The Head of the Department goes on, and the lines—
Still wouldst thou sing and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod—
are passed through analysis. “What the fitness is,” he says, “or what the poetic or other effectiveness of suggesting that the corpse of a person who has ceased upon the midnight still has ears, only to add that it has them in vain, I cannot pretend to understand”—one of a great many other things that the Head of the Department does not pretend to understand. It is probably with the same outfit of not pretending to understand that—for the edification of the merely admiring mind—the “Ode to a Grecian Urn” was rewritten. To Keats’s lines—
Oh, Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,