As Wordsworth’s work is too often marred by the moralizer, and Byron’s by the demagogue, and Shelley’s by the reformer, so Keats’s work suffers by the opposite extreme of aloofness from every human interest; so much so, that he is often accused of being indifferent to humanity.  His work is also criticised as being too effeminate for ordinary readers.  Three things should be remembered in this connection.  First, that Keats sought to express beauty for its own sake; that beauty is as essential to normal humanity as is government or law; and that the higher man climbs in civilization the more imperative becomes his need of beauty as a reward for his labors.  Second, that Keats’s letters are as much an indication of the man as is his poetry; and in his letters, with their human sympathy, their eager interest in social problems, their humor, and their keen insight into life, there is no trace of effeminacy, but rather every indication of a strong and noble manhood.  The third thing to remember is that all Keats’s work was done in three or four years, with small preparation, and that, dying at twenty-five, he left us a body of poetry which will always be one of our most cherished possessions.  He is often compared with “the marvelous boy” Chatterton, whom he greatly admired, and to whose memory he dedicated his Endymion; but though both died young, Chatterton was but a child, while Keats was in all respects a man.  It is idle to prophesy what he might have done, had he been granted a Tennyson’s long life and scholarly training.  At twenty five his work was as mature as was Tennyson’s at fifty, though the maturity suggests the too rapid growth of a tropical plant which under the warm rains and the flood of sunlight leaps into life, grows, blooms in a day, and dies.

As we have stated, Keats’s work was bitterly and unjustly condemned by the critics of his day.  He belonged to what was derisively called the cockney school of poetry, of which Leigh Hunt was chief, and Proctor and Beddoes were fellow-workmen.  Not even from Wordsworth and Byron, who were ready enough to recommend far less gifted writers, did Keats receive the slightest encouragement.  Like young Lochinvar, “he rode all unarmed and he rode all alone.”  Shelley, with his sincerity and generosity, was the first to recognize the young genius, and in his noble Adonais—­written, alas, like most of our tributes, when the subject of our praise is dead—­he spoke the first true word of appreciation, and placed Keats, where he unquestionably belongs, among our greatest poets.  The fame denied him in his sad life was granted freely after his death.  Most fitly does he close the list of poets of the romantic revival, because in many respects he was the best workman of them all.  He seems to have studied words more carefully than did his contemporaries, and so his poetic expression, or the harmony of word and thought, is generally more perfect than theirs.  More than any other he lived for poetry, as the noblest