Pencraft Author:William Watson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: may be best exemplified by his best work—by a sonnet like that on Chapman's Homer, or by that stanza of the Ode to a Nightingale which, from its first line to it... more »s last, touches the uttermost limit and reach of Keats's entrancing genius: "Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." That is bewitching, ravishing. To me it seems unsurpassable. But it is not chanted words: it is supremely beautiful writing. Therefore this wonderful and often quoted passage—and, indeed, so far as I am able to see, all its author's poems, without an exception—range themselves within what, without in the least suggesting grades of excellence, I take leave to classify as the second of my three kinds or orders of literature, the scriptive order: that is to say, the essentially written, as distinguished from that not necessarily greater but perhaps more elemental thing, the essentially chanted word. Within this scriptive order the vast mass of fine literature, whether in prose or verse, is in fact embraced; but it is scarcely necessary to observe that there are some writers whose works belong to it more absolutely, throughand through, body and soul, than do the works of certain others. Such a writer, I think, is Landor, from whom I will permit myself the luxury of quoting the following sentence on Dante: "He had that splenetic temper which seems to grudge brightness to the flames of Hell; to delight in...« less