Explore "The Poet of Immortal Youth" by Henry Van Dyke on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
One of the things that surprized and bewildered old Colonel Newcome / when he gathered his boy's friends around the mahogany tree in the / dull, respectable dining-room at 12 Fitzroy Square, was to hear George / Warrington declare, between huge puffs of tobacco smoke, "that young / Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael. " / At this Charles Honeyman sagely nodded his ambrosial head, while Clive / Newcome assented with sparkling eyes. But to the Colonel, sitting kindly / grave and silent at the head of the table, and recalling (somewhat / dimly) the bewigged and powdered poetry of the age of Queen Anne, such a / critical sentiment seemed radical and revolutionary, almost ungentlemanly.
How astonished he would have been sixty years later if he had taken up / Mr. Sidney Colvin's _Life of Keats_, in the "English Men of Letters / Series," and read in the concluding chapter the deliberate and / remarkable judgment that "by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he / was the most Shakespearean spirit that has lived since Shakespeare"!