How young he was, how pitifully young, when the Foam-born, jealous of him as she was jealous of Hippolytus, hurled him bleeding to the ground! But what Poetry he has left behind him! There is nothing like it in the world. Nothing like it, for sheer, deadly, draining, maddening, drowsing witchery of beauty. It is the very cup of Circe--the very philtre of Sun-poison. "A thing of Beauty is a Joy forever"! A Joy? Yes--but a Joy _drugged_ from its first pouring forth. We follow. We have to follow. But, O the weariness of the way! What an exultant hymn that is,--the one in honour of Pan, which comes so soon in Endymion! The dim rich depths of the dark forests are stirred by it, and its murmurs die away, over the wailing spaces of the marshes. Obscure growths, and drowsy weeds overhanging moon-lit paths, where fungoid things fumble for light and air, hear that cry in their voluptuous dreams and move uneasily. The dumb vegetable _expectancy_ of young tree-trunks is roused by it into sensual terror. For this is the sound of the hoof of Pan, stamping on the moist earth, as he rages for Syrinx. No one has ever understood the torment of the Wood-god and his mad joy, as the author of Endymion understood them. The tumultuous ground-swell of this poet's insane craving for Beauty must in the end have driven him on the rocks; but there came sometimes softer, gentler, less "vermeil-tinctured" moods, which might have prolonged his days, had he never met "that girl." "The Pot of Basil" expresses one of these. Wistful and heart-breaking, it has a tender yearning _pity_ in it, a gentle melancholy brooding, over the irremediable pain of love-loss, which haunts one like the sound of drowned Angelus-bells, under a hushed sea. The description of the appearance of the ghost of the dead boy and his vague troubled speech, is like nothing else that has ever been written. St. Agnes Eve too, in its more elaborate, more premeditated art, has a beauty so poignant, so _sensuously unearthly,_ that one dare not quote a line of it, in a mere "critical essay," for fear of breaking such a spell! The long-drawn solemn harmonies of "Hyperion"--Miltonian, and yet troubled by a thrilling sorcery that Milton never knew--madden the reader with anger that he never finished it; an anger which is only increased when in that other "Version," the influence of Dante becomes evident. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci!" Ah, there we find him--there we await him--the poet of _the tragedy of bodily craving,_ transferred, with all its aching, famished nerves, on to the psychic plane!