'of all Olympus's faded
hierarchy,' and promises her that, though born:

"Too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,"

She shall yet have a priest, the poet, and a temple built in some
untrodden region of his mind--

"And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!"

The thought of the 'Grecian Urn' is (to quote Mr. Bridges) "the supremacy
of ideal art over Nature, because of its unchanging expression of
perfection." And this also is true and beautiful. Idea for idea, there
is little to choose between the two odes. Each has the 'great thrill,' or
something very like it. The diction of 'Psyche' is more splendid; the
mood of the 'Grecian Urn' happier and (I think) rarer. But 'Psyche'
asserts its superiority in the orderly development of its idea, which
rises steadily to its climax in the magnificent lines quoted above, and on
that note triumphantly closes: whereas the 'Grecian Urn' marches
uncertainly, recurs to its main idea without advancing it, reaches
something like its climax in the middle stanza, and tripping over a pun
(as Mr. Bridges does not hesitate to call 'O Attic shape! fair attitude!')
at the entrance of the last stanza, barely recovers itself in time to make
a forcible close.

(1) 'Nightingale,' (2) 'Psyche,' (3) 'Grecian Urn.' Shall the next place
go to 'Melancholy?' The idea of this ode (I contrasted it just now with
the idea of 'Autumn') is particularly fine; and when we supply the first
stanza which Keats discarded we see it to be well developed.
The discarded stanza lies open to the charge of staginess. One may answer
that Keats meant it to be stagey: that he deliberately surrounded the
quest of the false Melancholy with those paste-board 'properties'--the
bark of dead men's bones, the rudder of a dragon's tail 'long severed, yet
still hard with agony', the cordage woven of large uprootings from the
skull of bald Medusa'--in order to make the genuine Melancholy more
effective by contrast.[1] Yet, as Mr. Bridges points out, the ode does
n