Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! 
      No hungry generations tread thee down;
   The voice I hear this passing night was heard
      In ancient days by emperor and clown: 

Mr. Rossetti tells us that it is a palpable, or rather ’palpaple (sic) fact that this address . . . is a logical solecism,’ as men live longer than nightingales.  As Mr. Colvin makes very much the same criticism, talking of ‘a breach of logic which is also . . . a flaw in the poetry,’ it may be worth while to point out to these two last critics of Keats’s work that what Keats meant to convey was the contrast between the permanence of beauty and the change and decay of human life, an idea which receives its fullest expression in the Ode on a Grecian Urn.  Nor do the other poems fare much better at Mr. Rossetti’s hands.  The fine invocation in Isabella—­

   Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,
      From the deep throat of sad Melpomene! 
   Through bronzed lyre in tragic order go,
      And touch the strings into a mystery,

seems to him ‘a fadeur’; the Indian Bacchante of the fourth book of Endymion he calls a ‘sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber,’ and, as for Endymion himself, he declares that he cannot understand ’how his human organism, with respirative and digestive processes, continues to exist,’ and gives us his own idea of how Keats should have treated the subject.  An eminent French critic once exclaimed in despair, ’Je trouve des physiologistes partout!’; but it has been reserved for Mr. Rossetti to speculate on Endymion’s digestion, and we readily accord to him all the distinction of the position.  Even where Mr. Rossetti seeks to praise, he spoils what he praises.  To speak of Hyperion as ’a monument of Cyclopean architecture in verse’ is bad enough, but to call it ’a Stonehenge of reverberance’ is absolutely detestable; nor do we learn much about The Eve of St. Mark by being told that its ’simplicity is full-blooded as well as quaint.’  What is the meaning, also, of stating that Keats’s Notes on Shakespeare are ‘somewhat strained and bloated’? and is there nothing better to be said of Madeline in The Eve of St. Agnes than that ’she is made a very charming and loveable figure, although she does nothing very particular except to undress without looking behind her, and to elope’?  There is no necessity to follow Mr. Rossetti any further as he flounders about through the quagmire that he has made for his own feet.  A critic who can say that ’not many of Keats’s poems are highly admirable’ need not be too seriously treated.  Mr. Rossetti is an industrious man and a painstaking writer, but he entirely lacks the temper necessary for the interpretation of such poetry as was written by John Keats.