“O eloquent and famed Boccaccio,
  Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon. . . . 
  For venturing syllables that ill beseem
  The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme. . . .

  “Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance? 
  Why linger at the yawning tomb so long? 
  O for the gentleness of old Romance,
  The simple plaining of the minstrel’s song.”

But it is just this wormy circumstance that rivets the poet’s attention; his imagination lingers over Isabella kissing the dead face, pointing each eyelash, and washing away the loam that disfigures it with her tears; over the basil tufts growing rankly from the mouldering head,

  “The thing was vile with green and livid spot,”

but Keats’ tenderness pierces the grave.

It is instructive to compare “Isabella” with Dryden’s “Sigismonda and Guiscardo,” also from the “Decameron” and surcharged with the physically horrible.  In this tale Tancred sends his daughter her lover’s heart in a golden goblet.  She kisses the heart, fills the cup with poison, drinks, and dies.  The two poems are typical examples of romantic and classical handling, though neither is quite a masterpiece in its kind.  The treatment in Dryden is cool, unimpassioned, objective—­like Boccaccio’s, in fact.  The story is firmly told, with a masculine energy of verse and language.  Sigismonda and Tancred are characters, confronted wills, as in drama, and their speeches are like tirades from a tragedy of Racine.  But here Dryden’s rhetorical habit and his fondness for reasoning in rime run away with him, and make his art inferior to Boccaccio’s.  Sigismonda argues her case like counsel for the defendant.  She even enjoys her own argument and carries it out with a gusto into abstractions.

  “But leaving that:  search we the secret springs,
  And backward trace the principles of things;
  There shall we find, that when the world began
  One common mass composed the mould of man,” etc.

Dryden’s grossness of taste mars his narrative at several points.  The satirist in him will not let him miss the chance for a sneer at priests and another at William III.’s standing army.  He makes his heroine’s love ignobly sensual.  She is a widow, who having “tasted marriage joys,” is unwilling to live single.  Dryden’s bourgeois manner is capable even of ludicrous descents.

  “The sudden bound awaked the sleeping sire,
  And showed a sight no parent can desire.”

In Keats’ poem there are no characters dramatically opposed.  Lorenzo and Isabella have no individuality apart from their love; passion has absorbed character.  The tale is not evolved firmly and continuously, but with lyrical outbursts, a poignancy of sympathy at the points of highest tragic tensity and a swooning sensibility all through, that sometimes breaks into weakness.  There can be no question, however, which poem is the more felt; no question, either, as to which method is superior—­at least as between these two artists, and as applied to subjects of this particular kind.