he poet.
And if any man object to me that he, for his part, feels a thrill as
poignant when he reads stanza 2 of 'Autumn' as when he reads stanza 7 of
the 'Nightingale,' then I confess that I shall have some difficulty in
answering him. But I believe very few, if any, will assert this of
themselves. And perhaps we may get at the truth of men's feelings on this
point in another way. Suppose that of these four poems, 'Autumn,'
'Nightingale,' 'Psyche,' and 'Grecian Urn,' one were doomed to perish, and
fate allowed us to choose which one should be abandoned. Sorrowful as the
choice must be, I believe that lovers of poetry would find themselves
least loth to part with 'Autumn'; that the loss of either of the others
would be foreseen as a sharper wrench.

For the others lie close to human emotion; are indeed interpenetrated with
emotion; whereas 'Autumn' makes but an objective appeal, chiefly to the
visual sense. It is, as I have said, a decorative picture; and even so it
hardly beats the pictures in stanza 4 of the 'Grecian Urn'--

"What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain, built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"

Though Keats, to be sure, comes perilously near to spoiling these lines by
the three answering ones--

"And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return."

--Which, though beautiful in themselves, involve a confusion of thought;
since (in Mr. Colvin's words) "they speak of the arrest of life as though
it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely a necessary
condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own
compensations."

But it is time to be drawing up one's own order for the Odes. The first
place, then, let us give to the 'Nightingale,' for the intensity of its
emotion, for the sustained splendour and variety of its language, for the
consummate skill with which it keeps the music matched with the mood, and
finally because it attains, at least twice, to the 'great thrill.'
Nor can one preferring it offend Mr. Bridges, who confesses that he "could
not name any English poem of the same length which contains so much beauty
as this ode."

For the second place, one feels inclined at first to bracket 'Psyche' with
the 'Grecian Urn.' Each develops a beautiful idea. In 'Psyche' the poet
addresses the loveliest but latest-born vision