ot all beautiful.
It is not that the marvel and wonder of life is less; but it is more
equable, more intricate, more mysterious. It does not rise at times,
like a sea, into great crested breakers, but it comes marching in
evenly, roller after roller, as far as the eye can reach.

And then too poetry becomes cramped and confined for all that one
desires to say. One lived life, as a young man, rather for the sake
of the emotions which occasionally transfigured it, with a priestly
sense of its occasional splendour; there was not time to be leisurely,
humorous, gently interested. But as we grow older, we perceive that
poetical emotion is but one of many forces, and our sympathy grows and
extends itself in more directions. One had but little patience in the
old days for quiet, prosaic, unemotional people; but now it becomes
clear that a great many persons live life on very simple and direct
lines; one wants to understand their point of view better, one is
conscious of the merits of plainer stuff; and so the taste broadens
and deepens, and becomes like a brimming river rather than a leaping
crystal fount. Life receives a hundred affluents, and is tinged with
many new substances; and one begins to see that if poetry is the
finest and sweetest interpretation of life, it is not always the
completest or even the largest.

If we examine the lives of poets, we too often see how their
inspiration flagged and failed. Milton indeed wrote his noblest verse
in middle-age, after a life immersed in affairs. Wordsworth went on
writing to the end, but all his best poetry was written in about five
early years. Tennyson went on to a patriarchal age, but there is
little of his later work that bears comparison with what he wrote
before he was forty. Browning produced volume after volume, but, with
the exception of an occasional fine lyric, his later work is hardly
more than an illustration of his faults of writing. Coleridge deserted
poetry very early; Byron, Shelley, Keats, all died comparatively
young.

The Letters of Keats give perhaps a more vivid and actual view of the
mind and soul of a poet than any other existing document. One sees
there, naively and nobly expressed, the very essence of the poetical
nature, the very soil out of which poetry flowers. It is wonderful,
because it is so wholly sane, simple, and unaffected. It is usual to
say that the Letters give one a picture of rather a second-rate and
suburban young man, with vulgar