ty
to delight, close-linked with afterthought--pleasure with pang--or that
poignant sense of ultimates, a sense delicious and harrowing, which
clasps the joy in sadness, and feasts upon the very sadness in joy. The
emotion throughout is the emotion of beauty: beauty intensely
perceived, intensely loved, questioned of its secret like the sphinx,
imperishable and eternal, yet haunted (as it were) by its own ghost, the
mortal throes of the human soul. As no poet had more capacity for
enjoyment than Keats, so none exceeded him in the luxury of sorrow. Few
also exceeded him in the sense of the one moment irretrievable; but this
conception in its fulness belongs to the region of morals yet more than
of sensation, and the spirit of Keats was almost an alien in the region
of morals. As he himself wrote (March 1818)--

"Oh never will the prize,
High reason, and the love of good and ill,
Be my award!"

I think it will be well to cull out of these five odes--taken in the
symphonic order above noted--the phrases which constitute the strongest
chords of emotion and of music.

(1) "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe, to the spirit, ditties of no tone.

"Human passion far above
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(2) "Too late for antique vows,
Too too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire.

"Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts new-grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind.

(3) "Where are the songs of spring--ay, where are they?
Think not of them: thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.

(4) "But, when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud,
Then glut thy sorro