line. This is the sonnet
of which we have already spoken, the dream of Paolo and Francesca. The
"Why did I laugh to-night?" is a strange personal utterance, in which
the poet (not yet attacked by his mortal illness) exalts death above
verse, fame, and beauty, in the same mood of mind as in the lovely
passage of the "Ode to a Nightingale"; but the sonnet, considered as an
example of its own form of art, is too exclamatory and uncombined.

There are several minor poems by Keats of which--though some of them are
extremely dear to his devotees--I have made no mention. Such are
"Teignmouth," "Where be you going, you Devon maid?" "Meg Merrilies,"
"Walking in Scotland," "Staffa," "Lines on the Mermaid Tavern," "Robin
Hood," "To Fancy," "To the Poets," "In a drear-nighted December," "Hush,
hush, tread softly," four "Faery Songs." Most of these pieces seem to me
over-rated. As a rule they have lyrical impulse, along with the
brightness or the tenderness which the subject bespeaks; but they are
slight in significance and in structure, pleasurable but not memorable
work. One enjoys them once and again, and then their office is over;
they have not in them that stuff which can be laid to heart, nor that
spherical unity and replenishment which can make of a mere snatch of
verse an inscription for the adamantine portal of time.

The feeling with which Keats regarded women in real life has been
already spoken of. As to the tone of his poems respecting them we have
his own evidence. A letter of his to Armitage Brown, dated towards the
first days of September 1820, says, in reference to the "Lamia" volume:
"One of the causes, I understand from different quarters, of the
unpopularity of this new book, is the offence the ladies take at me. On
thinking that matter over, I am certain that I have said nothing in a
spirit to displease any woman I would care to please; but still there is
a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats; they
never see themselves dominant." The long poems in the volume in question
were "Isabella," "The Eve of St. Agnes," "Hyperion," and "Lamia." In
"Hyperion" women are of course not dominant; but, as regards the other
three poems, they are surely dominant enough in one sense. In "Isabella"
the heroine is the sole figure of prime importance--so also in "Lamia";
and in the "Eve of St. Agnes" she counts for much more than Porphyro,
though the number of stanzas about her may be fewer. Nevertheless it