THE GENIUS OF KEATS.

Mataura Ensign, Volume 10, Issue 754, 9 March 1888, Page 2

THE GENIUS OF KEATS.

Keats's conception of the kingdom of poetry was Shakespearian, including the whole range of life and imagination, every affection of the soul and every speculation of the mind. Of that kingdom he lived long enough to enter on and possess certain provinces only, tho^e that their manifest and prevailing charm first and most naturally allure the spirit of youth. Would he have been able to make the rest also his own ? Would the faculties that were so swift to reveal the hidden delights of Nature, to divine the true spirit of antiquity, to conjure with the swell of the Middle Age— would they with time have gained equal power to unlock the mysteries of the heart, and still in obedience to the law of beauty, to illuminate and harmonise the great struggles and problems of human life ? My belief (says Mr Sidney Colvin in the " English Series ") is that such power they would not have failed to gain. From the height to which the genius of Keats arose during the brief j period between its first effervescence and its exhaustion — from the glowing humanity Qf his owu uature, au4 &« '

c ampletenesß with which, by the testimony alike of his own consciousness and his friends' experience, he was accustomed to live in the lives of others — from the gleams of true greatness of mind which shine not only in his poetry, but equally amid the gossip and pleasantry of his familiar letters — -from all our evidences, in a word, as to what he was as well as from what he did — [ think it probable that by power, as w -11 as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shakespearean spirit that has lived since Shakespeare ; the true Marc llus, as his firs*", biographer has exiled him, of the realm of English song \ aud that in hi* premature death our literature has sustained its greatest loss. Something like this, it would seem, is also the opinion of his foremost now living successors, as Lord Tenuyson, Mr Browning, Mr Matthew Arnold. Others have formed a different judgment ; but among those uufortnnate guests at the banquet of life, the poets called away before their time, who can really adjudge the honours that would have been due had they remained ? In a final estimate of any writer's work ye must take into account not what he might have done, but only what he did. And in the work actually left by Keats, the masterchord of humanity, we shall admit, had not yet been struck with fulness.