146 The Future Poetry
his own deeper self-expression; they are wonderful richly wo-
ven robes of sound and word and image curiously worked and
brocaded, but they clothe nothing. The Odes, where fulfilment
of imaginative beauty rises out of a higher sensuous seeking and
satisfaction to an admirable sweetness, fullness, largeness and
opulence and admits intimations of the ideal goddess, are almost
all of them among the scanty number of the chief masterpieces
in this high and deliberate lyrical form. But the real soul of
Keats, his inner genius, the thing he was striving to bring out
of himself is not to be altogether found even here; it lay in that
attempt which, first failing inEndymion, was again resumed in
Hyperion. It was the discovery of the divine Idea, Power and
living norm of Beauty which by its breath of delight has created
the universe, supports it and moves towards a greater perfection,
inspires the harmonies of inward sight and outward form, yearns
and strives towards the fullness of its own self-discovery by love
and delight. Not yet in possession of his idea, he tries to find and
to figure it inEndymionby sensuous images of a rich and dim
moonlit dream with a sort of allegory or weft of symbols behind
the words and thoughts, but his hand is still inexpert and fails
in the execution. InHyperionthe idea is clearer and in bolder
relief, but it is misconceived under a too intellectual, external
and conventionally epic Miltonic influence, and in his second
version he turns not quite happily to a renewal of the form of
his first attempt. He has found a clue in thought and imagination,
but not quite its realisation in the spiritual idea, has already its
imaginative, sensuous, something of its intellectual suggestion,
but not yet what the spirit in him is trying to reveal, its mystically
intellectual, mystically sensuous, mystically imaginative vision,
form and word. The intimation of it in his work, his growing
endeavour to find it and the unfulfilled promise of its discovery
and unique fullness of expression are the innermost Keats and by
it he belongs in spirit to these prophetic, but half-foiled singers of
the dawn. He lives more than any other poet in the very temple
of Beauty, traverses its sculptured and frescoed courts with a
mind hued and shaped to her forms and colours and prepares,
but is never permitted, to enter the innermost sanctuary. The