This power of language
is veiled in the old legends which make the invisible powers the servants
of some word. As soon as we have discovered the word for our joy or
sorrow we are no longer its serfs, but its lords. We reward the
discoverer of an anaesthetic for the body and make him member of all the
societies, but him who finds a nepenthe for the soul we elect into the
small academy of the immortals.
The poems of Keats mark an epoch in English poetry; for, however often we
may find traces of it in others, in them found its most unconscious
expression that reaction against the barrel-organ style which had been
reigning by a kind of sleepy divine right for half a century. The lowest
point was indicated when there was such an utter confounding of the
common and the uncommon sense that Dr. Johnson wrote verse and Burke
prose. The most profound gospel of criticism was, that nothing was good
poetry that could not be translated into good prose, as if one should say
that the test of sufficient moonlight was that tallow-candles could be
made of it. We find Keats at first going to the other extreme, and
endeavoring to extract green cucumbers from the rays of tallow; but we
see also incontestable proof of the greatness and purity of his poetic
gift in the constant return toward equilibrium and repose in his later
poems.
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