us verse had
been rigorously clipped down or pruned away, it could not long
have retained spirit enough to support or inform the shadowy body
of a subject so little charged with tangible significance."

Mr. Swinburne is a critic with whom one may well be content to go
astray, if astray it is. I will therefore say that I entirely agree with
him in this estimate of "Hyperion," and of the sound discretion which
Keats exercised in giving it up. To deal with the gods of Olympus is no
easy task--it had decidedly overtaxed Keats in "Endymion," though he
limited himself to the two goddesses Diana and Venus, and casually the
gods Neptune and Mercury; but to deal with the elder gods--Saturn, Ops,
Hyperion--and with the Titans, on the scale of a long epic narration, is
a task which may well be pronounced unachievable. The Olympian gods
would also have had to be introduced: Apollo already appears in the
poem, not too promisingly. The elder gods are necessarily mere
figure-heads of bulk, might, majesty, and antiquity; to get any
character out of them after these "property" attributes have been
exhausted to the mind's eye, to "set them going" in act, and doing
something apportionable into cantos, and readable by human energies, was
not a problem which could be solved by a poet of the nineteenth century.
Past question, Keats started grandly, and has left us a monument of
Cyclopean architecture in verse almost impeccable--a Stonehenge of
reverberance; he has made us feel that his elder gods were profoundly
primaeval, powers so august and abstract-natured as to have become
already obsolete in the days of Zeus and Hades: his Titans, too, were so
vast and muscular that no feat would have been difficult to them except
that of interesting us. This sufficed for the first book of the poem; in
the second book, the enterprise is already revealing itself as an
impossible one, for the council at which Oceanus and others speak is
reminiscent of the Pandaemonic council in Milton, and clearly very
inferior to that. It could not well help resembling the scene in
"Paradise Lost," nor yet help being inferior; besides, even were it
equal or preferable, Milton had done the thing first. The "large
utterance of the early gods," large though it be, tends to monotony. In
book iii., we go off to Mnemosyne and Apollo; but of this section little
remains, and we close the poem with a conviction that Keats, if he had
succeeded in writing "a _fragment_ as