It should strike the reader as a wording of his
own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
2d. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby
making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the
progress, the setting of Imagery should, like the sun, come
natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in
magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. But it is
easier to think what poetry should be than to write it--and
this leads me to
Another axiom--That if poetry comes not as naturally as the
leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.
Some people can always find things to complain about. We have seen
protests because the house in Rome where Keats died is used as a
steamship office. We think it is rather appropriate. No man's mind
ever set sail upon wider oceans of imagination. To paraphrase Emily
Dickinson:
Night after night his purple traffic
Strews the landing with opal bales;
Merchantmen poise upon horizons,
Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.
Another pleasing fact is that while he was a medical student Keats
lived in Bird-in-Hand Court, Cheapside--best known nowadays as the
home of Simpson's, that magnificent chophouse. Who else, in modern
times, came so close to holding unruffled in his hand the shy wild
bird of Poetry?
[Illustration]
A CITY NOTE-BOOK
Well, now let us see in what respect we are richer to-day than we
were yesterday.
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