the four, the _Ode to a Nightingale_, is the most
passionately human and personal of them all. For Keats wrote it soon
after the death of his brother Tom, whom he had loved devotedly and
himself nursed to the end. He was feeling keenly the tragedy of a world
'where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies', and the song of
the nightingale, heard in a friend's garden at Hampstead, made him long
to escape with it from this world of realities and sorrows to the world
of ideal beauty, which it seemed to him somehow to stand for and
suggest. He did not think of the nightingale as an individual bird, but
of its song, which had been beautiful for centuries and would continue
to be beautiful long after his generation had passed away; and the
thought of this undying loveliness he contrasted bitterly with our
feverishly sad and short life. When, by the power of imagination, he had
left the world behind him and was absorbed in the vision of beauty
roused by the bird's song, he longed for death rather than a return to
disillusionment.

So in the _Grecian Urn_ he contrasts unsatisfying human life with art,
which is everlastingly beautiful. The figures on the vase lack one thing
only--reality,--whilst on the other hand they are happy in not being
subject to trouble, change, or death. The thought is sad, yet Keats
closes this ode triumphantly, not, as in _The Nightingale_, on a note of
disappointment. The beauty of this Greek sculpture, truly felt, teaches
us that beauty at any rate is real and lasting, and that utter belief in
beauty is the one thing needful in life.

In the _Ode on Melancholy_ Keats, in a more bitter mood, finds the
presence, in a fleeting world, of eternal beauty the source of the
deepest melancholy. To encourage your melancholy mood, he tells us, do
not look on the things counted sad, but on the most beautiful, which are
only quickly-fading manifestations of the everlasting principle of
beauty. It is then, when a man most deeply loves the beautiful, when he
uses his capacities of joy to the utmost, that the full bitterness of
the contrast between the real and the ideal comes home to him and
crushes him. If he did not feel so much he would not suffer so much; if
he loved beauty less he would care less that he could not hold it long.

But in the ode _To Autumn_ Keats attains to the serenity he has been
seeking. In this unparalleled description of a richly beautiful autumn
day he conveys to us all the peace an