was incapable of breeding anything so deep as the mysterious portents
that, in the 'Hyperion,' run before and accompany the passing away of
divine immemorial dynasties. Nothing can be more impressive than the
picture of Saturn in his palsy of affliction, and of the mighty goddess
his grand-daughter, or than the secret signs of coming woe in the palace
of Hyperion. These things grew from darker creeds than Greece had ever
known since the elder traditions of Prometheus--creeds that sent down
their sounding plummets into far deeper wells within the human spirit.
What had been meant, by the question proposed to Shelley, was no doubt--
How so young a man as Keats, not having had the advantage of a regular
classical education, could have been so much at home in the details of the
_elder_ mythology? Tooke's 'Pantheon' might have been obtained by
favor of any English schoolboy, and Dumoustier's '_Lettres a Emile sur
la Mythologie_' by favor of very many young ladies; but these,
according to my recollection of them, would hardly have sufficed. Spence's
'_Polymetis_,' however, might have been had by favor of any good
library; and the '_Bibliotheca_' of Apollodorus, who is the cock of
the walk on this subject, might have been read by favor of a Latin
translation, supposing Keats really unequal to the easy Greek text. There
is no wonder in the case; nor, if there had been, would Shelley's kind
remark have solved it. The _treatment_ of the facts must, in any
case, have been due to Keats's genius, so as to be the same whether he had
studied Greek or not: the _facts_, apart from the treatment, must in
any case have been had from a book. Secondly--Let Mr. Landor rely upon it
--that Wordsworth never said the thing ascribed to him here as any formal
judgment, or what Scottish law would call _deliverance_, upon the
'Hyperion.' As to what he might have said incidentally and collaterally;
the meaning of words is so entirely affected by their position in a
conversation--what followed, what went before--that five words dislocated
from their context never would be received as evidence in the Queen's