by Paul Elmer More Much have I travell'd in the realms of
gold,It is the sonnet that to most people probably comes first
to mind when Keats is named and his destiny remembered. There is
about it the golden flush and wonder of youth--it was written in
his twentieth year--and one catches in it also, or seems to
catch, a certain quickness of breath which forebodes the rapture
so soon quenched. The inspiration of unsoiled nature and of
England's clear-voiced early singers is here mingled as in no
other of our poets. And especially this inheritance of the
Elizabethan age rediscovered in a later century will have a new
significance to any one who has just gone through the poems in
the volume edited by Mr. E. de Selincourt. There is a good deal
to commend in this scholarly edition of Keats; the text has been
prepared with extreme accuracy, and the notes, properly placed
at the end of the book, are thorough and apposite. Mr. de
Selincourt's interest has lain more particularly in the study of
sources, and Keats, among