unable to see "the divine beauty--pure and clear and unalloyed, not
clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all the colors and
varieties of human life." [Footnote: _Symposium_, 212.] Plato would
agree with the analysis of the poetic character that Keats once
struggled with, when he exclaimed,

What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in
literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean
_Negative Capability_, that is, when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine
isolated verisimilitude caught from the Pentralium of mystery, from
being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge--With a great
poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather
obliterates all consideration.

Plato would agree with this,--all but the last sentence. Only, in place
of the phrase "negative capability," he would substitute "incapability,"
and reflect that the poet fails to see absolute beauty because he is not
content to leave the sensual behind and press on to absolute reality.

It may be that Plato is right, yet one cannot help wishing that sometime
a poet may arise of greater power of persuasion than any with whom we
have dealt, who will prove to Plato what he appears ever longing to be
convinced of, that absolute ideality is not a negation of the sensual,
and that poetry, in revealing the union of sense and spirit, is the
strongest proof of idealism that we possess. A poet may yet arise who
will prove that he is right in refusing to acknowledge that this world
is merely a surface upon which is reflected the ideals which constitute
reality and which abide in a different realm. The assumption in that