the storm without, the fragrant warmth and light within, are all equally innocent of moral emphasis. Even the Beadsman is not worked up, as he might have been, into a didactic agent. But every beauty-laden line is rich in pleasure, the whole poem is an inheritance of delight. I never read it without being reminded afresh of that remonstrance offered so gently by Keats to Shelley,--by Keats, who was content to be a poet, to Shelley, who would also be a reformer: “You will, I am sure, forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.” Load every rift of your subject with ore,--there spoke the man who claimed no more for himself than that he had loved “the principle of beauty in all things,” and to whose hushed and listening soul the cry of Shelley’s “divine discontent” rang jarringly in the stillness of the night. If the poetry of Keats, a handful of scattered jewels left us by a dying boy, is, as Matthew Arnold admits, more solid and complete than Shelley’s superb and piercing song, to what is this due, save that Keats possessed, in addition to his poetic gift, the tranquil artist soul; content, as Goethe was content, to love the principle of beauty, and to be in sympathy with the great living past which has nourished, and still nourishes, the living present. The passion for reconstructing society, and for distributing pamphlets as a first step in the reconstruction, had no part in his artistic development. The errors of his fellow-mortals touched him lightly; their superstitions did not trouble him at all; their civil rights and inherited diseases were not matters of daily thought and analysis. But what he had to give them he gave unstintedly, and we to-day are rich in the fullness of his gift. “The proper and immediate object of poetry,” says Coleridge, “is the communication of immediate pleasure;” and are our lives so joyous that this boon may go unrecognized and unregarded? Which is best for us in this chilly world,--that which pleases, but does not instruct, like “The Eve of St. Agnes,” or that which instructs, but does not please, like Dr. Ibsen’s “Ghosts”? I do not say, which is true art? because the relative positions of the two authors forbid comparison; but, judged by the needs of humanity, which is the finer gift to earth? If, with Pliny, we seek an escape from mortality in literature, which shall be our choice? If, with Dr. Johnson, we require that a book should help us either to enjoy life or to endure it, which shall we take for a friend?