Throughout this ode Keats's genius is at its height. Imagination cannot be more rich and satisfying, felicity of phrase and cadence cannot be more absolute, than in the several contrasted stanzas calling for the draft of southern vintage, picturing the frailty and wretchedness of man's estate on earth, and conjecturing in the 'embalmed darkness' the divers odours of spring. To praise the art of a passage like that in the fourth stanza where with a light, lingering pause the mind is carried instantaneously away from the miseries of the world into the heart of the imagined forest,--to praise or comment on a stroke of art like this is to throw doubt on the reader's power to perceive it for himself. Let him be trusted to cherish and know the poem, as every lover of English poetry should, 'to its depths,' and let us go on to the last product, as I take it to be, of this spring month of inspiration, and that is the _Ode on Melancholy_. The music of the word--its hundred associations derived from the early seventeenth-century poetry in which his soul was steeped--foremost among them no doubt Milton's _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, with the beautiful song from Fletcher's _Nice Valour_ which inspired them--his recent familiarity with Burton's _Anatomy_, including those pithy stanzas of alternate praise and repudiation which preface it--all these things will have worked together with Keats's own haunting and deepest mood throughout these days to set him composing on this theme, Melancholy. He had dallied with an idea of doing so as far back as early in March, when being kept from writing both by physical disinclination and a temporary phase of self-criticism, he had written to Haydon, 'I will not spoil my gloom by writing an ode to Darkness.' Now that in May the springs of inspiration were again unlocked in him, such negative purpose fails to hold, and he adds this ode to the rest, throwing into it some of his most splendid imagery and diction. Its temper is nearly akin on the one hand to some of the gloomier passages in his letters to Miss Jeffrey of May 31 and June 9, and on the other to the tragic third stanza of the nightingale ode. Its main purport is to proclaim the spiritual nearness, the all but inseparableness, of joy and pain in human experience when either is present in its intensity. One of the attributes, it will be remembered, which he assigns to his enchantress _Lamia_ is-- a sciential brain To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain.