How young-hearted is this vision, how full of thronging fancies and half-apprehended mystic meanings! Yet how unmistakably it has the long, high, forward look toward manhood, without which youth itself is not rounded and complete! After all, that look, that brave expectation, is vital in our picture of Keats. It is one of the reasons why we love him. It is one of the things which make his slender volume of poetry so companionable, even as an ardent, dreamy man is doubly a good comrade when we feel in him the hope of a strong man. We cannot truly understand the wonderful performance of Keats without considering his promise; we cannot appreciate what he did without remembering that it was only part of what he hoped to do. He was not one of those who believe that the ultimate aim of poetry is sensuous loveliness, and that there is no higher law above the law of “art for art’s sake.” The poets of arrested development, the artificers of mere melody and form, who say that art must always play and never teach, the musicians who are content to remain forever “The idle singers of an empty day,” are not his true followers. He held that “beauty is truth.” But he held also another article that has been too often left out in the repetition of his poetic creed: he held “truth, beauty,” and he hoped one day to give a clear, full utterance to that higher, holier vision. Perhaps he has, but not to mortal ears. THE RECOVERY OF JOY WORDSWORTH’S POETRY When this essay was written, a good many years ago, there was no available biography of Wordsworth except the two-volume _Memoir_ by Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, the poet’s nephew. It is a solid work of family piety, admiring and admirable; but it must be admitted that it is dull. It is full of matters of no particular consequence, and it leaves out events in the poet’s life and traits in his character which are not only interesting in themselves but also of real importance to a vital understanding of his work. Even while reading the _Memoir_, I felt sure that he was not always the tranquil, patient, wise, serenely happy sage that he appeared in his later years,—sure that a joy in peace as deep and strong as his was, could only have been won through sharp conflict,—sure that the smooth portrait drawn by the reverent hand of the bishop did not fully and frankly depict the real man who wrote the deep and moving poetry of Wordsworth. It was about this time that the valuable studies of Wordsworth’s early life which had been made by Professor Emile Legouis, (then of the University of Lyons, now of the Sorbonne,) were published in English. This volume threw a new light upon the poet’s nature, revealing its intense, romantic strain, and making clear at least some of the causes which led to the shipwreck of his first hopes and to the period of profound gloom which followed his return from residence in France in December 1792.