w on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave.

"She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.

(5) "That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret,
Here where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few sad last grey hairs;
Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

"Darkling I listen: and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,--
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme
To take into the air my quiet breath.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy.

"The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self.

"Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Fled is that music--do I wake or sleep?"

To one or two of these phrases a few words of comment may be given. That
axiom which concludes the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"--

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,"

is perhaps the most important contribution to thought which the poetry
of Keats contains: it pairs with and transcends

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."

I am not prepared to say whether Keats was the first writer to formulate
any axiom to this effect,--I should rather presume not; but at any rate
it comes with peculiar appropriateness in the writings of a poet who
might have varied the dictum of Iago, and said of himself

"For I am nothi