air, and waved about over the valley. Very
beautiful is this descending spray, and the rainbow dwells in its {261}
bosom; but there is no longer any stream, nothing but an irridescent
mist. The word _etherial_, best expresses the quality of Shelley's
genius. His poetry is full of atmospheric effects; of the tricks which
light plays with the fluid elements of water and air; of stars, clouds,
rain, dew, mist, frost, wind, the foam of seas, the phases of the moon,
the green shadows of waves, the shapes of flames, the "golden lightning
of the setting sun." Nature, in Shelley, wants homeliness and relief.
While poets like Wordsworth and Burns let in an ideal light upon the
rough fields of earth, Shelley escapes into a "moonlight-colored" realm
of shadows and dreams, among whose abstractions the heart turns cold.
One bit of Wordsworth's mountain turf is worth them all.

By the death of John Keats (1796-1821), whose elegy Shelley sang in
_Adonais_, English poetry suffered an irreparable loss. His _Endymion_,
1818, though disfigured by mawkishness and by some affectations of
manner, was rich in promise. Its faults were those of youth, the faults
of exuberance and of a tremulous sensibility, which time corrects.
_Hyperion_, 1820, promised to be his masterpiece, but he left it
unfinished--"a Titanic torso"--because, as he said, "there were too many
Miltonic inversions in it." The subject was the displacement, by Phoebus
Apollo, of the ancient sun-god, Hyperion, the last of the Titans who
retained his dominion. It was a theme of great capabilities, and the
poem was begun by Keats, {262} with a strength of conception which leads
to the belief that here was once more a really epic genius, had fate
suffered it to mature. The fragment, as it stands--"that inlet to severe
magnificence"--proves how rapidly Keats's diction was clarifying. He had
learned to string up his looser chords. There is nothing maudlin in
_Hyperion_; all there is in whole tones and in the grand manner, "as
sublime as Aeschylus," said Byron, with the grave, antique simplicity,
and something of modern sweetness interfused.

Keats's father was a groom in a London livery-stable. The poet was
apprenticed at fifteen to a surgeon. At school he had studied Latin, but
not Greek. He, who of all English poets had the most purely Hellenic
spirit, made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the
medium of classical dictionaries, translations, and