think him a great poet. The burden of a mighty genius would never
have been imposed upon shoulders so physically frail and a spirit so
infirmly sensitive. Great poets should have iron sinews.

Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given nothing to the
world, is understood to have devoted himself to the composition of
an epic poem. Some passages of it have been communicated to the
inner circle of his admirers, and impressed them as the loftiest
strains that have been audible on earth since Milton's days. If I
can obtain copies of these specimens, I will ask you to present them
to James Russell Lowell, who seems to be one of the poet's most
fervent and worthiest worshippers. The information took me by
surprise. I had supposed that all Keats's poetic incense, without
being embodied in human language, floated up to heaven and mingled
with the songs of the immortal choristers, who perhaps were
conscious of an unknown voice among them, and thought their melody
the sweeter for it. But it is not so; he has positively written a
poem on the subject of _Paradise Regained_, though in another sense
than that which presented itself to the mind of Milton. In
compliance, it may be imagined, with the dogma of those who pretend
that all epic possibilities in the past history of the world are
exhausted, Keats has thrown his poem forward into an indefinitely
remote futurity. He pictures mankind amid the closing circumstances
of the time-long warfare between good and evil. Our race is on the
eve of its final triumph. Man is within the last stride of
perfection; Woman, redeemed from the thraldom against which our
sibyl uplifts so powerful and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by
his side or communes for herself with angels; the Earth,
sympathizing with her children's happier state, has clothed herself
in such luxuriant and loving beauty as no eye ever witnessed since