Keats is not a virile poet, like Dante or Shakespeare or Milton; that he would have become one if he had lived is a happy and loving guess. He is certainly not a member of the senile school of poetry, which celebrates the impotent and morbid passions of decay, with a _café chantant_ for its temple, and the smoke of cigarettes for incense, and cups of absinthe for its libations, and for its goddess not the immortal Venus rising from the sea, but the weary, painted, and decrepit Venus sinking into the gutter. He is in the highest and best sense of the word a juvenile poet—“mature,” as Lowell says, but mature, as genius always is, within the boundaries and in the spirit of his own season of life. The very sadness of his lovely odes, “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” “To Psyche,” is the pleasant melancholy of the springtime of the heart. “The Eve of St. Agnes,” pure and passionate, surprizing us by its fine excess of colour and melody, sensuous in every line, yet free from the slightest taint of sensuality, is unforgettable and unsurpassable as the dream of first love. The poetry of Keats, small in bulk and slight in body as it seems at first sight to be, endures, and will endure, in English literature, because it is the embodiment of _the spirit of immortal youth_. Here, I think, we touch its secret as an influence upon other poets. For that it has been an influence,—in the older sense of the word, which carries with it a reference to the guiding and controlling force supposed to flow from the stars to the earth,—is beyond all doubt. The _History of English Literature_, with which Taine amused us some fifty years ago, nowhere displays its narrowness of vision more egregiously than in its failure to take account of Gray, Collins, and Keats as fashioners of English poetry. It does not mention Gray and Collins at all; the name of Keats occurs only once, with a reference to “sickly or overflowing imagination,” but to Byron nearly fifty pages are devoted. The American critic, Stedman, showed a far broader and more intelligent understanding of the subject when he said that “Wordsworth begot the mind, and Keats the body, of the idyllic Victorian School.”