t born within the present
century who has not been a mere "sport" or exception. He begat Tennyson,
and Tennyson begat all the rest.

The evidences of this are to be seen in almost his earliest poems--not
necessarily in those contained in his earliest volume. Of course they
are not everywhere. There were sure to be, and there were, mere echoes
of eighteenth century verse and mere imitations of earlier writers. But
these may be simply neglected. It is in such pieces as "Calidore" that
the new note is heard; and though something in this note may be due to
Hunt (who had caught the original of it from Wither and Browne), Keats
changed, enriched, and refashioned the thing to such an extent that it
became his own. It is less apparent (though perhaps not less really
present) in his sonnets, despite the magnificence of the famous one on
Chapman's _Homer_, than in the couplet poems, which are written in an
extremely fluent and peculiar verse, very much "enjambed" or overlapped,
and with a frequent indulgence in double rhymes. Hunt had to a certain
extent started this, but he had not succeeded in giving it anything like
the distinct character which it took in Keats' hands.

_Endymion_ was written in this measure, with rare breaks; and there is
little doubt that the lusciousness of the rhythm, combined as it was
with a certain lusciousness both of subject and (again in unlucky
imitation of Hunt) of handling, had a bad effect on some readers, as
also that the attacks on it were to a certain extent, though not a very
large one, prompted by genuine disgust at the mawkishness, as its author
called it, of the tone. Keats, who was always an admirable critic of his
own work, judged it correctly enough later, except that he was too harsh
to it. But it is a delightful poem to this day, and I do not think that
it is quite just to call it, as it has been called, "not Greek, but
Elizabethan-Romantic." It seems to me quite different from Marlowe or
the author of _Britain's Ida_, and really Greek, but Greek mediaeval,
Greek of the late romance type, refreshed with a wonderful new blood of
English romanticism. And this once more was to be the note of all the
best poetry of the century, the pouring of this new English blood
through the veins of old subjects--classical, mediaeval, foreign, modern.
We were to conquer the whole world of poetical matter with our English
armies, and Keats was the first leader who started the adventure.

The exquisite