In considering his character, we must first observe the power of his imagination; it was so strong and all-absorbing, that it shut out the real and the true.  He was a man of extreme sensibility; and that sensibility, hurt by common contact with things and persons around him, made him morbid in morality and metaphysics.  He was a polemic of the fiercest type; and while he had an honest desire for reform of the evils that he saw about him, it is manifest that he attacked existing institutions for the very love of controversy.  Bold, retired, and proud, without a spice of vanity, if he has received harsh judgment from one half the critical world, who had at least the claim that they were supporting pure morals and true religion, his character has been unduly exalted by the other half, who have mistaken reckless dogmatism for true nobility of soul.  The most charitable judgment is that of Moir, who says:  “It is needless to disguise the fact—­and it accounts for all—­his mind was diseased; he never knew, even from boyhood, what it was to breathe the atmosphere of healthy life—­to have the mens sana in corpore sano.”

But of his poetical powers we must speak in a different manner.  What he has left, gives token that, had he lived, he would have been one of the greatest modern poets.  Thoroughly imbued with the Greek poetry, his verse-power was wonderful, his language stately and learned without pedantry, his inspiration was that of nature in her grandest moods, his fancy always exalted; and he presents the air of one who produces what is within him from an intense love of his art, without regard to the opinion of the world around him,—­which, indeed, he seems to have despised more thoroughly than any other poet has ever done.  Byron affected to despise it; Shelley really did.

We cannot help thinking that, had he lived after passing through the fiery trial of youthful passions and disordered imagination, he might have astonished the world with the grand spectacle of a convert to the good and true, and an apostle in the cause of both.  Of him an honest thinker has said,—­and there is much truth in the apparent paradox,—­“No man who was not a fanatic, had ever more natural piety than he; and his supposed atheism is a mere metaphysical crotchet in which he was kept by the affected scorn and malignity of dunces."[37]

JOHN KEATS.—­Another singular illustration of eccentricity and abnormal power in verse is found in the brief career of John Keats, the son of the keeper of a livery-stable in London, who was born on the 29th October, 1795.

Keats was a sensitive and pugnacious youth; and in 1810, after a very moderate education, he was apprenticed to a surgeon; but the love of poetry soon interfered with the surgery, and he began to read, not without the spirit of emulation, the works of the great poets—­Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton.  After the issue of a small volume which attracted little or no attention, he published his Endymion in 1818, which, with some similarity in temperament, he inscribed to the memory of Thomas Chatterton.  It is founded upon the Greek mythology, and is written in a varied measure.  Its opening line has been a familiar quotation since: