The gestures of the nymph are as ludicrous as could be found in an Academy or Salon picture.  Keats’s human or quasi-human beings are seldom more than decorations, but this is a commonplace decoration.  The figures in The Eve of St. Agnes and the later narratives are a part of the general beauty of the poems; but even there they are made, as it were, to match the furniture.  It is the same in all his best poems.  Keats’s imagination lived in castles, and he loved the properties, and the men and women were among the properties.  We may forget the names of Porphyro and Madeline, but we do not forget the background of casement and arras and golden dishes and beautiful sensual things against which we see them, charming figures of love-sickness.  Similarly, in Lamia, we may remember the name of the serpent-woman’s lover with difficulty; but who can forget the colours of her serpent-skin or the furnishing of her couch and of her palace in Corinth:—­

    That purple-lined palace of sweet sin?

In Keats every palace has a purple lining.

So much may be said in definition of Keats’s genius.  It was essentially an aesthetic genius.  It anticipated both William Morris and Oscar Wilde.  There is in Keats a passion for the luxury of the world such as we do not find in Wordsworth or Shelley.  He had not that bird-like quality of song which they had—­that happiness to be alive and singing between the sky and the green earth.  He looked on beautiful things with the intense devotion of the temple-worshipper rather than with the winged pleasure of the great poets.  He was love-sick for beauty as Porphyro for Madeline.  His attitude to beauty—­the secret and immortal beauty—­is one of “love shackled with vain-loving.”  It is desire of an almost bodily kind.  Keats’s work, indeed, is in large measure simply the beautiful expression of bodily desire, or of something of the same nature as bodily desire.  His conception of love was almost entirely physical.  He was greedy for it to the point of green-sickness.  His intuition told him that passion so entirely physical had in it something fatal.  Love in his poems is poisonous and secret in its beauty.  It is passion for a Lamia, for La Belle Dame sans Merci.  Keats’s ecstasies were swooning ecstasies.  They lacked joy.  It is not only in the Ode to a Nightingale that he seems to praise death more than life.  This was temperamental with him.  He felt the “cursed spite” of things as melancholily as Hamlet did.  He was able to dream a world nearer his happiness than this world of dependence and church bells and “literary jabberers”; and he could come to no terms except with his fancy.  I do not mean to suggest that he despised the beauty of the earth.  Rather he filled his eyes with it:—­

Hill-flowers running wild
In pink and purple chequer—­

and:—­

                                  Up-pil’d,
    The cloudy rack slow journeying in the West,
    Like herded elephants.