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The ode To Autumn is an excellent corrective to Bryant's popular but over-melancholy poem on the same season. who expects to read Alfred Noyes's Tales of the Mermaid Inn should not fail to precede that reading with Keats's Lines on the Mermaid Tavern.

In a separate group, as we have suggested, may well be placed the Ode on a Grecian Urn and La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The first is the poet's reconstruction of the Greek belief that art's product is eternal, or that the most truthful, or the only truthful, of all things is beauty. In this poem there is ample evidence that we are still in the renaissance period (even though it is not technically so called), for no product of the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth century, in any country, more adequately approaches a real revival of the ancient culture and tone of spirit of old Greece. It is because Keats was the author of such a poem as this that one hundred years of poetry and criticism have paid homage to this youth as a master of those who write. Traces of another master, Wordsworth, may be found in this poem, which serves to demonstrate that the creative spirit is not confined to the work of any one man, but runs unbrokenly through them all. In La Belle Dame Sans Merci there is added to the old-time and rather childish romanticism of Chatterton, the mystic weirdness of Coleridge; yet nothing is more spontaneous than the wizardry of these perfect lines, these pictures impossible to any other medium of painting than poetry. To describe by refraining from description, to tell by refusing to tell, here reaches its highest altitude.

Only one more thing can be mentioned, his last verses, written in September, 1820, his period of life was so short that the dates even by months are worth sacredly remembering. The sonnets of Keats are very uneven in quality, but the last one of all-without title-beginning "Bright star! would I

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were steadfast as thou art . . ." is among the finest, among best. The power to sing (no poet had better power than he at times), the instinct for consonance of sense with sound, imagination not bounded by time or measurable space, most human love, these survive and find richly full expression in "Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art . . ." and on until the last line, " And so live ever. . . or else swoon to death."

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2. The Great Novelists

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Jane Austen, realist. Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott were the two great novelists of this period. Sir Walter was the romancer, the Wizard of the North; but Miss Austen was as wonderful in her way as he in his. Her way was that of the sincere and gifted realist, rendering ordinary life interesting because she saw its details clearly and then in a plain and simple manner told what she saw. She still stands as the greatest of women novelists, superior to George Eliot or Charlotte Brontë. She was entirely human, frankly and hopefully sympathetic. She showed a great simplicity in her work because she was deeply cultured. Her field was narrow, but she knew it thoroughly, and worked upon it "with the skill of the worker in ivory." Macaulay said of her, in his rather exaggerated way, that Shakespeare is the only writer with whom she can be compared. She undoubtedly seems to have possessed the faculty of knowing everything, as Shakespeare did, and to have had the skill to say exactly the thing that must be said. To most readers, Jane Austen seems thoroughly to have been what is called objective; that is, fully in control of herself and of the characters of whom she wrote, never obtruding her own sentiments or opinions regarding them. But she was not quite that, for her own satiric tone of thought pervaded everything she wrote. Yet we feel that she has adhered in

minutest detail to the truth of the daily life which she related. Her satire is never bitter, always pleasant, though seriously penetrating to the inner meaning of what she depicts; as the superficial, though equally exact realist, Richardson, had never been able to do, because he was blinded by sentiment.

Jane Austen's six books were written between 1796 and 1810, in the halcyon days of the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, but were not published until between 1811 and 1818, thus overlapping the wonderful early days of Scott's success. Her books are: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. It is not the passing show of life that they picture, but ordinary life that is just as existent to-day as in her own day, one hundred years ago, and life that, in its main features, bids fair to continue endlessly. Therefore it seems that she is one who will always find an audience of readers. Northanger Abbey is her criticism of the Gothic romance, a very subtle, yet mild burlesque of its false heroicism. Sense and Sensibility is an indictment of the sentimentalists; and the sentimental character in her story is thoroughly cured of its sentimentalism in the end. Pride and Prejudice is the best and the most read of all the six. The comparison of it with a Shakespearean comedy is very fitting. Its humor is almost as keen, and it has all the technique of a finely constructed drama. In this book its author has illustrated the statement of Rodin, the present-day sculptor, that "All art is founded on mathematics; only, the artist must not let his mathematics grow cold." The book is as true in its details and as logical in its architectural contruction as a demonstration in geometry, yet Jane Austen. herself cannot be separated from it.

Sir Walter Scott, romanticist.Sir Walter Scott, the inspirer of Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas in France, of Caballero in

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