But let none be deluded. The tragic life upon earth is not the life of the spirit, but the life of the senses. The senses are the aching doors to the greatest mystery of all, the mystery of our tyranny over one another. Does anyone think that that love is greater, more real, more poignant, which can stand over the dead body of its One-of-all, and dream of encounters and reconciliations, in other worlds? It is not so! What we have loved is cold, cold and dead, and has become _that thing_ we scarcely recognise. Can any vague, spiritual reunion make up for the loss of the little gestures, the little touches, _the little ways,_ we shall never through all eternity know again? Ah! those reluctances and hesitations, over now, quite over now! Ah! those fretful pleadings, those strange withdrawals, those unheeded protests; nothing, less than nothing, and mere memories! When the life of the senses invades the affections of the heart--then, then, mon enfant, comes the pinch and the sting!
And this is what happens with such doomed sensualists as Keats was. What tortured him in death was the thought that he must leave his darling--and the actual look, touch, air, ways and presence of her, forever. "Vain," as that inspired Lover, Emily Bronte, cries, "vain, unutterably vain, are 'all the creeds' that would console!" Tired of hearing "simple truth miscalled simplicity"; tired of all the weariness of life--from these we "would begone"--"save that to die we leave our love alone"!
But it is not only in the fatal danger of eternal separation from the flesh that has become to us more necessary than sun or moon, that _the tragedy of the senses lies._ It lies in the very intensity with which we have sifted, winnowed, tormented and refined these panthers of holy lust. Those who understand the poetry of Keats recognise that in the passion which burns him for the "heavenly quintessence" as Marlowe calls it, there is also the ghastly danger of reaction. The pitiless hands of Joy "are ever at his lips, bidding adieu" and "veiled melancholy has her 'sovran shrine' in the heart of all delight."
This is the curse upon those who follow the _supreme Beauty_--that is to say, the Beauty that belongs, not to ideas and ideals, but to living forms. They are driven by the gross pressure of circumstance to forsake her, to leave her, to turn aside and eat husks with the swine!