ut the other is a noble
piece of literary workmanship, a powerful book, ingeniously framed,
with every detail strongly realized; a book which is dramatic,
humorous, sincere in its pathos, rich in its word-coloring, eloquent
in its descriptive passages; a book which embodies so much of life and
poetry that one has a feeling of mental exaltation as he reads.

Surely it is not wise in the critical Jeremiahs so despairingly to
lift up their voices, and so strenuously to bewail the condition of
the literature of the time. The literature of the time is very well,
as they would see could they but turn their fascinated gaze from the
meretricious and spectacular elements of that literature to the work
of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. With such men among the most
influential in modern letters, and with Barrie and Stevenson among the
idols of the reading world, it would seem that the office of public
Jeremiah should be continued rather from courtesy than from an
overwhelming sense of the needs of the hour.

A READING IN THE LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS

One would like to know whether a first reading in the letters of Keats
does not generally produce something akin to a severe mental shock. It
is a sensation which presently becomes agreeable, being in that
respect like a plunge into cold water, but it is undeniably a shock.
Most readers of Keats, knowing him, as he should be known, by his
poetry, have not the remotest conception of him as he shows himself in
his letters. Hence they are unprepared for this splendid exhibition of
virile intellectual health. Not that they think of him as morbid,--his
poetry surely could not make this impression,--but rather that the
popular conception of him is, after all these years, a legendary
Keats, the poet who was killed by reviewers, the Keats of Shelley's
preface to the _Adonais_, the Keats whose story is written large in
the world's book of Pity and of Death. When the readers are confronted
with a fair portrait of the real man, it makes them rub their eyes.
Nay, more, it embarrasses them. To find themselves guilty of having
pitied one who stood in small need of pity is mortifying. In plain
terms, they have systematically bestowed (or have attempted to bestow)
alms on a man whose income at its least was bigger than any his
patrons could boast. Small wonder that now and then you find a reader,
with large capacity for the sentimental, who looks back with terror to
his first dip into the