we know that his imagination is answering to a stimulus supplied by Wordsworth. But it is for the undercurrent of ethical symbolism in _Endymion_ that Keats will have owed the most to that master. Both Shelley and he had been profoundly impressed by the reading of _The Excursion_, published when Shelley was in his twenty-second year and Keats in his nineteenth, and each in his own way had taken deeply to heart Wordsworth's inculcation, both in that poem and many others, of the doctrine that a poet must learn to go out of himself and to live and feel as a man among fellow men,--that it is a kind of spiritual suicide for him to attempt to live apart from human sympathies, Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind! A large part of _Endymion_, as we have seen, is devoted to the symbolical setting forth of this conviction. For the rest, that essential contrast between the mental processes and poetic methods of the elder and the younger man which we have noted in discussing Keats's first volume continues to strike us in the second. In interpreting the relations of man to the natural world, Wordsworth's poetry is intensely personal and 'subjective,' Keats's intensely impersonal and 'objective.' Wordsworth expounds, Keats evokes: the mind of Wordsworth works by strenuous after-meditation on his experiences of life and nature and their effect upon his own soul and consciousness: the mind of Keats works by instantaneous imaginative participation, instinctive and self-oblivious, in nature's doings and beings, especially those which make for human refreshment and delight.