nd with thee fade away into the forest dim." [39]

Keats cared no more for history than he did for contemporary politics.
Courthope[40] quotes a passage from "Endymion" to illustrate his
indifference to everything but art;

"Hence, pageant history! Hence, gilded cheat! . . .
Many old rotten-timbered boats there be
Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified
To goodly vessels, many a sail of pride,
And golden-keeled, is left unlaunched and dry.
But wherefore this? What care, though owl did fly
About the great Athenian admiral's mast?
What care though striding Alexander past
The Indus with his Macedonian numbers?
. . . Juliet leaning
Amid her window-flowers,--sighing,--weaning
Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow,
Doth more avail than these: the silver flow
Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen,
Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den,
Are things to brood on with more ardency
Than the death-day of empires."

This passage should be set beside the complaint in "Lamia" of the
disenchanting touch of science:

"There was an awful rainbow once in heaven," etc.

Keats is the poet of romantic emotion, as Scott of romantic action.
Professor Gates says that Keats' heroes never _do_ anything.[41] It
puzzles the reader of "The Eve of St. Agnes" to know just why Porphyro
sets out the feast of cates on the little table by Madeline's bedside
unless it be to give the poet an opportunity for his luscious description
of "the lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon" and other like delicacies. In
the early fragment "Calidore," the hero--who gets his name from
Spenser--does nothing in some hundred and fifty lines but assist two
ladies to dismount from their palfreys. To revert, as before, to
Ariosto's programme, it was not the _arme_ and _audaci imprese_ which
Keats sang, but the _donne_, the _amori_, and the _cortesie_. Feudal war
array was no concern of his, but the "argent revelry" of masque and
dance, and the "silver-snarling trumpets" in the musicians' gallery. He
was the poet of the lute and the nightingale, rather than of the shock of
spear in tourney and crusade. His "Specimen of an Induction to a Poem"
begins

"Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry."

But he never tells it. The piece evaporates in visions of pure
loveliness; "large white plumes"; sweet ladies on the worn tops of old
battlements; light-footed damsels standing in sixes and sevens about the
hall in courtly talk. Meanwhile