that already noted between the romanticism of Coleridge and Scott.  The latter is here depicting an actual spot, one of the great old border abbeys; national pride and the pathos of historic ruins mingle with the description.  Madeline’s castle stood in the country of dream; and it was an “elfin storm from fairyland” that came to aid the lovers’ flight,[38] and all the creatures of his tale are but the

    “Shadows haunting fairily
  The brain new stuffed in youth with triumphs gay
  Of old Romance.”

In Keats is the romantic escape, the longing to

        “leave the world unseen. 
  And with thee fade away into the forest dim.” [39]

Keats cared no more for history than he did for contemporary politics.  Courthope[40] quotes a passage from “Endymion” to illustrate his indifference to everything but art;

  “Hence, pageant history!  Hence, gilded cheat! . . . 
  Many old rotten-timbered boats there be
  Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified
  To goodly vessels, many a sail of pride,
  And golden-keeled, is left unlaunched and dry. 
  But wherefore this?  What care, though owl did fly
  About the great Athenian admiral’s mast? 
  What care though striding Alexander past
  The Indus with his Macedonian numbers?
        . . .  Juliet leaning
  Amid her window-flowers,—­sighing,—­weaning
  Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow,
  Doth more avail than these:  the silver flow
  Of Hero’s tears, the swoon of Imogen,
  Fair Pastorella in the bandit’s den,
  Are things to brood on with more ardency
  Than the death-day of empires.”

This passage should be set beside the complaint in “Lamia” of the disenchanting touch of science: 

  “There was an awful rainbow once in heaven,” etc.

Keats is the poet of romantic emotion, as Scott of romantic action.  Professor Gates says that Keats’ heroes never do anything.[41] It puzzles the reader of “The Eve of St. Agnes” to know just why Porphyro sets out the feast of cates on the little table by Madeline’s bedside unless it be to give the poet an opportunity for his luscious description of “the lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon” and other like delicacies.  In the early fragment “Calidore,” the hero—­who gets his name from Spenser—­does nothing in some hundred and fifty lines but assist two ladies to dismount from their palfreys.  To revert, as before, to Ariosto’s programme, it was not the arme and audaci imprese which Keats sang, but the donne, the amori, and the cortesie.  Feudal war array was no concern of his, but the “argent revelry” of masque and dance, and the “silver-snarling trumpets” in the musicians’ gallery.  He was the poet of the lute and the nightingale, rather than of the shock of spear in tourney and crusade.  His “Specimen of an Induction to a Poem” begins

  “Lo!  I must tell a tale of chivalry.”