poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of release from those conventions and restraints by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered." It is thus, also, that Matthew Arnold speaks appreciatingly of him as "an Elizabethan born too late." Lowell tells us that we see in his verse "that reaction against the barrel-organ style which had been reigning by a kind of sleepy divine right for half a century." In a word, we find Keats to be, in this respect, a veritable innovator or renovator, calling his country back to primary poetic principles, to Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton; to truth and life; to physical nature and human nature; to the simple as a protest against the artificial. This, in itself, entitles Keats to an important place in the developing history of English verse-a work quite as important as anything he did in the way of writing poetry proper. His effort to revolutionize and refresh English poetry was as creditable to his literary thought and foresight as it was to the future fortunes of English letters. It was this conception of what poetry ought to be and this purpose to secure it that so attracted him to Burns and Wordsworth, as he discerned in them both the presence of genuine poetic impulse,

Hence his name cannot be overlooked in any true account of the Romantic revival in English verse at the opening of the last century. It is with his eye on the Elizabethan past and the stilted affectations of Augustan days that he wrote in the language of satire, in " Sleep and Poetry ":

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Beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile: so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smoothe, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy."

The evident Proofs of this higher conception of the spirit and office of verse are worthy of note.

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(a) His love of nature and outdoor life, a feature common to his poems, is seen in such examples as the "Ode to a Nightingale," "To Autumn," "The Thrush," On May-Day," "Walking in Scotland," "Staffia," "On the Sea," and "The Human Seasons." His early life at Enfield and Edmonton, his later life at the Isle of Wight, at Margate, Canterbury, Hampstead, Oxford, and Teignmouth, and his memorable tours through the Scottish Highlands and the English

lakes awakened and deepened this love of natural scenery until it controlled him, breaking forth in manifold lyric forms, and coloring with a rich and rare radiance all the products of his pen. One has but to attempt to cull a few choice passages of this description from his verse to see, at once, that the selection is invidious, and that the poetry, from first to last, is saturated with the freshness of the fields and hills. We know of no English poet who more beautifully touches upon natural scenery than he, or more skillfully condenses into a line or a paragraph the essential elements of a landscape. The dedicatory sonnet to Leigh Hunt, at the very opening of his verse, is full of these reflections on "early morn" and "smiling day" and "pleasant trees," his first poem beginning,

"I stood tiptoe on a little hill,"

in which poem we have that exquisite description of dewdrops:

those starry diadems

Caught from the early sobbing of the morn." Equally exquisite is the poetic touch, as he writes

of

"the moon lifting her silver rim

Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim
Coming into the blue with all her light."

So, in his sonnet

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To a Friend who sent me some

Roses," he sings :—

"As late I rambled in the happy fields,

What time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew

From his lush clover covert."

So, in his sonnet on

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Solitude":

"Let me thy vigils keep

'Mongst boughs pavilioned, where the deer's swift leap Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell."

So, elsewhere, he lovingly writes:

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"To one who has been long in city pent,

"Tis very sweet to look into the fair

And open face of heaven to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament."

In his poem "Sleep and Poetry " we find some of these choice passages; as,—

"Life is but a day;

A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way
From a tree's summit. . . .

Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown;
The reading of an ever-changing tale;

The light uplifting of a maiden's veil;

A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;
A laughing schoolboy, without grief or care,
Riding the springy branches of an elm."

So, in describing some quiet retreat, he says:

"Let there nothing be

More boisterous than a lover's bended knee;
Naught more ungentle than the placid look

Of one who leans upon a closed book;

Naught more untranquil than the grassy slopes
Between two hills."

So, the verse runs on in sweetest measure, until we see, beyond all doubt, that Keats knew Nature thoroughly and loved her, and at times embodied his love in lines as beautiful as are found in English verse. Nor should it be forgotten that, deep and strong as was this love, he never passed to the pantheistic extreme of confounding God and nature, or the equally dangerous anthropotheistic extreme of confounding man and nature, but viewed each in its place and all as related in the great unity and harmony of the world. "Scenery is fine," he wrote, but human nature is finer. The sward is richer for the tread of a real nervous English foot; the eagle's nest is finer for the mountaineer having looked into it." So, he wrote in "Endymion ":—

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"Who, of men, can tell

That flowers would bloom

If human souls would never kiss and greet?"

So, in his poem on "The Human Seasons ":

"Four seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of man."

So, in the midst of his rapturous enjoyments of