I suppose Keats suffered more in his brief life than any mortal child of the Muses. These ultimate creations of supreme Beauty are evoked in no other way. Everything has to be sacrificed--everything--if we are to be--like the gods, _creators of Life._ For Life is a thing that can only be born in _that soil_--only planted where the wound goes deepest--only watered when we strike where that fountain flows! He wrote for himself. The crowd, the verdict of his friends--what did all that matter? He wrote for himself; and for those who dare to risk the taste of that wine, which turns the taste of all else to a weary irrelevance! One is unwilling to leave our Adonais, whose "annual wound in Lebanon allures" us thus fatally, with nothing but such a bitter cry. One has a pathetic human longing to think of him _as he was,_ in those few moments of unalloyed pleasure the gods allowed him before "consumption," and "that girl," poisoned the springs of his life! And those moments, how they have passed into his poetry like the breath of the Spring! When "the grand obsession" was not upon him, who, like Keats, can make us feel the cool, sweet, wholesome touch of our great Mother, the Earth? That sleep, "full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing," which the breast that suckled Persephone alone can give may heal us also for a brief while. We, too, on this very morning--listen reader!--may wreath "a flowery band to bind us to the Earth, spite of despondence." Some "shape of beauty may yet move away the pall from our dark spirits." Even with old Saturn under his weight of grief, we may drink in the loveliness of those "green-robed senators of mighty woods, tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars." And in the worst of our moods we can still call aloud to the things of beauty that pass not away. We can even call out to them from her very side who is "the cause," "the cause, my soul," of what we suffer. "Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art! Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature's patient, sleepless eremite, The moving waters at their priest-like task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores--" This desperate, sensuous pain which makes us cry out to the "midnight" that we might "cease upon it," need not harden our hearts before we pass hence. The "gathering swallows twittering in the sky" of our little interludes of peace may still attune us to some strange, sad thankfulness that we have been born into life, even though life turned out to mean _this!_ And the vibrating, stricken nerves of our too great devotion may have at least the balm of feeling that they have not languished untouched by the fingers that thrill while they slay. After all, "we have lived"; we also; and we would not "change places" with those "happy innocents" who have never known the madness of what it may be to have been born a son of man!