t a
remembrance. 2nd, Its touches of beauty should never be half-way,
thereby making the reader breathless instead of content. The
rise, the progress, the setting, of imagery, should, like the
sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly
although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight.
But it is easier to think what poetry should be than to write it.
And this leads me to another axiom--That, if poetry comes not as
naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at
all."

Keats held that the melody of verse is founded on the adroit management
of open and close vowels. He thought that vowels can be as skilfully
combined and interchanged as differing notes of music, and that monotony
should only be allowed when it subserves some special purpose.

The following, from a letter to Mr. Woodhouse, October 1818 (soon after
the abusive reviews had appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and _The
Quarterly_), is a remarkable piece of self-analysis. As we read it, we
should bear in mind what Haydon said of Keats's want of decision of
character. I am not indeed clear that Keats has here pourtrayed himself
with marked accuracy. It may appear that he ascribes to himself too much
of absorption into the object or the personage which he contemplates;
whereas it might, with fully as much truth, be advanced that he was wont
to assimilate the personage or the object to himself. I greatly doubt
whether in Keats's poems we see the object or the personage the clearer
because his faculty transpires through them: rather, we see the object
or the personage through the haze of Keats. His range was not extremely
extensive (whatever it might possibly have become, with a longer lease
of life), nor was his personality by any means occulted. But in any
event his statement here is of great importance as showing what he
thought of the poetic phase of mind and working.

"As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort of which,
if I am anything, I am a member--that sort distinguished from the
Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a thing _per se_,
and stands alone), it is not itself--it has no self. It is
everything, and nothing--it has no character. It enjoys light,
and shade. It lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low,
rich or poor, mean or elevated--it has as much delight in
conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous
philoso