The last lines he thought were quite awful in their application to a guilty finite creature, like man, in the appalling nature of the feeling which they suggested to a thoughtful mind. Again, we often talked of that noble passage in the lines on Tintern Abbey:—
| That blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened. |
And his references to this passage are frequent in his letters.—But in those exquisite stanzas,
| She dwelt among the untrodden ways, Beside the springs of Dove, |
ending,—
| She lived unknown and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and oh, The difference to me. |
The simplicity of the last line he declared to be the most perfect pathos.
Among the qualities of high poetic promise in Keats was, even at this time, his correct taste. I remember to have been struck with this by his remarks on that well known and often quoted passage of the Excursion upon the Greek Mythology—where it is said that
| Fancy fetched Even from the blazing chariot of the Sun A beardless youth who touched a golden lute, And filled the illumined groves with ravishment. |