in the poetry of Spenser, Chaucer, and Ariosto, he found another such world.  Arcadia and Faeryland—­“the realms of gold”—­he rediscovered them both for himself, and he struck into the paths that wound through their enchanted thickets with the ardour of an explorer.  This was the very mood of the Renaissance—­this genial heat which fuses together the pagan and the Christian systems—­this indifference of the creative imagination to the mere sources and materials of its creations.  Indeed, there is in Keats’ style a “natural magic” which forces us back to Shakspere for comparison, a noticeable likeness to the diction of the Elizabethans, when the classics were still a living spring of inspiration, and not a set of copies held in terrorem over the head of every new poet.

Keats’ break with the classical tradition was early and decisive.  In his first volume (1817) there is a piece entitled “Sleep and Poetry,” composed after a night passed at Leigh Hunt’s cottage near Hampstead, which contains his literary declaration of faith.  After speaking of the beauty that fills the universe, and of the office of Imagination to be the minister and interpreter of this beauty, as in the old days when “here her altar shone, even in this isle,” and “the muses were nigh cloyed with honours,” he asks: 

  “Could all this be forgotten?  Yes, a schism
  Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
  Made great Apollo blush for this, his land. 
  Men were thought wise who could not understand
  His glories:  with a puling infant’s force,
  They swayed about upon a rocking horse
  And thought it Pegasus.  Ah, dismal-souled! 
  The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled
  Its gathering waves—­ye felt it not.  The blue
  Bowed its eternal bosom, and the dew
  Of summer night collected still, to make
  The morning precious.  Beauty was awake! 
  Why were ye not awake?  But ye were dead
  To things ye knew not of—­were closely wed
  To musty laws, lined out with wretched rule
  And compass vile:  so that ye taught a school
  Of dolts to smooth, inlay and clip and fit;
  Till, like the certain wands of Jacob’s wit,
  Their verses tallied.  Easy was the task: 
  A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
  Of Poesy.  Ill-fated, impious race! 
  That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face,
  And did not know it,—­no, they went about,
  Holding a poor decrepit standard out,
  Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large,
  The name of one Boileau!”

This complaint, so far as it relates to the style of the rule-ridden eighteenth-century poetry, had been made before:  by Cowper, by Wordsworth, by Coleridge.  But Keats, with his instinct for beauty, pierces to the core of the matter.  It was because of Pope’s defective sense of the beautiful that the doubt arose whether he was a poet at all.  It was because of its

        “. . . forgetting the great end
  Of Poetry, that it should be a friend
  To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man,”