t lover, might make her way to the minster porch to learn his
fate by the spell, and perhaps see his figure enter but not return." If
this was really to have been the sequel, we can perceive that the
unassuming simplicity of the poem at its commencement would, ere its
close, have deepened into a different sort of simplicity--emotional, and
even tragic. As it stands, the simplicity of "The Eve of St. Mark" is
full-blooded as well as quaint--there is nothing starved or threadbare
about it. Diverse though it is from Coleridge's "Christabel," we seem to
feel in it something of the like possessing or haunting quality,
modified by Keats's own distinctive genius. In this respect, and in
perfectness of touch, we link it with "La Belle Dame sans Merci."

"Hyperion" has next to be considered. This was the only poem by Keats
which Shelley admired in an extreme degree. He wrote at different dates:
"The fragment called 'Hyperion' promises for him that he is destined to
become one of the first writers of the age.... It is certainly an
astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of Keats which I
confess I had not before.... If the 'Hyperion' be not grand poetry, none
has been produced by our contemporaries.... The great proportion of this
piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry." Byron, who had
been particularly virulent against Keats during his lifetime, wrote
after his death a much more memorable phrase: "His fragment of
'Hyperion' seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as
AEschylus." Mr. Swinburne has written of the poem more at length, and
with carefully weighed words:

"The triumph of 'Hyperion' is as nearly complete as the failure
of 'Endymion.' Yet Keats never gave such proof of a manly
devotion and rational sense of duty to his art as in his
resolution to leave this great poem unfinished; not (as we may
gather from his correspondence on the subject) for the pitiful
reason assigned by his publishers, that of discouragement at the
reception given to his former work, but on the solid and
reasonable ground that a Miltonic study had something in its very
scheme and nature too artificial, too studious of a foreign
influence, to be carried on and carried out at such length as was
implied by his original design. Fortified and purified as it had
been on a first revision, when much introductory allegory and
much tentative effusion of sonorous and superfluo