To find the Melancholy--"

Keats's melancholy is not to be found amid images
of horror:

"She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu."

In _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ he conveys with delicate touch the
memory of the vision which haunts the knight, alone and palely
loitering. We see it through his eyes:

"I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:
They cried--'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'

"I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side."

From effects so exquisitely wrought as these it seems almost
profane to turn to the crude attempts of such poets as "Monk"
Lewis or Southey to sound the note of terror. Yet they too, in
their fashion, played a part in the "Renascence of Wonder."
Coleridge, fascinated by the spirit of "gramarye" in Bürger's
_Lenore_, etherealised and refined it. Scott and Lewis gloried in
the gruesome details and spirited rhythm of the ballad, and in