It is not, however, with moral but with naturalistic interpretation that we have now to do. And in this faculty of naturalistic interpretation, perhaps no poet—certainly no modern poet—equals Keats. In him, as Mr. Arnold says, “the faculty is overpoweringly predominant. The natural magic is perfect; when he speaks of the outward world he speaks almost like Adam naming, by Divine inspiration, the creatures; his expression corresponds with the thing’s essential reality.” Does not Keats thus bring home to us the meaning—the inner secret—of the ocean, and the impression it makes on the human heart, when he speaks of “The voice mysterious, which whoso hears Must think on what will be, and what has been?” It is he that interprets the meaning of the summer midnight among the woods, when he says— “Upon a tranced summer night Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir, Save from one gradual solitary gust Which comes upon the silence, and dies off, As if the ebbing air had but one wave.” Or take one more instance. All know the stern, almost grim, feeling of solitude about some little crag-engirdled lochan or tarn far up the heart of a Highland mountain. Who has given this feeling of grim solitude, so death-like that any living thing or sound startles you there, as Wordsworth, by these two strokes?— “There sometimes doth a leaping fish Send through the tarn a lonely cheer; The crags repeat the raven’s croak In symphony austere.” Or again, who has not felt as though he had a new revelation made to him about the starry sky and the mountain-stillness after reading for the first time these two well-known lines?— “The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills.” Or once more: who has so called up the impression produced by the sound of waters heard among the mountains as Wordsworth, when he thus speaks?— “In mute repose To lie and listen to the mountain-flood Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves.” But I have dwelt too long on this aspect of Poetry, its penetrating power of naturalistic interpretation when the poet, “With an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony and the deep power of joy,” is given to see into the life of things, and seeing, makes us share his insight, makes us partakers for a moment at least in “That blessed mood In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened.” Even if it be but a transient glance, a momentary lightening of the burden that he lends us, it is one of the most intimate and delicate services—one of the highest and rarest functions which the poet or any man can perform. VIII.