Less glowing, but of finer conception and more rare poetic value, is the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. Instead of the long and unequal stanza of the _Psyche_, it is written in a regular stanza of five rhymes, the first two arranged in a quatrain, and the second three in a sestet; a plan to which Keats adhered in the rest of his odes, only varying the order of the sestet, and in one instance--the ode to Melancholy--expanding it into a septet. The sight, or the imagination, of a piece of ancient sculpture had set the poet's mind at work, on the one hand conjuring up the scenes of ancient life and worship which lay behind and suggested the sculptured images; on the other, speculating on the abstract relations of plastic art to life. The opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which flash their own answer upon us out of the darkness of antiquity--interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,--'What men or gods are these, what maidens loth,' &c. The second and third stanzas express with perfect poetic felicity and insight the vital differences between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even richer than the real. Then the questioning begins again, and yields the incomparable choice of pictures,-- "What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?" In the answering lines-- "And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return,--" in these lines there seems a dissonance, inasmuch as they speak of the arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own compensations. But it is a dissonance which the attentive reader can easily reconcile for himself: and none but an attentive reader will notice it. Finally, dropping the airy play of the mind backward and forward between the two spheres, the poet consigns the work of ancient skill to the future, to remain,-- "in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--" thus proclaiming, in the last words, what amidst the gropings of reason and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of Keats's temper--an immutable law.