try," and,
gazing on her with ruthless fixity, he compels her and all her apparatus
of enchantment to vanish. This is the act for which (in lines partly
quoted in these pages) Keats arraigns philosophy, and its power of
stripping things bare of their illusions. No doubt a poet has a right to
treat a legend of this sort from such point of view as he likes; it is
for him, and not for his reader, to take the bull by the horns. But it
does look rather like taking the bull by the weaker horn to contend that
the philosopher who saves a youthful disciple from the wiles of a
serpent is condemnably prosaic--a grovelling spirit that denudes life of
its poetry. Conveniently for Keats's theory, Lycius is made to die
forthwith after the vanishing of his Lamia. If we invent a different
finale to the poem, and say that Lycius fell down on his knees, and
thanked Apollonius for saving him from such pestilent delusions and
perilous blandishments, and ever afterwards looked out for the cloven
tongue (if not the cloven hoof) when a pretty woman made advances to
him, we may perhaps come quite as near to a right construction of so
strange a series of events, and to the true moral of the story. But
Keats's championship was for the enjoying aspects of life; he may be
held to have exercised it here rather perversely. "Lamia" is one of his
completest and most finished pieces of writing--perhaps in this respect
superior to all his other long poems, if we except "Hyperion"; it closes
the roll of them with an affluence, even an excess, of sumptuous
adornment. "Lamia" leaves on the mental palate a rich flavour, if not an
absolutely healthy one.

Passing from the long compositions, we find the cream of Keats's poetry
in the ballad of "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and in the five odes--"To
Psyche," "To Autumn," "On Melancholy," "To a Nightingale," and "On a
Grecian Urn." "La Belle Dame sans Merci" may possibly have been written
later than any of the odes, but this point is uncertain. I give it here
as marking the highest point of romantic imagination to which Keats
attained in dealing with human or quasi-human personages, and also his
highest level of simplicity along with completeness of art.

"Ah what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,[24]
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

"Ah what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is f