the pictorial and plastic material of Keats's
imagination. Under auspices less benign we might have found the former
mistaken and the latter irrelevant; but it so happens that when Sir
Sidney shows us over the garden every goose is a swan. Like travellers
who at the end of a long day's journey among an inhospitable peasantry
are, against their expectation received in a kindly farm, and find
themselves talking glibly to their host of matters which are unimportant
and unknown to them--the price of land, and the points of a pedigree
bull--so we follow with an intense and intelligent absorption a subtle
argument in 'Endymion' in which at no moment we really believe. On the
contrary, we are convinced (when we are free from our author's friendly
spell) that Keats wrote 'Endymion' at all adventure. The words of the
cancelled preface: 'Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to
finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain,' were, we are
sure, quite literally true, and if anything an under-statement of his
lack of argument and plan. Not that we believe that Keats was incapable
of or averse to 'fundamental brain-work'--he had an understanding more
robust, firmer in its hold of reality, more closely cast upon
experience, than any one of his great contemporaries, Wordsworth not
excepted--but at that phase in his evolution he was simply not concerned
with understanding. 'Endymion' is not a record or sublimation of
experience; it is itself an experience. It was the liberation of a
verbal inhibition, and the magic word of freedom was Beauty. The story
of Endymion was to Keats a road to the unknown, in her course along
which his imagination might 'paw up against the sky.'

A refusal to admit that Keats built 'Endymion' upon any structure of
argument, however obscure--even Sir Sidney would acknowledge that the
argument he discovers is _very_ obscure--is so far from being a
derogation from his genius that it is in our opinion necessary to a full
appreciation of his idiosyncrasy. It is customary to regard the Odes as
the pinnacle of his achievement and to trace a poetical progression to
that point and a subsequent decline: we are shown the evidence of this
decline in the revised Induction to 'Hyperion.' As far as an absolute
poetical perfection is concerned there can be no serious objection to
the view. But the case of Keats is eminently one to be considered in
itself as well as objectively. There is no danger that Keat