tion. It lies in the delicate transfusion of sight and
emotion into sound; in making pictures out of words, or turning words
into pictures; of giving a visionary beauty to the closest items of
description; of holding all the materials of the poem in a long-drawn
suspense of music and reverie. "The Eve of St. Agnes" is _par
excellence_ the poem of "glamour." It means next to nothing; but means
that little so exquisitely, and in so rapt a mood of musing or of
trance, that it tells as an intellectual no less than a sensuous
restorative. Perhaps no reader has ever risen from "The Eve of St.
Agnes" dissatisfied. After a while he can question the grounds of his
satisfaction, and may possibly find them wanting; but he has only to
peruse the poem again, and the same spell is upon him.

"The Eve of St. Mark" was begun at much the same date as "The Eve of St.
Agnes," rather the earlier of the two. Its relation to other poems by
the author is singular. In "Endymion" he had been a prodigal of
treasures--some of them genuine, others spurious; in "The Eve of St.
Agnes" he was at least opulent, a magnate superior to sumptuary laws;
but in "The Eve of St. Mark" he subsides into a delightful simplicity--a
simplicity full, certainly, of "favour and prettiness," but chary of
ornament. It comes perfectly natural to him, and promises the most
charming results. The non-completion of "The Eve of St. Mark" is the
greatest grievance of which the admirers of Keats have to complain. I
should suppose that, in the first instance, he advisedly postponed the
eve of one saint, Mark, to the eve of the other, Agnes; and that he did
not afterwards find a convenient opportunity for resuming the
uncompleted poem. The superstition connected with St. Mark's vigil is
not wholly unlike that pertaining to St. Agnes's. In the former instance
(I quote from Dante Rossetti), "it is believed that, if a person placed
himself near the church porch when twilight was thickening, he would
behold the apparition of those persons in the parish who were to be
seized with any severe disease that year go into the church. If they
remained there, it signified their death; if they came out again, it
portended their recovery; and, the longer or shorter the time they
remained in the building, the severer or less dangerous their illness."
The same writer, forecasting the probable course of the story,[22]
surmised that "the heroine, remorseful after trifling with a sick and
now absen