Of the five odes of Keats, the _Nightingale_ is perhaps the most perfect, and certainly the most imaginative. But the _Grecian Urn_ is the finest, even though it has fancy rather than imagination, for never was fancy more exquisite. The most conspicuous idea—the emptying of the town because its folk are away at play in the tale of the antique urn—is merely a fancy, and a most antic fancy—a prank; it is an irony of man, a rallying of art, a mockery of time, a burlesque of poetry, divine with tenderness. The six lines in which this fancy sports are amongst the loveliest in all literature: the ‘little town,’ the ‘peaceful citadel,’—were ever simple adjectives more happy? But John Keats’s final moral here is undeniably a failure; it says so much and means so little. The _Ode to Autumn_ is an exterior ode, and not in so high a rank, but lovely and perfect. The _Psyche_ I love the least, because its fancy is rather weak and its sentiment effusive. It has a touch of the deadly sickliness of _Endymion_. None the less does it remain just within the group of the really fine odes of English poets. The eloquent _Melancholy_ more narrowly escapes exclusion from that group. * * * * * * * * * * Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press * * * * * FOOTNOTES. {168} Evidently of love. {244} In several parts of the north of England, when a funeral takes place, a basin full of sprigs of boxwood is placed at the door of the house from which the coffin is taken up, and each person who attends the funeral ordinarily takes a sprig of this boxwood, and throws it into the grave of the deceased.