For "La Belle Dame" is the Litany of the Beauty-Maniac--his death-in-life Requiem, his eternal Dirge! Those who have ever met Her, this "Lady in the mead, full-beautiful, a fairy-child," whose foot "was light" and whose hair "was long" and whose eyes "were wild," will know--and only they--the meaning of "the starved lips, through the gloom, with horrid warning, gaping wide"! And has the secret of the gasping pause of that broken half-line, "where no birds sing," borrowed originally from poor Ophelia's despair, and echoed wonderfully by Mr. Hardy in certain of his incomparable lyrics, been conveyed to my reader? But it is, of course, in his five great Odes, that Keats is most supreme, most entirely, without question, the unapproachable artist. Heaven forbid that I should shatter the sacred silence that such things produce, by any profane repetition! They leave behind them, every one of them, an echo, a vibration, a dying fall, leaving us enchanted and trembling; as when we have been touched, before the twittering of the birds at dawn, by the very fingers of Our Lady of sweet Pain! Is it possible that words, mere words, can work such miracles? Or are they not words at all, but chalices and Holy graals, of human passion, full of the life-blood, staining the lips that approach them scarlet, of heart-drained pulse-wearied ravishment? Certainly he has the touch, ineffable, final, absolute, of the supreme Beauty. And over it all, over the ardours and ecstasies, hangs the shadow of Death; and in the heart of it, an adder in the deep drugged cup, coiled and waiting, the poisonous bite of incurable anguish! We may stand mesmerized, spell-bound, amid "the hushed cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed" watching Psyche sleep. We may open those "charmed magic casements" towards "the perilous foam." We may linger with Ruth "sick for home amid the alien corn." We may gaze, awed and hushed, at the dead, cold, little, mountain-built town, "emptied of its folks"--We may "glut our sorrow on the morning rose, or on the wealth of globed Peonies." We may "imprison our mistress's soft hand, and gaze, deep, deep, within her peerless eyes." We may brood, quieted and sweetly-sad, upon the last melancholy "oozings" of the rich year's vintage. But across all these things lies, like a streak of red, breath-catching, spilled heart's blood, the knowledge of _what it means_ to have been able to turn all this into poetry! It means Torment. It means Despair. It means _that cry,_ out of the dust of the cemetery at Rome, "O God! O God! has there ever been such pain as my pain?"