He assimilated with eager delight all the riches of the Greek imagination,
even though he never learned the language and was dependent on the dull
mediums of dictionaries and translations. It is not only that his
recognition of the permanently significant and beautiful embodiment of the
central facts of life in the Greek stories led him to select some of them
as the subjects for several of his most important poems; but his whole
feeling, notably his feeling for Nature, seems almost precisely that of the
Greeks, especially, perhaps, of the earlier generations among whom their
mythology took shape. To him also Nature appears alive with divinities.
Walking through the woods he almost expects to catch glimpses of hamadryads
peering from their trees, nymphs rising from the fountains, and startled
fauns with shaggy skins and cloven feet scurrying away among the bushes.

In his later poetry, also, the deeper force of the Greek spirit led him
from his early Romantic formlessness to the achievement of the most
exquisite classical perfection of form and finish. His Romantic glow and
emotion never fade or cool, but such poems as the Odes to the Nightingale
and to a Grecian Urn, and the fragment of 'Hyperion,' are absolutely
flawless and satisfying in structure and expression.

SUMMARY. One of the best comments on the poets whom we have just been
considering is a single sentence of Lowell: 'Three men, almost
contemporaneous with each other, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron, were the
great means of bringing back English poetry from the sandy deserts of
rhetoric and recovering for her her triple inheritance of simplicity,
sensuousness, and passion.' But justice must be done also to the
'Renaissance of Wonder' in Coleridge, the ideal aspiration of Shelley, and
the healthy stirring of the elementary instincts by Scott.

LESSER WRITERS. Throughout our discussion of the nineteenth century it will