I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a field-mouse peeping out of the withered grass--the creature hath a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the buildings of a city, and I see a Man hurrying along--to what? The Creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it. In this very letter, no doubt, the disinterested philosopher as well as the æsthete speaks, but it is Keats’s longing for philosophy, not his philosophy itself, that touches us most profoundly in his greatest work. Our knowledge of his sufferings gives his work a background of Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self against which the exquisite images he wrought have a tragic and spiritual appeal beyond that of any other poet of his kind. The Keats we love is more than the Keats of the poems--more even than the Keats of the letters. It is the Keats of these and of the life--that proud and vehement spirit, that great-hearted traveller in the realms of gold, caught in circumstances and done to death in the very temples where he had worshipped. 2. THE ARTIFICER It is an interesting fact that most of the writers who use words like artificers have been townsmen. Milton and Gray, Keats and Lamb, were all Londoners. It is as though to some extent words took the place of natural scenes in the development of the townsman’s genius. The town boy finds the Muse in a book rather than by a stream. He hears her voice first, perhaps, in a beautiful phrase. It would be ridiculous to speak as though the country-bred poet were uninfluenced by books or the town-bred poet uninfluenced by bird and tree, by winds and waters. All I suggest is that in the townsman the influence of literature is more dominant, and frequently leads to an excitement over phrases almost more intense than his excitement over things. Milton was thus a stylist in a sense in which Shakespeare was not. Keats was a stylist in a sense in which Shelley was not. Not that Milton and Keats used speech more felicitously, but they used it more self-consciously. Theirs, at their greatest, was the magic of art rather than of nature. They had not, in the same measure as Shakespeare and Shelley, the freedom of the air--the bird-like flight or the bird-like song. The genius of Keats, we know, was founded on the reading of books. He did not even begin writing till he was nearly eighteen, when Cowden Clarke lent him the treasures of his library, including _The Faëry Queene_. The first of his great poems was written after reading Chapman’s _Homer_, and to the end of his life he was inspired by works of art to a greater degree than any other writer of genius in the England of his time. This may help to explain why he was, as Mr. John Bailey has pointed out, the poet of stillness. Books, pictures, and Grecian urns are still. They fix life for us in the wonder of a trance, and, if Keats saw Cortes “silent upon a peak in Darien,” and