poetry of his later work showed this general tendency in
all its latest pieces,--clearly in the larger poems, the fine but
perhaps somewhat overpraised _Hyperion_, the admirable _Lamia_, the
exquisite _Eve of St. Agnes_, but still more in the smaller, and most of
all in those twin peaks of all his poetry, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
and "La Belle Dame sans Merci." He need indeed have written nothing but
these two to show himself not merely an exquisite poet but a captain and
leader of English poetry for many a year, almost for many a generation
to come. Wordsworth may have given him a little, a very quiet hint for
the first, the more Classical masterpiece; Coleridge something a little
louder for the second, the Romantic. But in neither case did the summons
amount to anything like a cue or a call-bell; it was at best seed that,
if it had not fallen on fresh and fruitful soil, could have come to
nothing.

As it is, and if we wish to see what it came to, we must simply look at
the whole later poetry of the nineteenth century in England. The
operations of the spirit are not to be limited, and it is of course
quite possible that if Keats had not been, something or somebody would
have done his work instead of him. But as it is, it is to Keats that we
must trace Tennyson, Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Morris; to Keats that
even not a little of Browning has to be affiliated; to Keats, directly
or indirectly, that the greater part of the poetry of nearly three
generations owes royalty and allegiance.

Of him, as of Shelley, some foolish and hurtful things have been said.
In life he was no effeminate "aesthetic" or "decadent," divided between
sensual gratification and unmanly _Katzenjammer_, between paganism and
puerility, but an honest, manly Englishman, whose strength only yielded
to unconquerable disease, whose impulses were always healthy and
generous. Despite his origin,--and, it must be added, some of his
friendships,--there was not a touch of vulgarity about him; and if his
comic vein was not very full-pulsed, he had a merry laugh in him. There
is no "poisonous honey stolen" from anywhere or extracted by himself
from anything in Keats; his sensuousness is nothing more than is, in the
circumstances, "necessary and voluptuous and right." But these moral
excellences, while they may add to the satisfaction with which one
contemplates him, hardly enhance--though his morbid admirers seem to
think that the absence of them would e