outstart, he will always be poorer in the end. This process has a widespread fascination even in practical life, as the bankruptcy courts attest. Running downhill begets its proper exhilaration, one moves faster and faster; the invigoration derived from ascending must maintain itself in spite of decreasing speed.
Now not only do the victims of these many maladies of taste which I have enumerated miss sound health, but, by implacable necessity, they become passively or actively, here or there, enemies and maltreaters of poetry, who resist and persecute her best.
Why should we then wonder at the ups and downs of literary history, the blindness of contemporaries, the long-continued bigotry of worthless fashions, or at the lives and misfortunes of poets?
Poetry, as distinguished from prose, is formally rhythmic; and the reason why it is so, is that a majority of the finest mentalities have considered formal rhythms capable of greater beauty. Apart from their beauty, they are simply inconvenient.
Browning compares the ravishing depth and warmth of colour, which Keats discovered the secret of, to Tyrian purple, and says that he flooded the literary market with—
"Enough to furnish Solomon
Such hangings for his cedar-house,
That, when gold-robed he took the throne
In that abyss of blue, the Spouse
Might swear his presence shone
Most like the centre-spike of gold
Which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb,
What time, with ardours manifold,
The bee goes singing to her groom,
Drunken and over-bold."
—stanzas whose beauty is worthy to rank with Keats's own work, and which add to his luxurious richness of
