in
Shelley a lyre that responded to their touch in such entrancing notes.

General Characteristics.--Shelley's is the purest, the most hopeful,
and the noblest voice of the Revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge lost
their faith and became Tories, and Byron was a selfish, lawless
creature; but Shelley had the martyr spirit of sacrifice, and he
trusted to the end in the wild hopes of the revolutionary enthusiasts.
His _Queen Mab, Revolt of Islam, Ode to Liberty, Ode to Naples_, and,
above all, his _Prometheus Unbound_, are some of the works inspired by
a trust in the ideal democracy which was to be based on universal love
and the brotherhood of man. This faith gives a bounding elasticity and
buoyancy to Shelley's thought, but also tinges it with that disgust
for the old, that defiance of restraint, and that boyish disregard for
experience which mark a time of revolt.

The other subject that Shelley treats most frequently in his verse is
ideal beauty. He yearned all his life for some form beautiful enough
to satisfy the aspirations of his soul. _Alastor, Epipsychidion, The
Witch of Atlas_, and _Prometheus Unbound_, all breathe this insatiate
craving for that "Spirit of Beauty," that "awful Loveliness."

Many of his efforts to describe in verse this democracy and this ideal
beauty are impalpable and obscure. It is difficult to clothe such
shadowy abstractions in clear, simple form. He is occasionally vague
because his thoughts seem to have emerged only partially from the
cloud lands that gave them birth. At other times, his vagueness
resembles Plato's because it is inherent in the subject matter. Like
Byron, Shelley is sometimes careless in the construction and revision
of his verse. We shall, however, search in vain for these faults in
Shelley's greatest lyrics. He is one of the supreme lyrical geniuses
in the language. Of all the lyric poets of England, he is the greatest
master of an ethereal, evanescent, phantomlike beauty.

JOHN KEATS, 1795-1821

[Illustration: JOHN KEATS. _From the painting by Hilton, National
Portrait Gallery_.]

Life.--John Keats, the son of a keeper of a large livery stable, a
man "fine in common sense and native respectability," was born in
Moorfields, London, in 1795. He attended school at Enfield, where he
was a prize scholar. He took special pleasure in studying Grecian
mythology, the influence of which is so apparent in his poetry. While
at school, he also voluntarily wrote a translatio