which well illustrate the spirit of Keats’s later work, with its perfect finish and melody.  It has many quotable lines and passages, and its “Hymn to Pan” should be read in connection with Wordsworth’s famous sonnet beginning, “The world is too much with us.”  The poem gives splendid promise, but as a whole it is rather chaotic, with too much ornament and too little design, like a modern house.  That Keats felt this defect strongly is evident from his modest preface, wherein he speaks of Endymion, not as a deed accomplished, but only as an unsuccessful attempt to suggest the underlying beauty of Greek mythology.

Keats’s third and last volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), is the one with which the reader should begin his acquaintance with this master of English verse.  It has only two subjects, Greek mythology and mediaeval romance.  “Hyperion” is a magnificent fragment, suggesting the first arch of a cathedral that was never finished.  Its theme is the overthrow of the Titans by the young sun-god Apollo.  Realizing his own immaturity and lack of knowledge, Keats laid aside this work, and only the pleadings of his publisher induced him to print the fragment with his completed poems.

Throughout this last volume, and especially in “Hyperion,” the influence of Milton is apparent, while Spenser is more frequently suggested in reading Endymion.

Of the longer poems in the volume, “Lamia” is the most suggestive.  It is the story of a beautiful enchantress, who turns from a serpent into a glorious woman and fills every human sense with delight, until, as a result of the foolish philosophy of old Apollonius, she vanishes forever from her lover’s sight.  “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the most perfect of Keats’s mediaeval poems, is not a story after the manner of the metrical romances, but rather a vivid painting of a romantic mood, such as comes to all men, at times, to glorify a workaday world.  Like all the work of Keats and Shelley, it has an element of unreality; and when we read at the end,

    And they are gone; aye, ages long ago
    These lovers fled away into the storm,

it is as if we were waking from a dream,—­which is the only possible ending to all of Keats’s Greek and mediaeval fancies.  We are to remember, however, that no beautiful thing, though it be intangible as a dream, can enter a man’s life and leave him quite the same afterwards.  Keats’s own word is here suggestive.  “The imagination,” he said, “may be likened to Adam’s dream; he awoke and found it true.”

It is by his short poems that Keats is known to the majority of present-day readers.  Among these exquisite shorter poems we mention only the four odes, “On a Grecian Urn,” “To a Nightingale,” “To Autumn,” and “To Psyche.”  These are like an invitation to a feast; one who reads them will hardly be satisfied until he knows more of such delightful poetry.  Those who study only the “Ode to a Nightingale” may find four things,—­a love of sensuous beauty, a touch of pessimism, a purely pagan conception of nature, and a strong individualism,—­which are characteristic of this last of the romantic poets.