pendent on images of sense:--

"Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath."

The _Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Ode on
Melancholy, Lamia_, and _Isabella_,--all show the unusual charm of
Keats. He manifests the greatest strength in his unfinished fragment
_Hyperion_, "the Goetterdaemmerung of the early Grecian gods." The
opening lines reveal the artistic perfection of form and the
effectiveness of the sensory images with which he frames the scene:--

"Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud."

General Characteristics.--Keats is the poetic apostle of the
beautiful. He specially emphasizes the beautiful in the world of the
senses; but his definition of beauty grew to include more than mere
physical sensations from attractive objects. In his _Ode to a Grecian
Urn_, he says that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," and he calls to
the Grecian pipes to play--

"Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone."

Those poets who thought that they could equal Keats by piling up a
medley of sense images have been doomed to disappointment. The
transforming power of his imagination is more remarkable than the
wealth of his sensations.

His mastery in choosing, adapting, and sometimes even creating, apt
poetic words or phrases, is one of his special charms. Matthew Arnold
says: "No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in
expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats." Some of his
descriptive adjectives and phrases, such as the "deep-damasked wings"
of the tiger-moth, have been called "miniature poems." In the eighty
lines of the _Ode to a Nightingale_, we may note the "_full-throated
ease_" of the nightingale's song, the vintage cooled in the
"_deep-delved_ earth," the "_beaded bubbles winking_ at the brim" of
the beaker "_full of the warm South_," "the coming musk-rose, full of
_dewy wine_," the sad Ruth "amid the _alien_ corn," and the "_faery
lands forlorn_."

A contemporary critic accused Keats of "spawning" new words, of
converting verbs into nouns, of forming n