discriminately, generosity and fretfulness,
ardour and despondency, boyish petulance side by side with manful good
sense, the tattle of suburban parlours with the speculations of a
spirit unsurpassed for native gift and insight.' Every now and then
the level of his easygoing discourse is lit up by a flash of wit, and
occasionally by a jet of brilliant fancies among which some of his
finest poetry may be traced in the process of incubation. His whole
mind is set upon his art; for that only, and for a few intimate
friends, does he care to live and work; his letters often tell us when
and where, under what influences, his best pieces were composed; one
likes to know, for example, that the _Ode to Autumn_ came to him on a
fine September day during a Sunday's walk over the stubbles near
Winchester. His criticisms are always good, and their form
picturesque. He compares human life to a chamber that becomes
gradually darkened, in which one door after another is set open,
showing only dim passages leading out into darkness. This, he says, is
the burden of the mystery which Wordsworth felt and endeavoured to
explore; and he thinks that Wordsworth is deeper than Milton, though
he attributes this, justly, more to 'the general and gregarious
advance of intellect, than individual greatness of mind.' So far as
spontaneity and the free unguarded play of sportive and serious ideas,
taken as they came uppermost, are tests and conditions of excellence
in this kind of writing, Keats's letters must rank high. Nevertheless
there is still room for doubt whether these juvenile productions would
have left any but a most ephemeral mark apart from their connection
with his poetry.

In the case of other poets, who were his contemporaries, the verdict
will be different. They are all to be classed, though not in the same
line, as writers of letters that have great original and intrinsic
value. Scott's letters exhibit his generous and masculine nature; the
buoyancy of his spirits in good or bad fortune; and that romantic
attachment to old things and ideas which hardened latterly into
inveterate Toryism. Southey's prose writings will probably survive his
metrical compositions, which indeed have already fallen into oblivion.
There is life in a poet so long as he is quoted; but no verses or even
lines of Southey have fixed themselves in the popular memory. And
whereas the letters of Keats disclose a mind filled with the sense of
beauty and rich with p