verbal embodiment which has seldom
been equalled and seldomer exceeded. His conception of poetry as an
ideal, his sense of poetry as an art, spurred him on to artistic
achievement; and in the later stages of his work the character of the
Artist is that which marks him most strongly. As one of his own letters
says, he "looks upon fine phrases like a lover."

According to Mr. Swinburne, "the faultless force and profound subtlety
of this deep and cunning instinct for the absolute expression of
absolute natural beauty is doubtless the one main distinctive gift or
power which denotes him as a poet among all his equals." We may safely
accept this verdict of poet upon poet as a true one: yet I should be
inclined to demur to such strong adjectives as "faultless" and
"absolute." Beautiful as several of them are, I might hesitate to say
that even one poem by Keats exhibits this his special characteristic in
a faultless degree, or expresses absolutely throughout a natural beauty
of absolute quality. To the last, he appears to me to have been somewhat
wanting in those faculties of selection and of discipline which we sum
up, by a rough-and-ready process, in the word "taste." He had done a
great deal in this direction, and would probably, with a few years more
of life, have done all that was needed; but we have to take him as he
stands, with those few years denied. Unless perhaps in "La Belle Dame
sans Merci," Keats has not, I think, come nearer to perfection than in
the "Ode to a Nightingale." It is with some trepidation that I recur to
this Ode, for the invidious purpose of testing its claim to be adjudged
"faultless," for in so doing I shall certainly lose the sympathy of some
readers, and strain the patience of many. The question, however, seems
to be a very fair one to raise, and the specimen a strong one to try it
by, and so I persevere. The first point of weakness--excess which
becomes weak in result--is a surfeit of mythological allusions: Lethe,
Dryad (the nightingale is turned into a "light-winged Dryad of the
trees"--which is as much as to say, a light-winged _Oak_-nymph of the
_trees_), Flora, Hippocrene, Bacchus, the Queen-moon (the Queen-moon
appears at first sight to be the classical Phoebe, who is here
"clustered around by all her starry Fays," spirits proper to a Northern
mythology; but possibly Keats thought more of a Faery-queen than of
Phoebe). Then comes the passage (already cited in these pages) about
the poet