than abstract. His characteristic themes are, not God, but this god or that god; not spirit, or nature, or life or death-not even night or day, storm or light, darkness or air; but men and women and anthropomorphic powers; the sun and moon and stars; the leaves and fruits of trees; scents and jewels, and all that is pleasant to eye, or ear, or nostril, or touch. A world of such things is a world chiefly in repose; a world not of infinite potentiality and endless process, but of achieved and satisfying results.1 It follows naturally that Keats's epithets are material and sensuous rather than spiritual. They are epithets of vision, hearing, scent, and touch; and for the most part, though not invariably, they aim at definite, rather than vague, characterisation, such characterization as satisfies the senses. In the opening stanza of the great Endymion lyric ('O Sorrow!') Keats is as abstract and spiritual as he ever is; but how concrete and sensuous, on the whole are the imagery and epithets! And it is the same with the spiritualities and humanities, the 'moral ideas,' as Matthew Arnold reckoned them, of the great Odes. Now and again a personified abstraction, a vague word, a figure of indeterminate suggestion; but, on the whole, objects in sharp relief in a clear air; objects with outline and human or animal characteristics, objects recognizably constituted and of fixed and lasting presence. So far as vision is concerned, they are epithets of tone rather than colour. Keats's world, unlike Shelley's, is not one of intense or subtle hues. He is fond of the romantic and rather conventional ' vermeil,' and he likes white and blue; but he prefers silver and gold and sapphire and diamond, and still more, things that are wan,' or 'flushed,' or I Cf. in this connexion the passage in Sleep and Poetry (96—162), in which Keats distinguishes between lower and higher worlds of imagination, and notice how concrete and physical is his imagery for the latter. Contrast Wordsworth's imagery in the fragment from The Recluse beginning: On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life. faint,' or pale,' 'bright' or 'hoar,' rosy' or dusky' or cloudy.' He cannot be said to be rich in epithets expressing either sound or scent, though as regards the latter, in the Eve of St. Agnes' fragrant bodice' clings to the memory; and by the two phrases, spiced dainties' and ' and 'perfume light,' Keats seems to fill the whole poem with winning odours. It is to touch and taste that he makes his chief sensuous appeals; and epithets of touch and taste are numerous, characteristic, and important. In considering his use of 'cold' and 'warm,' we have already seen how much he thinks about the temperature of his world and the objects in it; but it is only when we remember his epithets of temperature as literal rather than metaphorical, and notice, along with them, his adjectives appealing otherwise to touch and to gustatory experience and suggestion, that we realize how powerfully Keats's imagination was moved by those sides of things. 4. We are now ready to make our last reflection on Keats's epithets, namely, that they are distinctly the epithets of an artist of the type to which painters and sculptors belong. If, for the moment, we choose to divide poets into three classes, those who paint (or carve), those who sing, and those who prophesy, we must unhesitatingly place Keats in the first class. His genius is not predominantly lyrical: he had not the lyrist's spontaneity and flow, which make epithets seem inevitable, in a world as living and moving as the verse. Nor has he as his special gift the genius of a prophetic poet like Wordsworth, whose world is of common things and persons, testifying of infinite heights and depths; and whose epithets seem often to reach into eternity. Keats's world is detached from him, and its contents are detached from each other; they are concrete, reposeful, may be visualized, heard, smelt, tasted, touched, moulded, painted. If we say that Wordsworth's objects reveal imagination's infinite, may we not say that those of Keats are that infinite, and that, as with the great poet or sculptor, the clearness of the vision, the sensitiveness, firmness and boldness of the touch, are the index of the imaginative power ? However that may be, we must not part from Keats as from a poet who could not occasionally triumph in pure, vague suggestion. It is true that, when he wrote those three lines of the Ode to a Nightingale, he was thinking of a picture he had seen; but the power of the poetry lies wholly in its untranslatable message of the unseensage concentrated in an epithet: The same that oft-times hath -a mes Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Forlorn !-The very word is like a bell, To toll me back from thee to my sole self! DR. JOHN BROWN. N the article on Tolstoy, which was one of Matthew Arnold's last contributions to literary criticism, IN the critic, speaking of Anna Karénina, says : 'We are not to take Anna as a work of art, we are to take it as a piece of life.' The antithesis, like so many antitheses, is far from satisfactory. A 'work of art' Anna Karénina needs must be; and the nearer to life, the better the art. Again and again, however, in reading certain books, we are forced to make some such reflexion as Matthew Arnold's. We cannot help saying at such times: here is something more than literature; here literature, it may be in the verisimilitude of its realism, it may be in the delicate fantasy of its idealism, goes beyond itself, shows a character abnormal, inexplicable; this is one of the passages, one of the books, one of the writers, that we feel rather than merely understand; that we love rather than merely admire; here is more than talent, more than even genius; this is nature, not art. The Germans have a word, the word innigkeit, which, better perhaps than any single English word, expresses the kind of quality which is here indicated. If we render it by inwardness, we may help ourselves to realize its character and recognize its manifestations. Inwardness on the part of the writer, a naked, telling sincerity, making itself inevitably and unmistakably evident to the reader; requiring on the reader's side, sympathy and simplicity and a sense of kinship; in both writer and reader, the sense that literary trappings and adornments and outworks are dispensed with, that the pulse and nerve of that which the writer would show us are made bare. W Unquestionably Dr. John Brown, the Edinburgh physician and essayist, belongs to those, a small and select band among writers of the first class, who possess this inward, secret power and charm. To the British reader of these hurried days, whose literary memory is short, and whose ear can hardly be reached by the silver tones of our shyer teachers, a service has been done by the editor of the late John Taylor Brown's critical and biographical study of his cousin. Nothing could be more fitting that than a critical duty to Dr. John Brown, the most modest, spontaneous and occasional of writers, should be done in this slight, discontinuous, and unsystematic way; nothing could be more fitting than that a biographical duty should be done by one member of a highly gifted and most affectionate family to another. For one element in the inwardness of Dr. John Brown's work was that personality which only relations and friends could pretend to know. With him the personal equation counts for very much. To those who, like myself, had the privilege of knowing him, of not only being familiar with the delicate face which all Edinburgh knew as well as it had known, earlier, Sir Walter Scott's limp or the stride of the mighty Christopher North, but of having felt the pressure of that kindly hand, and the pale sunshine of that sweet and sad smile, it seems at first almost profane to direct critical searchlights on so dear a form. Of him as of Wordsworth's poet we are apt to feel: You must love him, ere to you He shall seem worthy of your love. Yet the indulgence of such a feeling, in his case as in that of other writers of his kind, would be a sentimentality which, while seeming to shield him, would hurt his memory and his fame. No critic would be allowed to enter the presence of Cowper or of Charles Lamb without taking the shoes from off his feet; yet, as to them, the utmost reverence for sorrow, the |