ce by 'sleeping
betwixt every sentence.' Keats had in no small degree the 'fine
extemporal vein' with 'invention quicker than his eye.'

We uncritically feel that it could hardly have been otherwise in the
case of one with whom poetry was a passion. Keats had an infinite
hunger and thirst for good poetry. His poetical life, both in the
receptive and productive phases of it, was intense. Poetry was meat
and drink to him. He could even urge his friend Reynolds to talk about
it to him, much as one might beg a trusted friend to talk about one's
lady-love, and with the confidence that only the fitting thing would
be spoken. 'Whenever you write, say a word or two on some passage in
Shakespeare which may have come rather new to you,'--a sentence which
shows his faith in the many-sidedness of the great poetry. Shakespeare
was forever 'coming new' to _him_, and he was 'haunted' by particular
passages. He loved to fill the cup of his imagination with the
splendors of the best poets until the cup overflowed. 'I find I cannot
exist without Poetry,--without eternal Poetry; half the day will not
do,--the whole of it; I began with a little, but habit has made me a
leviathan.' He tells Leigh Hunt, in a letter written from Margate,
that he thought so much about poetry, and 'so long together,' that he
could not get to sleep at night. Whether this meant in working out
ideas of his own, or living over the thoughts of other poets, is of
little importance; the remark shows how deeply the roots of his life
were imbedded in poetical soil. He loved a debauch in the verse of
masters of his art. He could intoxicate himself with Shakespeare's
sonnets. He rioted in 'all their fine things said unconsciously.' We
are tempted to say, by just so much as he had large reverence for
these men, by just so much he was of them.

Undoubtedly, this ability to be moved by strong imaginative work may
be abused until it becomes a maudlin and quite disordered sentiment.
Keats was too well balanced to be carried into appreciative excesses.
He knew that mere yearning could not make a poet of one any more than
mere ambition could. He understood the limits of ambition as a force
in literature. Keats's ambition trembled in the presence of Keats's
conception of the magnitude of the poetic office. 'I have asked myself
so often why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great
a thing it is.' Yet he had honest confidence. One cannot help liking
him for the fi