In this, which is almost his last deliberate utterance, Keats expresses his sense of the futility of romance, and seems to condemn poetry itself. A condemnation of the expression of profound thought in beautiful forms would come very ill from Keats, but this much he surely had learned, that poetry, the real high poetry, cannot be made out of dreams. The worst of dreams is that you cannot discipline them. Their tragedy is night-mare; their comedy is nonsense. Only what can stand severe discipline, and emerge the purer and stronger for it, is fit to endure. For all its sins of flatness and prosiness the Classical School has always taught discipline. No doubt it has sometimes trusted too absolutely to discipline, and has given us too much of the foot-rule and the tuning- fork. But one discipline, at least, poetry cannot afford to neglect--the discipline of facts and life. The poetry that can face this ordeal and survive it is rare. Some poets are tempted to avoid the experience and save the dream. Others, who were poets in their youth, undergo the experience and are beaten by it. But the poetry which can bear all naked truth and still keep its singing voice is the only immortal poetry. Footnotes: {78} For some of the facts in this account of Ossian I am indebted to Mr. J. S. Smart's fascinating book, _James Macpherson_, _an Episode in Literature_ (David Nutt, 1905).