friends and _banal_ associations, with
one prodigious and matchless faculty. But it is that very background
that constitutes the supreme force of the appeal. Keats accepted his
circumstances, his friends, his duties with a singular modesty. He was
not for ever complaining that he was unappreciated and underestimated.
His commonplaceness, when it appears, is not a defect of quality, but
an eager human interest in the personalities among whom his lot was
cast. But every now and then there swells up a poignant sense of
passion and beauty, a sacred, haunting, devouring fire of inspiration,
which leaps high and clear upon the homely altar.

Thus he writes: "This morning poetry has conquered--I have relapsed
into those abstractions which are my only life--I feel escaped from a
new, strange, and threatening sorrow.... There is an awful warmth
about my heart, like a load of immortality." Or again: "I feel more
and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live
in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds." And again: "I have
loved the principle of beauty in all things."

One sees in these passages that there not only is a difference of
force and passion, but an added quality of some kind in the mind of a
poet, a combination of fine perception and emotion, which
instantaneously and instinctively translates itself into words.

For it must never be forgotten how essential a part of the poet is the
knack of words. I do not doubt that there are hundreds of people who
are haunted and penetrated by a lively sense of beauty, whose emotions
are fiery and sweet, but who have not just the intellectual store of
words, which must drip like honey from an overflowing jar. It is a
gift as definite as that of the sculptor or the musician, an exuberant
fertility and swiftness of brain, that does not slowly and painfully
fit a word into its place, but which breathes thought direct into
music.

The most subtle account of this that I know is given in a passage in
Shelley's _Defence of Poetry_. He says: "A man cannot say 'I will
compose poetry'--the greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in
creation is like a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like
an inconstant wind, awakes to transitory brightness. The power arises
from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it
is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic
either of its approach or its departure. When compos