And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not--

culminating in the piteous death 'too lone and incomplete'--in the
delineation of all this Keats shows supreme power and insight.

In the conception, too, of the tragic loneliness of Lorenzo's ghost we
feel that nothing could be changed, added, or taken away.

Not quite equally happy are the descriptions of the cruel brothers, and
of Lorenzo as the young lover. There is a tendency to exaggerate both
their inhumanity and his gentleness, for purposes of contrast, which
weakens where it would give strength.

_The Eve of St. Agnes_, founded on a popular mediaeval legend, not being
a tragedy like _Isabella_, cannot be expected to rival it in depth and
intensity; but in every other poetic quality it equals, where it does
not surpass, the former poem.

To be specially noted is the skilful use which Keats here makes of
contrast--between the cruel cold without and the warm love within; the
palsied age of the Bedesman and Angela, and the eager youth of Porphyro
and Madeline; the noise and revel and the hush of Madeline's bedroom,
and, as Mr. Colvin has pointed out, in the moonlight which, chill and
sepulchral when it strikes elsewhere, to Madeline is as a halo of glory,
an angelic light.

A mysterious charm is given to the poem by the way in which Keats endows
inanimate things with a sort of half-conscious life. The knights and
ladies of stone arouse the bedesman's shuddering sympathy when he thinks
of the cold they must be enduring; 'the carven angels' '_star'd_'
'_eager-eyed_' from the roof of the chapel, and the scutcheon in
Madeline's window '_blush'd_ with blood of queens and kings'.

Keats's characteristic method of description--the way in which, by his
masterly choice of significant detail, he gives us the whole feeling of
the situation, is here seen in its perfection. In stanza 1 each line is
a picture and each picture contributes to the whole effect of painful
chill. The silence of the sheep, the old man's breath visible in the
frosty air,--these are things which many people would not notice, but it
is such little things that make the whole scene real to us.

There is another method of description, quite as beautiful in its way,
which Coleridge adopted with magic effect in _Christabel_. This is to
use the power of suggestion, to say very little, but that little of a
kind to awaken