both imaginations that proves him greater than Coleridge. In his
day they seem to have found Coleridge to be a thinker in his
poetry. To me he seems to have had nothing but senses, magic, and
simplicity, and these he had to the utmost yet known to man. Keats
was to have been a great intellectual poet, besides all that in
fact he was.


ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE


Of the five odes of Keats, the Nightingale is perhaps the most
perfect, and certainly the most imaginative. But the Grecian Urn
is the finest, even though it has fancy rather than imagination,
for never was fancy more exquisite. The most conspicuous idea--the
emptying of the town because its folk are away at play in the tale
of the antique urn--is merely a fancy, and a most antic fancy--a
prank; it is an irony of man, a rallying of art, a mockery of time,
a burlesque of poetry, divine with tenderness. The six lines in
which this fancy sports are amongst the loveliest in all
literature: the "little town," the "peaceful citadel,"--were ever
simple adjectives more happy? But John Keats's final moral here is
undeniably a failure; it says so much and means so little. The Ode
to Autumn is an exterior ode, and not in so high a rank, but lovely
and perfect. The Psyche I love the least, because its fancy is
rather weak and its sentiment effusive. It has a touch of the
deadly sickliness of Endymion. None the less does it remain just
within the group of the really fine odes of English poets. The
eloquent Melancholy more narrowly escapes exclusion from that
group.