He was exchanging the worship of Apollo for the worship of Zeus and, like Tolstoy, he seemed to condemn his own past work as a denial of the genius of true art. Even here, however, Keats was still tortured by conflicting allegiances, and it is on Apollo, not on Zeus, he calls in his condemnation of Byron in _The Fall of Hyperion_: Apollo! faded! O far-flown Apollo! Where is thy misty pestilence to creep Into the dwellings, through the door crannies Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse? Though I breathe death with them it will be life To see them sprawl before me into graves. But he was Zeus’s child, as he lay dying, and the very epitaph he left for himself, remembering a phrase in _The Maid’s Tragedy_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, “Here lies one whose name is writ in water,” was a last farewell to an Apollo who seemed to have failed him. The Keats who achieved perfection in literature, however, was Apollo’s Keats--Apollo’s and Aphrodite’s. His odes, written out of a genius stirred to its depths for the first time by his passion for Fanny Brawne--he does not seem to have been subject to love, as most poets are, in his boyhood--were but the perfect expression of that idolatry that had stammered in _Endymion_. Keats in his masterpieces is still the Prince breaking through the wood to the vision of the Sleeping Beauty. He has not yet touched her into life. He almost prefers to remain a spectator, not an awakener. He loves the picture itself more than the reality, though he guesses all the while at the reality behind. That, perhaps, is why men do not go to Keats for healing, as they go to Wordsworth, or for hope, as they go to Shelley. Keats enriches life rather with a sense of a loveliness for ever vanishing, and with a dream of what life might be if the loveliness remained. Regret means more to him than hope: Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea-shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. The world at its most beautiful is for Keats a series of dissolving pictures--of “fair attitudes” that only the artist can make immortal. His indolence is the indolence of a man under the spell of beautiful shapes. His energy is the energy of a man who would drain the whole cup of worship in a beautiful phrase. His æsthetic attitude to life--as æsthetic in its way as the early Pater’s--appears in that letter in which he writes: