ng if not beautiful."

In the Ode, the axiom is put forward as the message of the sculptured
Grecian Urn "to man," and is thus propounded as being of universal
application. It amounts to saying--"Any beauty which is not truthful (if
any such there be), and any truth which is not beautiful (if any such
there be), are of no practical importance to mankind in their mundane
condition: but in fact there are none such, for, to the human mind,
beauty and truth are one and the same thing." To debate this question on
abstract grounds is not in my province: all that I have to do is to
point out that Keats's perception and thought crystallized into this
axiom as the sum and substance of wisdom for man, and that he has
bequeathed it to us to ponder in itself, and to lay to heart as the
secret of his writings. Those other lines, from the "Ode on Melancholy,"
where he says of Melancholy--

"She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu"--

appear to me unsurpassable in the whole range of his poetry--as intense
in imagery as supreme in diction and in music. They pair with the other
celebrated verses from the "Ode to a Nightingale"--

"Now more then ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain;"

and--

"Charmed magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn."

The phrase "_rich_ to die" is of the very essence of Keats's emotion;
and the passage about "magic casements" shows a reach of expression
which might almost be called the Pillars of Hercules of human language.
Far greater things have been said by the greatest minds: but nothing
more perfect in form has been said--nothing wider in scale and closer in
utterance--by any mind of whatsoever pitch of greatness.

And here we come to one of the most intrinsic properties of Keats's
poetry. He is a master of _imagination in verbal form_: he gifts us with
things so finely and magically said as to convey an imaginative
impression. The imagination may sometimes be in the substance of the
thought, as well as in its wording--as it is in the passage just quoted:
sometimes it resides essentially in the wording, out of which thought
expands in the reader, who is made

"To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest."

From wealth of perception, at first confused or docked in the
expression, he rose into a height of