O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
      Alone and palely loitering!

But he does not perceive the reasons that led Keats to alter this in the version he published in Leigh Hunt’s Indicator to:—­

    Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,

and so on.  Sir Sidney thinks that this and other changes, “which are all in the direction of the slipshod and the commonplace, were made on Hunt’s suggestion, and that Keats acquiesced from fatigue or indifference.”  To accuse Hunt of wishing to alter “knight-at-arms” to “wretched wight” seems to me unwarrantable guessing.  Surely a much more likely explanation is that Keats, who in this poem wrote his own biography as an unfortunate lover, came in a realistic mood to dislike “knight-at-arms” as a too romantic image of himself.  He decided, I conjecture, that “wretched wight” was a description nearer the bitter truth.  Hence his emendation.  The other alterations also seem to me to belong to Keats rather than to Hunt.  This does not mean that the “knight-at-arms” version is not also beautiful.  But, in spite of this, I trust the Delegates of the Oxford University Press will not listen to Sir Sidney Colvin’s appeal to banish the later version from their editions of Keats.  Every edition of Keats ought to contain both versions just as it ought to contain both versions of Hyperion.

Nothing that I have written will be regarded, I trust, as depreciating the essential excellence, power, and (in its scholarly way) even the greatness of Sir Sidney Colvin’s book.  But a certain false emphasis here and there, an intelligible prejudice in favour of believing what is good of his subject, has left his book almost too ready to the hand of those who cannot love a man of genius without desiring to “respectabilize” him.  Sir Sidney sees clearly enough the double nature of Keats—­his fiery courage, shown in his love of fighting as a schoolboy, his generosity, his virtue of the heart, on the one hand, and his luxurious love of beauty, his tremulous and swooning sensitiveness in the presence of nature and women, his morbidness, his mawkishness, his fascination as by serpents, on the other.  But in the resultant portrait, it is a too respectable and virile Keats that emerges.  Keats was more virile as a man than is generally understood.  He does not owe his immortality to his virility, however.  He owes it to his servitude to golden images, to his citizenship of the world of the senses, to his bondage to physical love.  Had he lived longer he might have invaded other worlds.  His recasting of Hyperion opens with a cry of distrust in the artist who is content to live in the little world of his art.  His very revulsion against the English of Milton was a revulsion against the dead language of formal beauty.  But it is in formal beauty—­the formal beauty especially of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, which has never been surpassed in literature—­that his own achievement lies.  He is great among the pagans, not among the prophets.  Unless we keep this clearly in mind our praise of him will not be appreciation.  It will be but a sounding funeral speech instead of communion with a lovely and broken spirit, the greatest boast of whose life was:  “I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.”