I had never (to my shame) thought of comparing the two odes until Mr. Ellwanger invited me. He notes the felicitous use of the O-sounds throughout Hood's ode, and points out, shrewdly as correctly, that the two poets were contemplating two different stages of autumn. Keats, more sensuous, dwells on the stage of mellow fruitfulness, and writes of late October at the latest. Hood's poem lies close 'on the birth of trembling winter': he sings more austerely of November's desolation:-- "Where is the pride of Summer--the green prime-- The many, many leaves all twinkling?--Three On the moss'd elm; three on the naked lime Trembling,--and one upon the old oak tree! Where is the Dryad's immortality? Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew, Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through In the smooth holly's green eternity. "The squirrel gloats o'er his accomplished hoard, The ants have brimm'd their garners with ripe grain, And honey bees have stored The sweets of summer in their luscious cells; The swallows all have wing'd across the main; But here the Autumn melancholy dwells, And sighs her tearful spells Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain. Alone, alone Upon a mossy stone She sits and reckons up the dead and gone With the last leaves for a love-rosary. . . ." The last image involves a change of sex in personified Autumn: an awkwardness, I allow. But if the awkwardness of the change can be excused, Hood's lines excuse it:-- "O go and sit with her and be o'er-shaded Under the languid downfall of her hair; She wears a coronal of flowers faded Upon her forehead, and a face of care; There is enough of wither'd everywhere To make her bower,--and enough of gloom. . . ." In spite of its ambiguity of sex and in spite of its irregular metre, I find, with Mr. Ellwanger, more force of poetry in Hood's ode than in Keats's; and this in spite of one's prejudice in favour of the greater poet. It came on me with a small shock therefore to find that Mr. Bridges, in his already famous Essay on Keats, ranks 'Autumn' as the very best of all Keats's Odes.