50 The Study of Poetry
pact of poetry on the larger world which was prepared to
receive it. Shelley reared before the eyes of that larger
world the glittering fabric of an imaginatively reconstructed
universe in which, freed from tyranny and superstition, from
selfishness and apathy, the human race might develop its
noblest qualities, and life be one long ecstasy of joy. Even
those who regard Byron as a beautiful fiend, and Shelley as
an ineffectual angel, must admit the truth of the striking
words used of them by Tennyson, that these two poets, ‘how-
ever mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another
heart and new pulses.’
Even more striking and significant is the attitude towards
an anticipated democracy, and the part to be played in it by
poetry, which was taken by Keats. He was the youngest of
that great group of revolutionary poets, the most gifted and
the most splendid in his wonderful promise and unfinished
achievement. Beyond all those others, with a width and
foresight of vision all his own, he pointed and urged poetry
forward. The horizon to which he saw is still distant and
unreached. That ‘joy in widest commonalty spread,’ of
which Wordsworth had profound glimpses, and which
Shelley saw, as it were, through an iridescent burning mist,
lay before the eyes of Keats, clearly, definitely, attainably.
The world to which he looked forward was one in which, as
he says, ‘every human being might become great, and hu-
manity, instead of being a wide heath of furze and briars,
with here and there a remote oak or pine, would become a
grand democracy of forest trees.’ In that image he em-
bodies for us the ideal of democracy in the highest and
amplest form. And of this democratic ideal, poetry, because
coextensive with human life, will be the informing spirit.
Democracy, we are often told, is on its trial. The bril-
liant promises of its youth have not been realised. It has