Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/596

 592 Gilbert Yet this particular observation was made on Sunday, when work probably would not be going on, and, apparently, the grain had already been removed from the stubble- field. Even though 'Keats had known the country from boyhood/ 17 there seems to be little reason to suppose that he became especially familiar with agriculture. The difficulties of this particular passage lead one to suspect that the poet's search for agricultural terms was a groping one, and that he chose among those that came to hand without a perfectly clear understanding of them. If the lines be in truth as difficult as they appear to me, the passage may be taken to illustrate both the weakness and the strength of Keats. He is likely not to show that full mastery of the meaning of words that marks the greatest poets, and his vocabulary seems sometimes insufficient to furnish him with the word proper for both thought and meter. Yet he is here perhaps revealing his powers of appreciation and assimilation by adapt- ing a word from a suitable passage in Shakespeare, though one hesitates to say that he has fully assimilated what he took, or bettered it in the borrowing. Nevertheless, the sound of the line is effective. It was a stroke of genius in the management of rhythm, if not in the management of ideas, to substitute the verse as it now stands for the reading of the Holograph. And though the indistinct outlines of the passage do not permit us to think it a work of the highest and best disciplined genius, the picture is beautiful in spite of its inaccurate drawing. ALLAN H. GILBERT. The Rice Institute, Houston, Texas. 17 The Poems of John Keats, with an Introduction by E. de S61incourt, New York, 1905, p. Ixiii.