than the life
of the drudge and the raker of stones and dirt.

But this very absence of recognition and fame was what made the lives
of these two great poets so intensely beautiful; there is hardly a
great poet who has achieved fame who has not been in a degree spoilt by
the consciousness of worth and influence. Tennyson, Pope, Byron,
Wordsworth--how their lives were injured by vanity and self-conceit!
Even Scott was touched by the grossness of prosperity, though he purged
his fault in despair and tears. But such poets as did not guess their
own greatness, and remained humble and peaceable, how much sweeter and
gentler is their example, walking humbly in the company of the mighty,
and hardly seeming to guess that they are of the happy number. And thus
we may rank it amongst the greatest gifts that were given to Keats and
Shelley, though they did not know their own felicity, that they were
never overshadowed by the approbation of the world, and had no touch of
the complacent sense of greatness that so disfigures the spirit of a
mortal.

XLIX

I have been reading all to-day the Letters of Keats, a thing which I do
at irregular intervals. Perhaps what I am going to say may sound
affected, but it is perfectly true: it is a book that always has a very
peculiar effect on me, not so much a mental effect as what, for want of
a better word, I will call a spiritual effect. It sets my soul on
flame. I feel as though I had drawn near to a spirit burning like a
fiery lamp, and that my own torpid and inert spirit had been kindled at
it. That flame will burn out again, as it has burnt out many times
before; but while the fire still leaps and glances in my heart I will
try to put down exactly what it makes me feel I believe there are few
books that give one, in the first place, more of the author's own
heart. Is there in the world any book which gives so fully the
youthful, ebullient thoughts of a man of the highest poetical genius as
this? I cannot recall any. Keats, to his brothers, his sister, and to
one or two intimate friends, allowed his long, vague letters to be an
absolutely intimate diary of what he was thinking. You see his genius
rise and flush and blaze and grow cold again before your eyes. Not to
multiply instances, take the wonderful letter written in October 1818
to Richard Woodhouse, where he sketches his own poetical temperament,
differentiating it from what he calls the "Wordsworthian Character--the
egotis