elen_, _Adonais_,
_Epipsychidion_, and the _Triumph of Life_--would alone have made his
fame. But it is in Shelley's smallest poems that his greatest virtue
lies. Not even in the seventeenth century had any writer given so much
that was so purely exquisite. "To Constantia Singing," the "Ozymandias"
sonnet, the "Lines written among the Euganean Hills," the "Stanzas
written in Dejection," the "Ode to the West Wind," the hackneyed
"Cloud," and "Skylark," "Arethusa," the "World's Wanderers," "Music,
when soft voices die," "The flower that smiles to-day," "Rarely, rarely,
comest thou," the "Lament," "One word is too often profaned," the
"Indian Air," the second "Lament," "O world! O life! O time!" (the most
perfect thing of its kind perhaps, in the strict sense of
perfection, that all poetry contains), the "Invitation," and the
"Recollection,"--this long list, which might have been made longer,
contains things absolutely consummate, absolutely unsurpassed, only
rivalled by a few other things as perfect as themselves.

Shelley has been foolishly praised, and it is very likely that the
praise given here may seem to some foolish. It is as hard for praise to
keep the law of the head as for blame to keep the law of the heart. He
has been mischievously and tastelessly excused for errors both in and
out of his writings which need only a kindly silence. In irritation at
the "chatter" over him some have even tried to make out that his
prose--very fine prose indeed, and preserved to us in some welcome
letters and miscellaneous treatises, but capable of being dispensed
with--is more worthy of attention than his verse, which has no parallel
and few peers. But that one thing will remain true in the general
estimate of competent posterity I have no doubt. There are two English
poets, and two only, in whom the purely poetical attraction, exclusive
of and sufficient without all others, is supreme, and these two are
Spenser and Shelley.

The life of John Keats was even shorter and even less marked by striking
events than that of Shelley, and he belonged in point of extraction and
education to a somewhat lower class of society than any of the poets
hitherto mentioned in this chapter. He was the son of a livery stable
keeper who was fairly well off, and he went to no school but a private
one, where, however, he received tolerable instruction and had good
comrades. Born in 1795, he was apprenticed to a surgeon at the age of
fifteen, and even