Keats takes in this poem the simple, almost threadbare theme of the love of an adventurous youth for the daughter of a hostile house,--a story wherein something of Romeo and Juliet is mixed with something of young Lochinvar,--and brings it deftly into association with the old popular belief as to the way a maiden might on this anniversary win sight of her lover in a dream. Choosing happily, for such a purpose, the Spenserian stanza, he adds to the melodious grace, the 'sweet-slipping movement,' as it has been called, of Spenser, a transparent ease and directness of construction; and with this ease and directness combines (wherein lies the great secret of his ripened art) a never-failing richness and concentration of poetic meaning and suggestion. From the opening stanza, which makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones,--telling us first of its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood and field, and next how the frozen breath of the old beadsman in the chapel aisle 'seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,'--from thence to the close, where the lovers make their way past the sleeping porter and the friendly bloodhound into the night, the poetry seems to throb in every line with the life of imagination and beauty. It indeed plays in great part about the external circumstances and decorative adjuncts of the tale. But in handling these Keats's method is the reverse of that by which some writers vainly endeavour to rival in literature the effects of the painter and sculptor. He never writes for the eye merely, but vivifies everything he touches, telling even of dead and senseless things in terms of life, movement, and feeling. Thus the monuments in the chapel aisle are brought before us, not by any effort of description, but solely through our sympathy with the shivering fancy of the beadsman:-- "Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails." Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels in the banqueting hall the poet strikes life:-- "The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, With wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their breasts." The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out their beauties in detail, he calls-- "Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings,--" a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the colour-imagination of the reader, giving it at the same time a sufficient clue by the simile drawn from a particular specimen of nature's blazonry. In the last line of the same stanza-- "A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings,"