Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/98

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS wrote "Endymion," and outdid his monitor in lush and swooning verse. But it was always Hunt who unerringly praised the finest, the most original phrases of one greater than himself, and took joy in assuring him of his birthright.

Shelley, too, Keats met at this time,—the peer who was to sing his dirge and pæan. Meanwhile, his own heroic instinct, the prescience of a muse "that with no middle flight intends to soar," was shown by his recognition of the greatest masters as he found them,—Chaucer, Spenser, Chapman, Shakespeare, Milton,—and his serious study of few besides. One must have exemplars and preceptors; let these be of the best. Neophytes often are drawn to the imitators of imitators, the catch-penny favorites of the hour, and this to their own belittlement. The blind still lead the blind. Give an aspirant the range of English song, see the masters that attract him, and it is not hard to cast his horoscope.

Pity is akin to love, when not too self-conscious of good fortune and the wisdom that leads thereto. Keats died so young, and so piteously, that some writers, to whom his work has yielded profit and delight, naïvely regard him from the superior person's critical or moral point of view. Lowell, however, pays honor to the "strong sense" underlying his sensibility. When Mr. Lowell said that "the faults of Keats's poetry are obvious enough," he plainly had in mind the faults of the youth's early work,—extravagances from which he freed himself by covering them in that sculptured monument, "Endymion," with [84]