still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. . . . . . .  “O Attic shape!  Fair attitude! with brede* Of marble men and maidens over-wrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

    As doth eternity:  Cold Pastoral! 
    When old age shall this generation waste,
    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
    Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
    ’Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—­that is all
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

    Embroidery.

In these last lines we have the dominant note in Keats’s song, beauty and the love of beauty.  What is true must be beautiful, and just in so far as we move away from truth we lose what is beautiful.  Nothing is so ugly as a lie.

And now remembering how Shelley sang of the skylark you will like to read how his brother poet sang of the nightingale.

“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:  ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,—­ That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. . . . . . .  “Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!  Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—­ To thy high requiem become a sod.

    “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: 
    Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
    Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
    She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
    The same that oft times hath
    Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
    Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

    “Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
    To toll me back from thee to my sole self! 
    Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
    As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. 
    Adieu!  Adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
    Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
    Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
    In the next valley glades;
    Was it a vision, or a waking dream? 
    Fled is the music:—­Do I wake or sleep?”

As another poet* has said, speaking of Keats’s odes, “Greater lyrical poetry the world may have seen than any that is in these; lovelier it surely has never seen, nor ever can it possibly see.”