nd of these not one is either
forced or remote. Then coming to the second verse,

Oh for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!

Mr. Rossetti exclaims in a fine fit of 'Blue Ribbon' enthusiasm: 'Surely
nobody wants wine as a preparation for enjoying a nightingale's music,
whether in a literal or in a fanciful relation'! 'To call wine "the
true, the blushful Hippocrene" . . . seems' to him 'both stilted and
repulsive'; 'the phrase "with beaded bubbles winking at the brim" is
(though picturesque) trivial'; 'the succeeding image, "Not charioted by
Bacchus and his pards"' is 'far worse'; while such an expression as
'light-winged Dryad of the trees' is an obvious pleonasm, for Dryad
really means Oak-nymph! As for that superb burst of passion,

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Mr. Rossetti tells us that it is a palpable, or rather 'palpaple (sic)
fact that this address . . . is a logical solecism,' as men live longer
than nightingales. As Mr. Colvin makes very much the same criticism,
talking of 'a breach of logic which is also . . . a flaw in the poetry,'
it may be worth while to point out to these two last critics of Keats's
work that what Keats meant to convey was the contrast between the
permanence of beauty and the change and decay of human life, an idea
which receives its fullest expression in the Ode on a Grecian Urn. Nor
do the other poems fare much better at Mr. Rossetti's hands. The fine
invocation in Isabella--

Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,
From the deep throat of sad Melpomene!
Through bronzed lyre in tragic order go,
And touch the strings into a mystery,

seems to him 'a fadeur'; the Indian Bacchante of the fourth book of
Endymion he calls a 'sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber,' and, as for
Endymion himself, he declares that he cannot understand 'how his human
organism, _with respirative and digestive processes_, continues to
exist,' and gives us his own idea of how Keats should have treated the
subject. An eminent French critic once exclaimed in despair, 'Je trouve
des physiologistes partout!'; but it has been reserved for Mr. Rossetti
to speculate on Endymion's digestion