Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/280

 264 CRITICAL STUDIES its season in him who, dying at twenty-four, wrote "Hyperion" a few years after "Endymion." But this plastic genius would have proceeded in trium- phant transmigrations through all fairest forms ere it could have found eternal tranquillity in the soul of all form. Had he been spared, all analogies, I think, point to this end. Shelley possessed, or rather was possessed by, this simplicity to the uttermost. Although he and Keats were twin brothers, Greeks of the race of the gods, their works do not resemble but complement each other. The very childlike lisp which we remarked in Blake is often observable in the voice of Shelley, consummate singer as he was. The lisp is, however, not always that of a child ; it is on several occasions that of a missionary seeking to translate old thoughts from his rich and exact native tongue into the dialect, poor and barbarous, of his hearers. He (while doing also very different work of his own) carries on the work begun by Blake, sinking its foundations into a deeper past, and uplifting its towers into a loftier future. Both Shelley and Keats are still so far beyond the range of our English criticism that they would not have been mentioned thus cursorily here had it been possible to omit them.* glorious poets and their contemporaries can best be put in clear light by thus considering them young Greeks of the race of the gods, born three thousand years after their time, in Christian England. Shelley has been called "The Eternal Child," and Keats "The Real Adonis;" and Novalis says well, "Children are ancients, and youth is antique " {Die Kinder sind Aniiken. Auch die Jugend ist antik, vol. iii. p. 190). The ideas and senti- ments of the race among whom they were reared were naturally strange, and in many respects repugnant to them both. Keats,
 * Perhaps the astonishing difference in kind between these