eliness with that of thy friend, Dante!" [23]

Among all the writers of his generation, Keats was most purely the poet,
the artist of the beautiful. His sensitive imagination thrilled to every
touch of beauty from whatever quarter. That his work is mainly
retrospective and eclectic in subject is because a young poet's mind
responds more readily to books than to life, and this young poet did not
outlive his youth. In the Greek mythology he found a world of lovely
images ready to his hand, in the poetry of Spenser, Chaucer, and Ariosto,
he found another such world. Arcadia and Faeryland--"the realms of
gold"--he rediscovered them both for himself, and he struck into the
paths that wound through their enchanted thickets with the ardour of an
explorer. This was the very mood of the Renaissance--this genial heat
which fuses together the pagan and the Christian systems--this
indifference of the creative imagination to the mere sources and
materials of its creations. Indeed, there is in Keats' style a "natural
magic" which forces us back to Shakspere for comparison, a noticeable
likeness to the diction of the Elizabethans, when the classics were still
a living spring of inspiration, and not a set of copies held _in
terrorem_ over the head of every new poet.

Keats' break with the classical tradition was early and decisive. In his
first volume (1817) there is a piece entitled "Sleep and Poetry,"
composed after a night passed at Leigh Hunt's cottage near Hampstead,
which contains his literary declaration of faith. After speaking of the
beauty that fills the universe, and of the office of Imagination to be
the minister and interpreter of this beauty, as in the old days when
"here her altar shone, even in this isle," and "the muses were nigh
cloyed with honours," he asks:

"Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
Made great Apollo blush for this, his land.
Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories: with a puling infant's force,
They swayed about upon a rocking horse
And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-souled!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled
Its gathering waves--ye felt it not. The blue
Bowed its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer night collected still, to make
The morning precious. Beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of--were closely wed
To musty laws, lined out with wretc