ot hit so hard as one would expect: and it has seemed to me that the
composition of Durer's great drawing may have something to do with this.
Durer _did_ surround his Melancholia with 'properties,' and he _did_
evoke a figure which all must admit to be not only tremendously impressive
but entirely genuine, whatever Keats may say; a figure so haunting, too,
that it obtrudes its face between us and Keats's page and scares away his
delicate figure of:

"Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu . . ."--

Reducing him to the pettiness of a Chelsea-china shepherd. Mr. Bridges,
too, calls attention to a false note in the second stanza:--

"Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed, feed deep upon her peerless eyes."

So prone was Keats to sound this particular false note that Mr. Bridges
had to devote some three pages of his essay to an examination of the
poet's want of taste in his speech about women and his lack of true
insight into human passion. The worst trick this disability ever played
upon Keats was to blind him to his magnificent opportunity in 'Lamia'--an
opportunity of which the missing is felt as positively cruel: but it
betrayed him also into occasional lapses and ineptitudes which almost
rival Leigh Hunt's--

"The two divinest things the world has got--
A lovely woman in a rural spot."

This blemish may, perhaps, condemn it to a place below 'Autumn'; of which
(I hope) reason has been shown why it cannot rank higher than (4).
And (6) _longo intervallo_ comes 'Indolence,' which may be fearlessly
called an altogether inferior performance.

The 'May Ode' stands by itself, an exquisite fragment. But the two odes
from _Endymion_ may be set well above 'Indolence,' and that to 'Sorrow,'
in my opinion, above 'Autumn,' and only a little way behind the leaders.

But the fall of the year is marked for us by a ceremony more poignant,
more sorrowfully seasonable than any hymned by Hood or by Keats. Let us
celebrate--

LAYING UP THE BOAT.

There arrives a day towards the end of October--or with luck we may tide
over into November--when the wind in the mainsail suddenly takes a winter
force, and we begin to talk of laying up the boat. Hitherto we have kept
a silent compact and ignored all change in the season. We have watched
the blue afternoons shortening, fading through lilac into grey, and let
pass their