In his interpretation of nature Shelley suggests Wordsworth, both by resemblance and by contrast.  To both poets all natural objects are symbols of truth; both regard nature as permeated by the great spiritual life which animates all things; but while Wordsworth finds a spirit of thought, and so of communion between nature and the soul of man, Shelley finds a spirit of love, which exists chiefly for its own delight; and so “The Cloud,” “The Skylark,” and “The West Wind,” three of the most beautiful poems in our language, have no definite message for humanity.  In his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” Shelley is most like Wordsworth; but in his “Sensitive Plant,” with its fine symbolism and imagery, he is like nobody in the world but himself.  Comparison is sometimes an excellent thing; and if we compare Shelley’s exquisite “Lament,” beginning “O world, O life, O time,” with Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” we shall perhaps understand both poets better.  Both poems recall many happy memories of youth; both express a very real mood of a moment; but while the beauty of one merely saddens and disheartens us, the beauty of the other inspires us with something of the poet’s own faith and hopefulness.  In a word, Wordsworth found and Shelley lost himself in nature.

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romanticists.  While Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating impossible reforms, and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political discontent of the times, Keats lived apart from men and from all political measures, worshiping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own heart, or to reflect some splendor of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be.  He had, moreover, the novel idea that poetry exists for its own sake, and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics or, indeed, to any cause, however great or small.  As he says in “Lamia”: 

                ...  Do not all charms fly
    At the mere touch of cold philosophy? 
    There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: 
    We know her woof, her texture; she is given
    In the dull catalogue of common things. 
    Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
    Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
    Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—­
    Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
    The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.

Partly because of this high ideal of poetry, partly because he studied and unconsciously imitated the Greek classics and the best works of the Elizabethans, Keats’s last little volume of poetry is unequaled by the work of any of his contemporaries.  When we remember that all his work was published in three short years, from 1817 to 1820, and that he died when only twenty-five years old, we must judge him to be the most promising figure of the early nineteenth century, and one of the most remarkable in the history of literature.