Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd
By an immortal sickness which kills not;
It works a constant change, which happy death
Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
To no death was that visage; it had past
The lily and the snow; and beyond these
I must not think now, though I saw that face.
But for her eyes I should have fled away;
They held me back with a benignant light
Soft, mitigated by divinest lids
Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed
Of all external things; they saw me not,
But in blank splendour beam'd like the mild moon
Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not
What eyes are upward cast....'

This vision of Moneta is the culminating point of Keats's evolution. It
stands at the summit, not of his poetry, but of his achievement regarded
as obedient to its own inward law. Moneta was to him the discovered
spirit of reality; her vision was the vision of necessity itself. In
her, joy and pain, life and death compassion and indifference, vision
and blindness are one; she is the eternal abode of contraries, the Idea
if you will, not hypostatised but immanent. Before this reality the poet
is impotent as his fellows; he is above them by his knowledge of it, but
below them by the weakness which that knowledge brings. He, too, is the
prey of contraries, the mirror of his deity, struck to the heart of his
victory, enduring the intolerable pain of triumph.

Here, not unfittingly, in his struggle with a conception too big to
express, came the end of Keats the poet. None have passed beyond him;