Diverse though it is from Coleridge's "Christabel," we seem to feel in it something of the like possessing or haunting quality, modified by Keats's own distinctive genius. In this respect, and in perfectness of touch, we link it with "La Belle Dame sans Merci." "Hyperion" has next to be considered. This was the only poem by Keats which Shelley admired in an extreme degree. He wrote at different dates: "The fragment called 'Hyperion' promises for him that he is destined to become one of the first writers of the age.... It is certainly an astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of Keats which I confess I had not before.... If the 'Hyperion' be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.... The great proportion of this piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry." Byron, who had been particularly virulent against Keats during his lifetime, wrote after his death a much more memorable phrase: "His fragment of 'Hyperion' seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as AEschylus." Mr. Swinburne has written of the poem more at length, and with carefully weighed words: "The triumph of 'Hyperion' is as nearly complete as the failure of 'Endymion.' Yet Keats never gave such proof of a manly devotion and rational sense of duty to his art as in his resolution to leave this great poem unfinished; not (as we may gather from his correspondence on the subject) for the pitiful reason assigned by his publishers, that of discouragement at the reception given to his former work, but on the solid and reasonable ground that a Miltonic study had something in its very scheme and nature too artificial, too studious of a foreign influence, to be carried on and carried out at such length as was implied by his original design. Fortified and purified as it had been on a first revision, when much introductory allegory and much tentative effusion of sonorous and superfluous verse had been rigorously clipped down or pruned away, it could not long have retained spirit enough to support or inform the shadowy body of a subject so little charged with tangible significance."