ay from
purely aesthetic standards? Again, consider the case of Keats. For us
the facts of his life must color almost every line he wrote. How are we
to determine whether his sonnet, _When I Have Fears,_ is great poetry or
not, so long as it fills our minds insistently with the pity of his love
for Fanny Brawne, and his epitaph in the Roman graveyard?

Christopher North has been much upbraided by a hero-worshiping
generation, but one may go too far in condemning the Scotch sense in his
contention:

Mr. Keats we have often heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and
we have no doubt that his manners and feelings are calculated to make
his friends love him. But what has all this to do with our opinion of
their poetry? What, in the name of wonder, does it concern us, whether
these men sit among themselves with mild or with sulky faces, eating
their mutton steaks, and drinking their porter? [Footnote: Sidney
Colvin, _John Keats,_ p. 478.]

If we are reluctant to sponsor words printed in _Blackwoods,_ we may be
more at ease in agreeing with the same sentiments as expressed by
Keats himself. After a too protracted dinner party with Wordsworth and
Hunt, Keats gave vent to his feelings as follows:

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing that enters into one's
soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but with its
subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! How they would lose
their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "Admire
me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!".... I will cut all
this--I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular.... I
don't mean to deny Wordsworth's grandeur and Hunt's merit, but I mean to
say that we need not be teased with grandeur and merit when we can have
them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. [Footnote: _Ibid.,_ p. 253.]

If acquaintance with a poet prevents his contemporaries from fixing
their attention exclusively upon the merits of his verse, in how much
better case is posterity, if the poet's personality makes its way into
the heart of his poetry? We have Browning's dictum on Shakespeare's
sonnets,

With this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart. Once more
_Did_ Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he.
[Footnote: _House._]

Did Browning mean that Shakespeare was less the poet, as well as less
the dramatist, if he revealed himself to us in his poetry? And is this
our contention?

It seem