The Poets of the Dawn – 3 145largely his choice of rhythms, but wonderfully melodious as is
his use or conversion of them to the mould of his spirit, one
feels that he would have done better to seek more often for self-
formed movements. Shelley is the bright archangel of this dawn
and he becomes greater to us as the light he foresaw and lived in
returns and grows, but he sings half concealed in the too dense
halo of his own ethereal beauty.
As with Wordsworth and Byron, so too we find Shelley and
Keats standing side by side, but with a certain antinomy. They
are perhaps the two most purely poetic minds that have used
the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the
other looks from earth towards Olympus. Keats is the first entire
artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, — not grandiose,
classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his
artistry, he begins a new era. His astonishing early performance
leaves us wondering what might have been the masterpieces of
his prime, of which evenHyperionand the Odes are only the
unfulfilled promise. His death in the beginning of his powers is
the greatest loss ever suffered by human achievement in this field.
Alone of all the chief poets of his time he is in possession of a
perfect or almost perfected instrument of his native temperament
and genius, but he had not yet found the thing he had to say, not
yet seen what he was striving to see. All the other high things that
interested his great equals, had for him no interest; one godhead
only he worshipped, the image of divine Beauty, and through
this alone he wished to see Truth and by her to achieve spiritual
delight and not so much freedom as completeness. And he saw
her in three of her four forms, sensuous beauty, imaginative
beauty, intellectual and ideal beauty. But it is the first only which
he had entirely expressed when his thread was cut short in its
beginning; the second he had carried far, but it was not yet full-
orbed; towards the third and highest he was only striving, “to
philosophise he dared not yet”, but it was from the first the real
sense and goal of his genius.
On life he had like the others — Byron alone excepted — no
hold; such work asLamia,Isabella,The Eve of St. Agnes,in
which he followed the romantic tendency of the time, was not