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And they say (the starry choir

And the other listening things) That Israfeli's fire

Is owing to that lyre

By which he sits and sings-
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings.

But the skies that angel trod,

Where deep thoughts are a duty, Where Love's a grown-up God, Where the Houri glances are Imbued with all the beauty

Which we worship in a star.

Therefore, thou art not wrong,
Israfeli, who despisest
An unimpassioned song;

To thee the laurels belong,

Best bard, because the wisest !

Merrily live, and long!

The ecstasies above

With thy burning measures suit Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,

With the fervor of thy lute-
Well may the stars be mute!

Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;

Our flowers are merely

flowers,

And the shadow of thy perfect bliss

Is the sunshine of ours.

If I could dwell

Where Israfel

Hath dwelt, and he where I,

He might not sing so wildly well

A mortal melody,

While a bolder note than this might swell From my lyre within the sky.

ODE ON A GRECIAN

WH

URN

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HEN Keats composed the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in 1819, he was in his twenty-fifth year, and in the happiest hour of his creative work. To this period belong five odes which, by their various and unique excellence, place him among the greater English poets. Endymion" has lines of exquisite beauty, and is penetrated with the spirit of poetry, but it fails both in construction and form to rise into the region of mature and ripened art. perion" has an amplitude of imaginative suggestion which discloses a great poetic force dealing with ma

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terials which, although clearly within its vision, are still beyond its grasp. There are evidences of structural

genius and of the power to apply fundamental ideas to life in the longer poems; but Keats died too early for their full and instinctive play in his work. On this side, the side on which the greatest poets reveal clear mastery, Keats remains a poet of high promise; on the side of freshness of diction and imagination, of the magic which gathers from words their first delicious bloom and opens them to the very heart of their ultimate beauty, which captures and holds the elusive loveliness in things and in thought, Keats is not only a poet of achievement, he is the poet of poets; the type of concentrated poetic consciousness and a past-master of verbal felicity. These claims for his pre-eminence

rest on the Odes, on "St. Agnes' Eve," and on two or three sonnets, and find abundant justification in their contrasting perfections. To the five Odes "St. Agnes' Eve," composed in Chichester in January, 1819, was a prelude, and "Lamia," begun in Shanklin in the following June, was an epilogue; between these two pieces of verse, the first of a marvelous richness of diction, Keats touched the heights of his art and made his lasting contribution to English poetry. The "Ode on Melancholy" has both a classic and a personal touch; beauty is still all-compelling, but "beauty that must die":

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. . . In the very temple of Delight Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine;"

in the "Ode on Indolence" the personal note is struck with diminished

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