Profile And Frieze: From Engravings In The Musee Napoleon]

In the ode we read how the sculptured forms of such an imaginary antique, visualized in full intensity before his mind's eye, have set his thoughts to work, on the one hand asking himself what living, human scenes of ancient custom and worship lay behind them, and on the other hand speculating upon the abstract relations of plastic art to life. The opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which flash their own answer upon us--interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,--'What men or gods are these, what maidens loth?' etc. The second and third stanzas express with full felicity and insight the differences between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even richer than the real. The thought thrown by Leonardo da Vinci into a single line--'Cosa bella mortal passa e non d'arte'--and expanded by Wordsworth in his later days into the sonnet, 'Praised be the art,' etc., finds here its most perfect utterance.

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Then the questioning begins again, and again conjures up a choice of pictures,--

What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?

In the answering lines of the sestet--

And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return,--

in these lines we find that the poet's imagination has suddenly and lightly shifted its ground, and chooses to view the arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own compensations. Finally, dropping such airy play of the mind backward and forward between the two spheres, he consigns the work of ancient skill to the future, to remain,--

in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--

thus re-asserting his old doctrine, 'What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth'; a doctrine which amidst the gropings of reason and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of Keats's temper--the one anchorage to which his soul can and needs must cleave.

'What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy'