From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

Though Keats, to be sure, comes perilously near to spoiling these lines by the three answering ones—

"And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return."

—Which, though beautiful in themselves, involve a confusion of thought; since (in Mr. Colvin's words) "they speak of the arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own compensations."

But it is time to be drawing up one's own order for the Odes. The first place, then, let us give to the 'Nightingale,' for the intensity of its emotion, for the sustained splendour and variety of its language, for the consummate skill with which it keeps the music matched with the mood, and finally because it attains, at least twice, to the 'great thrill.' Nor can one preferring it offend Mr. Bridges, who confesses that he "could not name any English poem of the same length which contains so much beauty as this ode."

For the second place, one feels inclined at first to bracket 'Psyche' with the 'Grecian Urn.' Each develops a beautiful idea. In 'Psyche' the poet addresses the loveliest but latest-born vision 'of all Olympus's faded hierarchy,' and promises her that, though born:

"Too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,"

She shall yet have a priest, the poet, and a temple built in some untrodden region of his mind—

"And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!"