having destroyed all
the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours; the
whole company had to drink "Newton's health, and confusion to
mathematics." This was a freak, yet not so mere a freak but that the
poet--in one of his most elaborated and heedful compositions,
"Lamia"--could revert to the same idea--

"Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture--she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine,
Unweave a rainbow."

In a letter to his brother, December 1817, Keats observes:--

"The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making
all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close
relationship with beauty and truth. Examine 'King Lear,' and you
will find this exemplified throughout.... It struck me what
quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in
literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously. I mean
_negative capability_; that is, when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a
fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of
mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with
half-knowledge. This, pursued through volumes, would perhaps take
us no further than this: that with a great poet the sense of
beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates
all consideration."

Keats did not very often in his letters remark upon the work of his
poetic contemporaries. We have just read a reference to Coleridge. In
another letter addressed to Haydon, January 1818, he shows that his
admiration of Wordsworth's "Excursion" was great, coupling that poem
with Haydon's pictures, and with "Hazlitt's depth of taste," as "three
things to rejoice at in this age."

Soon afterwards, February 1818, while "Endymion" was passing through the
press, he wrote to Mr. Taylor:--

"In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am
from their centre. 1st, I think poetry should surprise by a fine
excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a
wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almos