not think now, though I saw that face.
But for her eyes I should have fled away;
They held me back with a benignant light
Soft, mitigated by divinest lids
Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed
Of all external things; they saw me not,
But in blank splendour beam'd like the mild moon
Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not
What eyes are upward cast....'

This vision of Moneta is the culminating point of Keats's evolution. It
stands at the summit, not of his poetry, but of his achievement regarded
as obedient to its own inward law. Moneta was to him the discovered
spirit of reality; her vision was the vision of necessity itself. In
her, joy and pain, life and death compassion and indifference, vision
and blindness are one; she is the eternal abode of contraries, the Idea
if you will, not hypostatised but immanent. Before this reality the poet
is impotent as his fellows; he is above them by his knowledge of it, but
below them by the weakness which that knowledge brings. He, too, is the
prey of contraries, the mirror of his deity, struck to the heart of his
victory, enduring the intolerable pain of triumph.

Here, not unfittingly, in his struggle with a conception too big to
express, came the end of Keats the poet. None have passed beyond him;
few have been so far. Of the poetry that might have been constructed on
the basis of an apprehension so profound we can form only a conjecture,
each after his own image: we do not know the method of the 'other verse'
of which Keats had a glimpse; we only know the quality with which it
would have been saturated, the calm and various light of united
contraries.

We fear that Sir Sidney Colvin will not agree with our view. The angles
of observation are different. The angle at which we have placed
ourselves is not wholly advantageous--from it Sir Sidney's book could
not have been written--but it has this advantage, that from it we can
read his book with a heightened interest. As we look out from it, some
things are increased and some diminished with the change of
perspective; and among those which are increased is our gratitude to Sir
Sidney. In the clear mirror of his sympathy and sanity nothing is
obscured. We are shown the Keats who wrote the perfect poems that will
last with the English language, and in the few places where Sir Sidney
falls short of the spirit of complete acceptance, we discern behind the
words of rebuke and regret only the idealisa