Never has there been a poet less _mystical_--never a poet less _moral._ The ground and soil, and sub-soil, of his nature, was Sensuality--a rich, quivering, tormented Sensuality!
If you will, you may use, for what he was, the word "materialistic"; but such a word gives an absurdly wrong impression. The physical nerves of his abnormally troubled senses, were too exquisitely, too passionately stirred, to let their vibrations die away in material bondage. They quiver off into remotest psychic waves, these shaken strings; and a touch will send them shuddering into the high regions of the Spirit. For a nature like this, with the fever of consumption wasting his tissues, and the fever of his thirst for Beauty ravaging his soul, it was nothing less than the cruellest tragedy that he should have been driven by the phantom-flame of sex-illusion to find all the magic and wonder of the Mystery he worshiped, caught, imprisoned, enclosed, _blighted,_ in the poisonous loveliness of one capricious girl. An anarchist at heart--as so many great artists are--Keats hated, with a furious hatred, any bastard claims and privileges that insolently intruded themselves between the godlike senses of Man and the divine madness of their quest. Society? the Public? Moral Opinion? Intellectual Fashion? The manners and customs of the Upper Classes? What were all these but vain impertinences, interrupting his desperate Pursuit? "Every gentleman" he cried "is my natural enemy!"
The feverish fanaticism of his devotion knew absolutely no limits. His cry day and night was for "new sensations"; and such "sensation," a mere epicurean indulgence to others, was a lust, a madness, a frenzy, a fury, a rushing upon death, to him.
How young he was, how pitifully young, when the Foam-born, jealous of him as she was jealous of Hippolytus, hurled him bleeding to the ground!
But what Poetry he has left behind him! There is nothing like it in the world. Nothing like it, for sheer, deadly, draining, maddening, drowsing witchery of beauty. It is the very cup of Circe--the very philtre of Sun-poison. "A thing of Beauty is a Joy forever"! A Joy? Yes--but a Joy _drugged_ from its first pouring forth. We follow. We have to follow. But, O the weariness of the way!