Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/191

 household of Cowper. With them he had some good things in common; his letters, if less worth reading than the best of theirs, have the same frank delicacy and gentle play of personal sentiment applied to the landscape or the hearthside, and couched sometimes in choice and excellent words. But Keats, of all men born the ablest to hold his own with nature, and translate her gods into verbal incarnation; Keats, who was at once the lyrist and the lyre of that nature, the priest and the altar of those gods; more than all other poets receptive and passive of her influences and forces, and more than all other poets able and active to turn them all to a divine use, to transfigure them without transformation, to attune all colours and attemper all harmonies; whose power upon these things, whose gift of transfusion and expression, places him apart from all in his sovereign command of nature, able to do for nature what in his own day Shelley could not achieve nor Wordsworth attempt; above all Greece and all Italy and all England in his own line and field of work; to push forward as a competitor with him in that especial field of work where all the giants and all the gods of art would fail to stand against him for an hour, a man who in his own craft could not use the tools that lay ready to his hand—who was nothing (it seems) if not a poet, and could not as much as prove