As temperament is the receptive faculty, the artist's attitude toward life is what Wordsworth called "wise passiveness,"--Wordsworth, the poet of "impassioned contemplation." Keats, too,--and among the poets, whose vision of beauty was more beautiful, whose grasp on the truth more true?--characterizes himself as "addicted to passiveness." It is of temperament that Keats is writing when he says in a letter: "That quality which goes to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously, is _Negative Capability_ ." In another letter he writes:-- "It has been an old comparison for our urging on--the Beehive; however, it seems to me that we should rather be the flower than the Bee--for it is a false notion that more is gained by receiving than giving--no, the receiver and the giver are equal in their benefits. The flower, I doubt not, receives a fair guerdon from the Bee--its leaves blush deeper in the next spring--and who shall say between Man and Woman which is the most delighted? Now it is more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like Mercury--let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey, bee-like buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be aimed at; but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive--budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favours us with a visit--sap will be given us for meat and dew for drink. . . . "O fret not after knowledge--I have none, And yet my song comes native with the warmth. O fret not after knowledge--I have none, And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens At thought of idleness cannot be idle, And he's awake who thinks himself asleep." Still again he says: "The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself." A nature so constituted, a nature receptive and passive, is necessarily withdrawn from practical affairs. To revert to Keats as an example, for Keats is so wholly the artist, it is his remoteness from the daily life about him that makes him the man of no one country or time. His poetry has a kind of universality, but universality within a definite sphere, and that sphere is the world of things lovely and fair. In a playful mood Keats writes to his sister: "Give me Books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know . . . and I can pass a summer very quietly without caring much about Fat Louis, fat Regent or the Duke of Wellington." These are trivial words; but they serve to define in some measure the artistic temperament.