in the volume of genius of the two writers. Further, while it
is not at all improbable that if Shelley had lived he would have gone on
writing better and better, the same probability is, I think, to be more
sparingly predicated of Keats.

On the other hand, by a not uncommon connection or consequence, Keats
has proved much more of a "germinal" poet than Shelley. Although the
latter was, I think, by far the greater, his poetry had little that was
national and very little that was imitable about it. He has had a vast
influence; but it has been in the main the influence, the inspiration of
his unsurpassed exciting power. No one has borrowed or carried further
any specially Shelleian turns of phrase, rhythm, or thought. Those who
have attempted to copy and urge further the Shelleian attitude towards
politics, philosophy, ethics, and the like, have made it generally
ludicrous and sometimes disgusting. He is, in his own famous words,
"something remote and afar." His poetry is almost poetry in its
elements, uncoloured by race, language, time, circumstance, or creed. He
is not even so much a poet as Poetry accidentally impersonated and
incarnate.

With Keats it is very different. He had scarcely reached maturity of any
kind when he died, and he laboured under the very serious disadvantages,
first of an insufficient acquaintance with the great masters, and
secondly of coming early under the influence of a rather small master,
yet a master, Leigh Hunt, who taught him the fluent, gushing, slipshod
style that brought not merely upon him, but upon his mighty successor
Tennyson, the harsh but not in this respect wholly unjust lash of
conservative and academic criticism. But he, as no one of his own
contemporaries did, felt, expressed, and handed on the exact change
wrought in English poetry by the great Romantic movement. Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Scott, and even Southey to some extent, were the authors of
this; but, being the authors, they were necessarily not the results of
it. Byron was fundamentally out of sympathy with it, though by accidents
of time and chance he had to enlist; Shelley, an angel, and an effectual
angel, of poetry, was hardly a man, and still less an Englishman. But
Keats felt it all, expressed what of it he had time and strength to
express, and left the rest to his successors, helped, guided, furthered
by his own example. Keats, in short, is the father, directly or at short
stages of descent, of every English poe