ds "The Pot of Basil." He thinks
it both beautiful and pathetic--and so do I.

"Isabella" is written in the octave stanza; "The Eve of St. Agnes" in
the Spenserean. This difference of metre corresponds very closely to the
difference of character between the two poems. "Isabella" is a narrative
poem of event and passion, in which the incidents are presented so as
chiefly to subserve purposes of sentiment; "The Eve of St. Agnes,"
though it assumes a narrative form, is hardly a narrative, but rather a
monody of dreamy richness, a pictured and scenic presentment, which
sentiment again permeates and over-rules. I rate it far above
"Isabella"--and indeed above all those poems of Keats, not purely
lyrical, in which human or quasi-human agents bear their part, except
only the ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and the uncompleted "Eve of
St. Mark." "Hyperion" stands aloof in lonely majesty; but I think that,
in the long run, even "Hyperion" represents the genius of Keats less
adequately, and past question less characteristically, than "The Eve of
St. Agnes." The story of this fascinating poem is so meagre as to be
almost nugatory. There is nothing in it but this--that Keats took hold
of the superstition proper to St. Agnes' Eve, the power of a maiden to
see her absent lover under certain conditions, and added to it that a
lover, who was clandestinely present in this conjuncture of
circumstances, eloped with his mistress. This extreme tenuity of
constructive power in the poem, coupled with the rambling excursiveness
of "Endymion," and the futility of "The Cap and Bells," might be held to
indicate that Keats had very little head for framing a story--and indeed
I infer that, if he possessed any faculty in that direction, it remained
undeveloped up to the day of his death. One of the few subsidiary
incidents introduced into "The Eve of St. Agnes" is that the lover
Porphyro, on emerging from his hiding-place while his lady is asleep,
produces from a cupboard and marshals to sight a large assortment of
appetizing eatables. Why he did this no critic and no admirer has yet
been able to divine; and the incident is so trivial in itself, and is
made so much of for the purpose of verbal or metrical embellishment, as
to reinforce our persuasion that Keats's capacity for framing a story
out of successive details of a suggestive and self-consistent kind was
decidedly feeble. The power of "The Eve of St. Agnes" lies in a wholly
different direc