more deeply felt "the vital connection of beauty
with truth". He realized in himself his idea of the poet
expressed in his lines,--

"'Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he king,
Or poorest of the beggar-clan,
Or any other wondrous thing
A man may be 'twixt ape and Plato;
'Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren, or eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts; he hath heard
The lion's roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the tiger's yell
Comes articulate and presseth
On his ear like mother tongue." *

--
* "We often think of Shelley and Keats together,
and they seem to have an attraction for minds of the same cast.
They were both exposed to the same influences, those revolutionary
influences in literature and religion which inaugurated a new period.
Yet there is a great contrast as well as a great similarity
between them, and it is interesting to remark the different
spiritual results in the case of these two different minds
subjected to conditions so similar in general, though different
in detail. Both felt the same need, the need of ESCAPE,
desiring to escape from the actual world in which they perceived
more evil than good, to some other ideal world which they had
to create for themselves. This is the point of their similarity;
their need and motive were the same, to escape from the limitations
of the present. But they escaped in different directions,
Keats into the past where he reconstructed a mythical Greek world
after the designs of his own fancy, Shelley into a future where
he sought in a new and distant era, in a new and distant world,
a refuge from the present. We may compare Keats's `Hyperion'
with Shelley's `Prometheus', as both poems touch the same idea--
the dominion of elder gods usurped by younger, for Prometheus belonged
to the elder generation. The impression Keats gives us is that
he represents the dethroned gods in the sad vale, "far from
the fiery noon", for the pleasure of moving among them himself,
and creates their lonely world as a retreat for his own spirit.
Whereas in the `Prometheus Unbound' we feel that the scenes
laid in ancient days and built on Greek myths, have a direct relation
to the destinies of man, and that Shelley went back into the past
because he believed it was connected with the future,
and because he could use it as an artistic setting for exhibiting
an ideal world i