Neither to the Greek nor the Miltonic, but essentially to the modern, the romantic, sentiment of nature does it belong to try and express, by such a concourse of metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which a forest scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-eminence of the oaks among the other trees--their quasi-human venerableness--their verdure, unseen in the darkness--the sense of their preternatural stillness and suspended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with mysterious influences communicated between earth and sky. All good poems, it has been said, begin well. None begins better than _Hyperion_, with its 'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,' and its grand mournful dialogue between the discrowned Saturn and the Titaness Thea, his would-be comforter. Then, with a rich contrast from this scene of despondency, comes the scene, dazzling and resplendent for all its ominousness, of the mingled wrath and terror of the threatened sun-god in his flaming palace. The second book, relating the council of the dethroned Titans, has neither the contrasted sublimities of the first nor the intensity, rising almost to fever-point, of the unfinished third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his godhead. But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to my mind, fully on a level with the other two. And it is in this book, in the speech of Oceanus, that Keats sets forth the whole symbolical purport and meaning of the myth as he had conceived it:-- Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain; O folly! for to bear all naked truths, And to envisage circumstance, all calm, That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well! As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companionship, And thousand other signs of purer life; So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness: nor are we Thereby more conquer'd, than by us the rule Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed, And feedeth still, more comely than itself? Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves? Or shall the tree be envious of the dove Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings To wander wherewithal and find its joys? We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves, But eagles golden-feather'd, who do tower Above us in their beauty, and must reign In right thereof; for 'tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might: