The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎58r] (120/244)

1892 THE STORY OF GIFF 605
•of the aphorisms of the wise Goethe; and the world, in a blind and
stumbling way, becomes itself aware of that fact. Every new instance
of the nobly or the finely extraordinary in any department insinuates
its own influence gradually into the general mind, modifying the
previous standard of judgment in that department, and changing the
demands and expectations in it for the future. Thus, in the case of
Xeats, just as in that of Wordsworth, a conspicuously blundering
critical judgment at first has been as conspicuously condemned and
reversed. It is Keats's Hyperion, with his and his
other later poems of the volume of 1820, that people now almost
unanimously agree to regard as the most perfect and splendid things
Jie has left us; but the much-decried of 1818, with all its
admitted faults, now counts enormously also in the reckoning with
those who know it best; and the earlier volume of 1817 yields some
deathless additions. And so it has happened that, in virtue of those
bequests to our poetry, not of large bulk altogether, from four years
■of too short a life, this youth of exquisitely peculiar genius, on whom
the robust Gfifford or his deputy trampled so savagely because he could
not understand him, has been promoted to a zone in the invisible
firmament of the departed immeasurably above that tenanted by the
robust Gifford and all his kin, and that now, as Shelley has expressed
it in his elegy,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the aboie where the eternals are.
D avid M assox,
V ol. XXXI - X o. 182