There is no good reason why we should give characteristic specimens of the poet's obscurity, since our aim is to induce people to read him. The obscurities will slowly vanish and something of the intention appear; and they will find in him many of the strange beauties won by men who push on to the borderlands of their science; they will speculate whether the failure of his whole achievement was due to the starvation of experience which his vocation imposed upon him, or to a fundamental vice in his poetical endeavour. For ourselves we believe that the former was the true cause. His 'avant toute chose' whirling dizzily in a spiritual vacuum, met with no salutary resistance to modify, inform, and strengthen it. Hopkins told the truth of himself--the reason why he must remain a poets' poet:-- I want the one rapture of an inspiration. O then if in my lagging lines you miss The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation, My winter world, that scarcely yields that bliss Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.' [JUNE, 1919. _The Problem of Keats_ It is a subject for congratulation that a second edition of Sir Sidney Colvin's life of Keats[6] has been called for by the public: first, because it is a good, a very good book, and secondly, because all evidence of a general curiosity concerning a poet so great and so greatly to be loved must be counted for righteousness. The impassioned and intimate sympathy which is felt--as we may at least conclude--by a portion of the present generation for Keats is a motion of the consciousness which stands in a right and natural order. Keats is with us; and it argues much for a generous elasticity in Sir Sidney Colvin's mind, which we have neither the right nor the custom to expect in an older generation, that he should have had more than a sidelong vision of at least one aspect of the community between his poet-hero and a younger race which has had the destiny to produce far more heroes than poets. Commenting upon the inability of the late Mr Courthope to appreciate Keats, Sir Sidney writes:-- 'He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics. But of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a disillusion,--that the saving of the world from the grip of one great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in reinstating a number of ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less tyrannical. To that which lies behind and above politics and history to the general destinies, aspirations, and tribulations of the race, he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only tragically and acutely sensitive.' [Footnote 6: _John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics, and After-fame_. By Sidney Colvin. Second edition. (Macmillan.)]