Many of his efforts to describe in verse this democracy and this ideal beauty are impalpable and obscure. It is difficult to clothe such shadowy abstractions in clear, simple form. He is occasionally vague because his thoughts seem to have emerged only partially from the cloud lands that gave them birth. At other times, his vagueness resembles Plato's because it is inherent in the subject matter. Like Byron, Shelley is sometimes careless in the construction and revision of his verse. We shall, however, search in vain for these faults in Shelley's greatest lyrics. He is one of the supreme lyrical geniuses in the language. Of all the lyric poets of England, he is the greatest master of an ethereal, evanescent, phantomlike beauty. JOHN KEATS, 1795-1821 [Illustration: JOHN KEATS. _From the painting by Hilton, National Portrait Gallery_.] Life.--John Keats, the son of a keeper of a large livery stable, a man "fine in common sense and native respectability," was born in Moorfields, London, in 1795. He attended school at Enfield, where he was a prize scholar. He took special pleasure in studying Grecian mythology, the influence of which is so apparent in his poetry. While at school, he also voluntarily wrote a translation of much of Vergil's _AEneid_. It would seem as if he had also been attracted to Shakespeare; for Keats is credited with expressing to a young playmate the opinion that no one, if alone in the house, would dare read _Macbeth_ at two in the morning. When Keats was left an orphan in his fifteenth year, he was taken from school and apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton, near London. When seventeen, he walked some distance to borrow a copy of Spenser's _Faerie Queene_. A friend says: "Keats ramped through the scenes of the romance like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." His study of Grecian mythology and Elizabethan poetry exerted a stronger influence over him than his medical instructor. One day when Keats should have been listening to a surgical lecture, "there came," he says, "a sunbeam into the room and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray: and I was off with them to Oberon and fairy land." He made a moderately good surgeon; but finding that his heart was constantly with "Oberon and the fairy land" of poesy, he gave up his profession in 1817 and began to study hard, preparatory to a literary career. His short life was a brave struggle against disease, poverty, and unfriendly criticism; but he accomplished more than any other English author in the first twenty-five years of life. Success under such conditions would have been impossible unless he had had "flint and iron in him." He wrote:-- "I must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a man. They make his Prime Objects a Refuge as well as a Passion."