But this very absence of recognition and fame was what made the lives of these two great poets so intensely beautiful; there is hardly a great poet who has achieved fame who has not been in a degree spoilt by the consciousness of worth and influence.  Tennyson, Pope, Byron, Wordsworth—­how their lives were injured by vanity and self-conceit!  Even Scott was touched by the grossness of prosperity, though he purged his fault in despair and tears.  But such poets as did not guess their own greatness, and remained humble and peaceable, how much sweeter and gentler is their example, walking humbly in the company of the mighty, and hardly seeming to guess that they are of the happy number.  And thus we may rank it amongst the greatest gifts that were given to Keats and Shelley, though they did not know their own felicity, that they were never overshadowed by the approbation of the world, and had no touch of the complacent sense of greatness that so disfigures the spirit of a mortal.

XLIX

I have been reading all to-day the Letters of Keats, a thing which I do at irregular intervals.  Perhaps what I am going to say may sound affected, but it is perfectly true:  it is a book that always has a very peculiar effect on me, not so much a mental effect as what, for want of a better word, I will call a spiritual effect.  It sets my soul on flame.  I feel as though I had drawn near to a spirit burning like a fiery lamp, and that my own torpid and inert spirit had been kindled at it.  That flame will burn out again, as it has burnt out many times before; but while the fire still leaps and glances in my heart I will try to put down exactly what it makes me feel I believe there are few books that give one, in the first place, more of the author’s own heart.  Is there in the world any book which gives so fully the youthful, ebullient thoughts of a man of the highest poetical genius as this?  I cannot recall any.  Keats, to his brothers, his sister, and to one or two intimate friends, allowed his long, vague letters to be an absolutely intimate diary of what he was thinking.  You see his genius rise and flush and blaze and grow cold again before your eyes.  Not to multiply instances, take the wonderful letter written in October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse, where he sketches his own poetical temperament, differentiating it from what he calls the “Wordsworthian Character—­the egotistically sublime.”  He goes on to say that he feels that he has no identity of his own, but that he is a kind of sensitive mirror on which external things imprint themselves for a lucid moment and are gone again; he says that it is a torture to him to be in a room with other people, because the identity of everyone presses on him so insistently.  He adds in a fine elation that “the faint conceptions that he has of poems to come, bring the blood frequently into his forehead.”