Long before the French assault upon this ancient, honoured name, Keats blows the war-trumpet! Théophile Gautier himself does not treat it with greater contempt.
It was probably the above passage, the energetic style of which reminds one of that picture of Kaulbach's in Munich, in which the artist of the rococo period is painted asleep with the lay-figure in his arms, which gave occasion to Byron's repeated thrusts at Keats as the traducer of Pope. For Keats never published a line against Pope; and when Countess Guiccioli, in her naïve work on Byron, refers to attacks which infuriated her lover, she is only repeating vague remarks she has heard. It is, however, highly probable that Keats included Pope among those whom he reproached with being deaf to the music of the waves and the winds, and with sleeping whilst the morning unfolded its beauties.
He himself was not of that company. If we examine the distinctive individuality of Keats's genius, we find its determining element to be the all-embracing sensuousness already alluded to. Read this stanza of the _Ode to a Nightingale_:--
"O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stainèd mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim."
And compare with it the following lines of _Endymion_:--
"Taste these juicy pears, Sent me by sad Vertumnus; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . here is cream, Deepening to richness from a snowy gleam; Sweeter than that nurse Amalthea skimmed For the boy Jupiter: and here, undimmed By any touch, a bunch of blooming plums Ready to melt between an infant's gums."
The delicate, highly developed sense of taste is accompanied by an equally delicate and highly developed sense of touch and sense of smell. Read the passage in _Isabella_--a poem which, following Boccaccio, treats of the same theme as Hans Andersen's tale of the "Rose Fairy"--the passage which tells how the young girl took the head of her murdered lover from the grave:--