbid. Her shrine is in the very temple of delight, her reign is the recessional of natural joy. He only can enter her dark

holy of holies who has drained the cup of happiness from the full to the dregs. And then he must submit to the law of compensation; the payment of the price.

She dwells with Beauty Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

This is not the melancholy of the foiled intellect. It is not the despair of the diseased mind. It is the melancholy, inherent in mortal fate, of the fleeting emotion of delight.

It may be worth while to note that the theme of this ode is a replica of the ode to "Sorrow" in the fourth book of "Endymion." There Sorrow is pictured in the guise of health, full of lustrous passion and borrowing "Heart's lightness from the merriment of May." In both poems the symbolism expresses that richness of joy which only can give admittance to the palace of Melancholy. The strenuous tongue that bursts the grape against the palate is the "classical terseness" for the elaborate description of the revels of Bacchus.