Excerpt from A New Spirit of the Age, Vol. 2 How it should happen that the influencer of so many spirits of the present time should himself have been left to the ecstatic solitude of his own charmed shores and faery lands forlorn, while those very Spirits have each and all of them made some passage for themselves into the public mind, is one of those problems which neither the common fate of origina tors, the Obduracy or caprice of the public, the cling ing poison of bygone malice and depreciation, nor the want of sufficient introduction and championship on the part of living appreciators, can furnish a per fectly satisfactory solution. Such, however, is the fact at this very time. We have said that Keats has had no imitators; of what nature, then, has been his influence upon the poetry of the present day? It has been spiritual in its ideality; it has been classical in its revivification of the forms and images of the antique, which he inspired with a new soul; it has been romantic in its spells, and dreams, and legendary associations; and it has been pastoral in its fresh gatherings from the wild forests and fields, and as little as possible from the garden, and never from the hot-house and the flower-shows. His imagination identified itself with the essences Of things, poetical in themselves, and he acted as the interpreter Of all this, by words which eminently possess the prerogative Of expres sive form and colour, and have a sense of their own by which to make themselves understood. Who shall imitate these peculiarities of genius? It is not possible. But kindred spirits will always recognize the voice from other spheres, will hail the vision, and the faculty divine, come from whom it may, will have their own inherent impulses quickened to look into their own hearts, and abroad upon nature and mankind, and to work out the purposes of their souls. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.