he pine forest") is as vivid a picture of actual scenery as
ever appeared on the walls of any Academy: and _The Witch of Atlas_
itself, not to mention the portrait-frescoes in _Adonais_, is quite a
_waking_ dream. The quality of liveness is naturally still more
prominent in the letters, because poetical transcendence of fact is not
there required to accompany it. But it _does_ accompany now and then;
and the result is a blend or brand of letter-writing almost as unlike
anything else as the writer's poetry, and in its own (doubtless lower)
kind hardly less perfect. To prefer the letters to the poems is merely
foolish, and to say that they are as good as the poems is perhaps
excessive. But they comment and complete the Shelley of the Poems
themselves in a manner for which we cannot be too thankful.

[Sidenote: KEATS]

The letters of Keats did not attract much notice till long after those
of Byron, and no short time after those of Shelley, had secured it. This
was by no means wholly, though it may have been to some extent
indirectly, due to the partly stupid and partly malevolent attempts to
smother his poetical reputation in its cradle. The letters were
inaccessible till the late Lord Houghton practically resuscitated Keats;
and till other persons--rather in the "Codlin not Short" manner--rushed
in to correct and supplement Mr. Milnes as he then was. And it was even
much later still before two very different editors, Sir Sidney Colvin
and the late Mr. Buxton Forman, completed, or nearly so, the
publication. Something must be said and may be touched on later in
connection with a very important division of our subject in general, as
to the publication by the last-named, of the letters to Fanny Brawne:
but nothing in detail need be written, and it is almost needless to say
that none of these letters will appear here. No one but a brute who is
also something of a fool will think any the worse of Keats for writing
them. A thought of _sunt lacrimae rerum_ is all the price that need be
paid by any one who chooses to read them, nor is it our business to
characterise at length the taste and wits of the person who could
publish them.[28]

But putting this question aside, it is unquestionable that for some
years past there has been a tendency to value the Letters as a whole
very highly. Not only has unusual critical power been claimed for Keats
on the strength of them, but general epistolary merit; and though
nobody, so far as on