in,
and because he did not concern himself with the gravest questions of
life; but, after all, Keats is the poet for the poets!

My dear friend, Edward Roth--whom James Huneker celebrates in his
"Steeplejack"--named Spenser as "the poet of the poets"; but Spenser is
too hard to read--even harder than Chaucer, and certainly more involved,
while no poets that ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full of
a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later, it seemed absurd for
the French poets of a certain _genre_ to call themselves symbolists.
When Keats wrote, he saw and felt, and he saw because he felt. It was
not necessary for him to search laboriously for the colour of a word.
The thing itself coloured the word--and Keats, working hard in a verbal
laboratory, would have been an anomaly. It was not necessary for him to
study carefully the music of his verse as Campion did or Coventry
Patmore or as Sidney Lanier is supposed to have done--though one cannot
have suspected that Sidney Lanier's elaborate laboratory was erected
after his best verse had been written.

Maurice de Gu['e]rin, a very Christian soul, was probably disturbed in
his religious sentiments by the defection of his old friend and
director, P[`e]re de Lamennais--the "M. F['e]li" of the little paradise
of la Ch['e]nie. To the delight of some of the more independent and
emancipated of the literary circle at Paris, which included George Sand,
Maurice was becoming more pantheistic than Christian. He seemed to have
tried to make for humanity an altar on which Christ and Nature might be
almost equally adored, and this gave Eug['e]nie great pain, although it
did not change her love or make a rift in her belief in him.

De Gu['e]rin is a singing poet in a language which is used by few singing
poets for serious themes. There are few lyric poems in French, like the
"Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It was not strange that the
great Sainte-Beuve found the verse of De Gu['e]rin somewhat too unusual.
Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine reduced to a
conversational tone, and taking all the little turns of an intimate
talk." Eug['e]nie complains that "it sings too much and does not talk
enough." However, one of the most charming of literary essays, to which
Matthew Arnold's seems almost "common," is that preceding Tr['e]butien's
"Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice de Gu['e]rin." It would be folly
for me to try to permeate the mind of any oth