In a far more difficult kind, where Keats has to deal with the features of the story that might easily make for the repulsive or the _macabre_, he triumphs not by shirking but by sheer force of passionate imagination. 'The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.' This dictum of Keats can scarcely be better illustrated than by his own handling of the _Isabella_ story. Take the vision of the murdered man appearing to the girl at night:-- Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spake; For there was striving, in its piteous tongue, To speak as when on earth it was awake, And Isabella on its music hung: Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake, As in a palsied Druid's harp unstrung; And through it moan'd a ghostly under-song, Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briars among. Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof From the poor girl by magic of their light. How wonderfully, in these touches, do we feel love prevailing over horror and purging the apparition of all its charnel ghastliness. When we come to the discovery and digging up of the body, Boccaccio turns the difficulty which must inhere in any realistic treatment of the theme by simply saying that it was uncorrupted; as though some kind of miracle had kept it fresh. Keats on the other hand confronts the difficulty and overcomes it. First he acknowledges how the imagination in dwelling on the dead is prone to call up images of corruptibility:-- Who hath not loiter'd in a green church-yard, And let his spirit, like a demon-mole, Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard, To see scull, coffin'd bones, and funeral stole; Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr'd, And filling it once more with human soul? Ah! this is holiday to what was felt When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt. Then he compulsively leads away the mind from such images to think only of the passionate absorption with which Isabella flings herself upon her task:-- She gaz'd into the fresh-thrown mould, as though One glance did fully all its secrets tell; Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well; Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow, Like to a native lilly of the dell: Then with her knife, all sudden, she began To dig more fervently than misers can. Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon Her silk had play'd in purple phantasies, She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone, And put it in her bosom, where it dries And freezes utterly unto the bone Those dainties made to still an infant's cries: Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care, But to throw back at times her veiling hair. [Illustration: PL. X PAGE FROM ISABELLA; OR, THE POT OF BASIL FROM AN AUTOGRAPH BY KEATS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM]