There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise Among immortals when a God gives sign, With hushing finger, how he means to load His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, With thunder, and with music, and with pomp: Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines.

This is not a whit the less Keats for his use of the Miltonic ‘turn’ in rounding the period by a repetition in the last line of the ‘bleak-grown pines’ from the first. Again, of Oceanus answering his fallen chief:—

So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea, Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove, But cogitation in his watery shades, Arose, with locks not oozy, and began, In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands.

Here the affirmation by negation in the second and fourth lines is a Latin usage already employed by Keats in the Pot of Basil[4]: the ‘locks not oozy’ are a reminiscence from Lycidas and the ‘first-endeavouring tongue’ from The Vacation Exercise. But into what a vitally apt and beautiful new music of his own has Keats moulded and converted all such echoes. Once more, of Clymene following Enceladus in debate:—

So far her voice flow’d on, like timorous brook That, lingering along a pebbled coast, Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met, And shudder’d; for the overwhelming voice Of huge Enceladus swallow’d it in wrath: The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, Came booming thus.

In this last example the sublimity owes nothing to Milton except in the single case of the repetition in the third line. Even the scoffing Byron recognized after Keats’s death the authentic ‘large utterance of the early gods’ in passages like these, though Keats in his modesty had himself refused to recognize it.

Further to compare Keats with Milton,—the poet of Hyperion is naturally no match for Milton in passages where the elder master has been inspired by life-long impassioned meditation on his readings of history and romance, like that famous one ending with

What resounds In fable or romance of Uther’s son. Begirt with British and Armoric knights Or all who since, baptized or infidel Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebizond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore When Charlemain with all his peerage fell By Fontarrabia—

On the other hand Milton, even in the sweetness and the nearness to nature of Comus and his other early work, is scarce a match for Keats when it comes to the evocation, even in a mode relatively simple, of nature’s secret sources of delight,—as thus: