Keats in this book lets himself go without a check. Now we find

ourselves in a temple, described as complete and true to sacred custom,

with an image of Diana; and in a trice either we have passed, or the

temple itself has dissolved, into a structure which by its 'abysmal

depths of awe,' its gloomy splendours and intricacies of aisle and vault

and corridor, its dimly gorgeous and most un-Grecian magnificence,

reminds us of nothing so much as of Vathek and the halls of Eblis or

some of the magical subterranean palaces of the _Arabian Nights_.

(Beckford's _Vathek_ and the _Thousand and One Nights_ were both among

Keats's familiar reading.) Endymion is miserable there, and appeals to

Diana to restore him to the pleasant light of earth. Thereupon the

marble floor breaks up beneath and before his footsteps into a flowery

sward. Endymion walks on to the sound of a soft music which only

intensifies his yearnings: is led by a light through the alleys of a

myrtle grove; and comes to an embowered chamber where Adonis lies asleep

among little ministering Loves, with Cupid himself, lute in hand, for

their chief.

Here follows a long and highly wrought episode of the winter sleep of

Adonis and the descent of Venus to awaken him. The original idea for the

scene comes from Ovid, in part direct, in part through Spenser (_Faerie

Queene_, iii, 6) and Shakespeare. But the detail is entirely Keats's own

and on the whole is a happy example of his early luxuriant manner;

especially the description of the entrance of Venus and the looks and

presence of Cupid as bystander and interpreter. The symbolic meaning of

the story is for him evidently much the same as it was to the

ancients,--the awakening of nature to love and life after the sleep of

winter, with all the ulterior and associated hopes implied by such a

resurrection. The first embracements over, Endymion is about to intreat

the favour of Venus for his quest when she anticipates him

encouragingly, telling him that from her upper regions she has perceived

his plight and has guessed (here is one of the echoes from Drayton to

which I have referred above) that some goddess, she knows not which, has

condescended to him. She bids her son be propitious to him, and she and

Adonis depart. Endymion wanders on by miraculous grottoes and palaces,

and then mounts by a diamond balustrade,

Leading afar past wild magnificence,

Spiral through ruggedst loopholes, and thence

Stretching across a void, then guiding o'er

Enormous chasms, where, all foam and roar,

Streams subterranean teaze their granite beds;

Then heighten'd just above the silvery heads

Of a thousand fountains, so that he could dash

The waters with his spear; but at the splash,

Done heedlessly, those spouting columns rose

Sudden a poplar's height, and 'gan to enclose

His diamond path with fretwork, streaming round

Alive, and dazzling cool, and with a sound,

Haply, like dolphin tumults, when sweet shells

Welcome the float of Thetis.

The fountains assume all manner of changing and interlacing imitative

shapes which he watches with delight (this and much else on the

underground journey seems to be the outcome of pure fancy and

day-dreaming on the poet's part, without symbolic purpose). Then passing

on through a dim tremendous region of vaults and precipices he has a

momentary vision of the earth-goddess Cybele with her team of lions

issuing from an arch below him. At this point the diamond balustrade

suddenly breaks off in mid-space and ends in nothing.[8] Endymion calls

to Jove for help and rescue, and is taken up on the wings of an eagle,

(is this the eagle of Dante in the _Purgatory_ and of Chaucer in The

_House of Fame_?) who swoops down with him,--all this still happening,

be it remembered, deep within the bowels of the earth,--to a place of

sweet airs of flowers and mosses. He is deposited in a jasmine bower,

wonders within himself who and what his unknown love may be, longs to

force his way to her, but as that may not be, to sleep and dream of her.

He sleeps on a mossy bed; she comes to him; and their endearments are

related, unluckily in a very cloying and distasteful manner of amatory

ejaculation. It was a flaw in Keats's art and a blot on his genius--or

perhaps only a consequence of the rawness and ferment of his

youth?--that thinking nobly as he did of love, yet when he came to

relate a love-passage, even one intended as this to be symbolical of

ideal things, he could only realize it in terms like these.

The visitant, whose identity is still unrecognized, again disappears; he

resumes his quest, and next finds himself in a huge vaulted grotto full

of sea treasures and sea sounds and murmurs. Here he goes over in memory

his past life and aspirations,

--the spur

Of the old bards to mighty deeds: his plans

To nurse the golden age 'mong shepherd clans:

That wondrous night: the great Pan-festival:

His sister's sorrow; and his wanderings all,

Until into the earth's deep maw he rush'd:

Then all its buried magic, till it flush'd

High with excessive love. 'And now,' thought he,

'How long must I remain in jeopardy

Of blank amazements that amaze no more?

Now I have tasted her sweet soul to the core

All other depths are shallow: essences,

Once spiritual, are like muddy lees,

Meant but to fertilize my earthly root,

And make my branches lift a golden fruit

Into the bloom of heaven: other light,

Though it be quick and sharp enough to blight

The Olympian eagle's vision, is dark,

Dark as the parentage of chaos. Hark!

My silent thoughts are echoing from these shells;

Or they are but the ghosts, the dying swells

Of noises far away?--list!--'

The poet seems here to mean that in the seeker's transient hour of union

with his unknown divinity capacities for thought and emotion have been

awakened in him richer and more spiritually illuminating than he has

known before. The strange sounds which reach him are the rushing of the

streams of the river-god Alpheus and the fountain-nymph Arethusa;

Arethusa fleeing, Alpheus pursuing (according to that myth which is told

most fully by Ovid and which Shelley's lyric has made familiar to all

English readers); he entreating, she longing to yield but fearing the

wrath of Diana. Endymion, who till now has had no thought of anything

but his own plight, is touched by the pangs of these lovers and prays to

his goddess to assuage them. We are left to infer that she assents: they

plunge into a gulf and disappear: he turns to follow a path which leads

him in the direction of a cooler light and a louder sound:

--and lo!

More suddenly than doth a moment go,

The visions of the earth were gone and fled--

He saw the giant sea above his head.

Throughout this second book Keats has been content to let the mystery

and 'buried magic' of the under-world reveal itself in nothing of more

original invention or of deeper apparent significance than the spring

awakening of Adonis and the vision of the earth-goddess Cybele. His

under-world is no Tartarus or Elysium, no place of souls: he attempts

nothing like the calling-up of the ghosts of dead heroes by Ulysses in

the _Odyssey_, still less like the mystic revelation of a future state

of rewards and punishments in the sixth book of the _Aeneid_. Possibly

the visit of the disguised Diana is meant to have a double meaning, and

of her three characters as 'Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell,' to

refer to the last, that of a goddess of the under-world and of the dead,

and at the same time to symbolize the power of the spirit of Beauty to

visit the poet's soul with joy and illumination even among the 'dismal

elements' of that nether sphere. Into the rest of the underground

scenery and incidents it is hard to read any symbolical meaning or

anything but the uncontrolled and aimless-seeming play of invention. But

in what is now to follow we are conscious of a fuller meaning and a

stricter plan. That from Diana, conscious of her own weakness,

indulgence for the weakness of her nymph Arethusa should be won by the

prayer of Endymion, now for the first time wrought to sympathy with the

sorrows of others, is a clear stage in the development of the poet's

scheme. The next stage is more decisive and significant still.

Book III. Keats begins his third book with a denunciation of kings,

conquerors, and worldly 'regalities' in general, amplifying in his least

fortunate style the ideas contained in the sonnet 'On receiving a laurel

crown from Leigh Hunt' written the previous March in the copy of his

_Poems_ which he gave to Reynolds (see above, p. 57). When Keats read

this passage to Bailey at Oxford, Bailey very justly found fault with

some forced expressions in it such as 'baaing vanities,' and also, he

tells us, with what seemed to him an over-done defiance of the

traditional way of handling the rimed couplet. From denunciation the

verse passes into narrative with the question, 'Are then regalities all

gilded masks?' The answer is, No, there are a thousand mysterious powers

throned in the universe--cosmic powers, as we should now say--most of

them far beyond human ken but a few within it; and of these, swears the

poet, the moon is 'the gentlier-mightiest.' Having once more, in a

strain of splendid nature-poetry, praised her, he resumes his tale, and

tells how Cynthia, pining no less than Endymion, sends a shaft of her

light down to him where he lies on an under-sea bed of sand and pearls;

how this comforts him, and how at dawn he resumes his fated journey.

Here follows a description of the litter of the Ocean floor which, as we

shall see later, is something of a challenge to Shakespeare and was in

its turn something of an inspiration to Shelley. Endymion now in his own

person takes up the inexhaustible theme of the moon's praise, asking her

pardon at the same time for having lately suffered a more rapturous,

more absorbing passion to come between him and his former youthful

worship of her. At this moment the wanderer's attention is suddenly

diverted,--

For as he lifted up his eyes to swear

How his own goddess was past all things fair,

He saw far in the green concave of the sea

An old man sitting calm and peacefully.

Upon a weeded rock this old man sat,

And his white hair was awful, and a mat

Of weeds were cold beneath his cold thin feet.

The old man is Glaucus, and the rest of the book is taken up almost

entirely with his story. Keats's reading of Ovid had made him familiar

with this story:[9] but he remodels it radically for his own ethical and

symbolic purpose, giving it turns and a sequel quite unknown to

antiquity, and even helping himself as he felt the need to certain

incidents and machinery of Oriental magic from the _Arabian Nights_.

Glaucus at first sight of Endymion greets him joyfully, seeing in him

his predestined deliverer from the spell of palsied age which binds him.

But Endymion cannot endure the thought of being diverted from his own

private quest, and meets the old man's welcome first with suspicious

terror and then with angry defiance. The grey-haired creature weeps:

whereupon Endymion, newly awakened to human sympathies, is struck with

remorse.

Had he then wrong'd a heart where sorrow kept?

* * * * *

He had indeed, and he was ripe for tears.

The penitent shower fell, as down he knelt

Before that careworn sage.

They rise and proceed over the ocean floor together. Glaucus tells

Endymion his history: how he led a quiet and kind existence as a

fisherman long ago, familiar with and befriended by all sea-creatures,

even the fiercest, until he was seized with the ambition to be free of

Neptune's kingdom and able to live and breathe beneath the sea; how this

desire being granted he loved and pursued the sea-nymph Scylla, and she

feared and fled him; how then he asked the aid of the enchantress Circe,

who made him her thrall and lapped him in sensual delights while Scylla

was forgotten. How the witch, the 'arbitrary queen of sense,' one day

revealed her true character, and 'specious heaven was changed to real

hell.' (Is Keats here remembering the closing couplet of Shakespeare's

great sonnet against lust--

This all the world well knows; but none know well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell?)

He came upon her torturing her crowd of spell-bound animals, once human

beings, fled in terror at the sight, was overtaken, and with savage

taunts driven back into his ocean-home. Here he found Scylla cold and

dead, killed by Circe's arts. (In the original myth as told by Ovid and

others Glaucus refuses the temptations of Circe, who in revenge inflicts

on Scylla a worse punishment than death, transforming her into a

sea-monster engirdled with a pack of ravening dogs and stationed as a

terror to mariners at the Straits over against Charybdis). Glaucus then

tells how he conveyed the body of his dead love to a niche in a vacant

under-sea temple, where she still remains. Then began the doom of

paralysed and helpless senility which the enchantress had condemned him

to endure for a thousand years and which still binds him fast,--a doom

which inevitably reminds us of such stories as that of the Fisherman in

the _Arabian Nights_, and of the spell laid by Suleiman upon the

rebellious Djinn, whom he imprisoned for a thousand and eight hundred

years in a bottle until the Fisherman released him.

Glaucus goes on to relate how once, in the course of his miserable

spell-bound existence, he witnessed the drowning of a shipwrecked crew

with agony at his own helplessness, and in trying vainly to rescue a

sinking old man by the hand found himself left with a wand and scroll

which the old man had held. Reading the scroll, he found in it

comfortable words of hope and wisdom. (Note that it was through an

attempted act of human succour that this wisdom came to him). If he

would have patience, so ran the promise of the scroll, to probe all the

depths of magic and the hidden secrets of nature--if moreover he would

piously through the centuries make it his business to lay side by side

in sanctuary all bodies of lovers drowned at sea--there would one day

come to him a heaven-favoured youth to whom he would be able to teach

the rites necessary for his deliverance. He recognizes the predestined

youth in Endymion, who on learning the nature of the promise accepts

joyfully his share in the prescribed duty, with the attendant risk of

destruction to both if they fail. The young man and the old--or rather

'the young soul in age's mask'--go together to the submarine hall of

burial where Scylla and the multitude of drowned lovers lie enshrined.

As to the rites that follow and their effect, let us have them in the

poet's own words:--

'Let us commence,'

Whisper'd the guide, stuttering with joy, 'even now.'

He spake, and, trembling like an aspen-bough,

Began to tear his scroll in pieces small,

Uttering the while some mumblings funeral.

He tore it into pieces small as snow

That drifts unfeather'd when bleak northerns blow;

And having done it, took his dark blue cloak

And bound it round Endymion: then struck

His wand against the empty air times nine.--

'What more there is to do, young man, is thine:

But first a little patience; first undo

This tangled thread, and wind it to a clue.

Ah, gentle! 'tis as weak as spider's skein;

And shouldst thou break it--What, is it done so clean

A power overshadows thee! O, brave!

The spite of hell is tumbling to its grave.

Here is a shell; 'tis pearly blank to me,

Nor mark'd with any sign or charactery--

Canst thou read aught? O read for pity's sake!

Olympus! we are safe! Now, Carian, break

This wand against yon lyre on the pedestal.'

'Twas done: and straight with sudden swell and fall

Sweet music breath'd her soul away, and sigh'd

A lullaby to silence.--'Youth! now strew

These minced leaves on me, and passing through

Those files of dead, scatter the same around,

And thou wilt see the issue.'--'Mid the sound

Of flutes and viols, ravishing his heart,

Endymion from Glaucus stood apart,

And scatter'd in his face some fragments light.

How lightning-swift the change! a youthful wight

Smiling beneath a coral diadem

Out-sparkling sudden like an upturn'd gem,

Appear'd, and, stepping to a beauteous corse,

Kneel'd down beside it, and with tenderest force

Press'd its cold hand, and wept,--and Scylla sigh'd!

Endymion, with quick hand, the charm apply'd--

The nymph arose: he left them to their joy,

And onward went upon his high employ,

Showering those powerful fragments on the dead.

And as he passed, each lifted up his head,

As doth a flower at Apollo's touch.

Death felt it to his inwards: 'twas too much:

Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house.

The Latmian persever'd along, and thus

All were re-animated. There arose

A noise of harmony, pulses and throes

Of gladness in the air--while many, who

Had died in mutual arms devout and true,

Sprang to each other madly; and the rest

Felt a high certainty of being blest.

They gaz'd upon Endymion. Enchantment

Grew drunken, and would have its head and bent.

Delicious symphonies, like airy flowers,

Budded, and swell'd, and, full-blown, shed full showers

Of light, soft, unseen leaves of sounds divine.

The two deliverers tasted a pure wine

Of happiness, from fairy-press ooz'd out.

Speechless they ey'd each other, and about

The fair assembly wander'd to and fro,

Distracted with the richest overflow

Of joy that ever pour'd from heaven.

The whole long Glaucus and Scylla episode filling the third book, and

especially this its climax, has to many lovers and students of Keats

proved a riddle hard of solution. And indeed at first reading the

meaning of its strange incidents and imagery, beautiful as is much of

the poetry in which they are told, looks obscure enough. Every definite

clue to their interpretation seems to elude us as we lay hold of it,

like the drowned man who sinks through the palsied grasp of Glaucus. But

bearing in mind what we have recognized as the general scope and

symbolic meaning of the poem, does not the main purport of the Glaucus

book, on closer study, emerge clearly as something like this? The spirit

touched with the divine beam of Cynthia--that is aspiring to and chosen

for communion with essential Beauty--in other words the spirit of the

Poet--must prepare itself for its high calling, first by purging away

the selfishness of its private passion in sympathy with human loves and

sorrows, and next by acquiring a full store alike of human experience

and of philosophic thought and wisdom. Endymion, endowed by favour of

the gods with the poetic gift and passion, has only begun to awaken to

sympathy and acquire knowledge when he meets Glaucus, whose history has

made him rich in all that Endymion yet lacks, including as it does the

forfeiting of simple everyday life and usefulness for the exercise of a

perilous superhuman gift; the desertion, under a spell of evil magic, of

a pure for an impure love; the tremendous penalty which has to be paid

for this plunge into sensual debasement; the painful acquisition of the

gift of righteous magic, or knowledge of the secrets of nature and

mysteries of life and death, by prolonged intensity of study, and the

patient exercise of the duties of pious tenderness towards the bodies of

the drowned. At the approach of Endymion the sage recognizes in him the

predestined poet, and hastens to make over to him, as to one more

divinely favoured than himself, all the dower of his dearly bought

wisdom; in possession of which the poet is enabled to work miracles of

joy and healing and to confer immortality on dead lovers.

As to the significance in detail of the rites by which the transfer of

power is effected, we are again helped by remembering that Keats was

mixing up with his classic myth ideas taken from the _Thousand and One

Nights_. Let the student turn to the Glaucus and Circe episodes of

Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, and then refresh his memory of certain Arabian

tales, particularly that of Bebr Salim, with its kings and queens of the

sea living and moving under water as easily as on land, its repeated

magical transformations and layings on and taking off of enchantments,

and the adventures of the hero with queen Lab, the Oriental counterpart

of Circe,--let the student refresh his memory from these sources, and

the proceedings of this episode will no longer seem so strange. In the

Arabian tales, and for that matter in western tales of magic also, the

commonest method of annulling enchantments is by sprinkling with water

over which words of power have been spoken. Under sea you cannot

sprinkle with water, so Keats makes Endymion use for sprinkling the

shredded fragments of the scroll taken by Glaucus from the drowned man.

First Glaucus tears the scroll, uttering 'some mumblings funeral' as he

does so (compare the 'backward mutters of dissevering power' in Milton's

_Comus_). Then follows a series of actions showing that the hour has

come for him to surrender and make over his powers and virtues to the

new comer. First he invests Endymion with his own magic robe. Then he

waves his magic wand nine times in the air,--as a preliminary to the

last exercise of its power? or as a sign that its power is exhausted?

Nine is of course a magic number, and the immediate suggestion comes

from the couplet in Sandys's Ovid where Glaucus tells how the sea-gods

admitted him to their fellowship,--

Whom now they hallow, and with charms nine times

Repeated, purge me from my human crimes.

The disentangling of the skein and the perceiving and deciphering of

runes on the shell[10] which to Glaucus is a blank are evidently tests

Endymion has to undergo before it is proved and confirmed that he is

really the predestined poet, gifted to unravel and interpret mysteries

beyond the ken of mere philosophy. The breaking of the philosopher's

wand against the lyre suspended from its pedestal, followed by an

outburst of ravishing music, is a farther and not too obscure piece of

symbolism shadowing forth the surrender and absorption of the powers of

study and research into the higher powers of poetic intuition and

inspiration. And then comes the general disenchantment and awakening of

the drowned multitude to life and happiness.

The parable breaks off at this point, and the book closes with a

submarine pageant imagined, it would seem, almost singly for the

pageant's sake; perhaps also partly in remembrance of Spenser's festival

of the sea-gods at the marriage of Thames and Medway in the fourth book

of the _Faerie Queene_. The rejuvenated Glaucus bids the whole beautiful

multitude follow him to pay their homage to Neptune: they obey: the

first crowd of lovers restored to life meets a second crowd on the sand,

and some in either crowd recognize and happily pair off with their lost

ones in the other. All approach in procession the palace of

Neptune--another marvel of vast and vague jewelled and translucent

architectural splendours--and find the god presiding on an emerald

throne between Venus and Cupid. Glaucus and Scylla receive the blessing

of Neptune and Venus respectively, and Venus addresses Endymion in a

speech of arch encouragement, where the poet's style (as almost always

in moments of his hero's prosperous love) turns common and tasteless.

Dance and revelry follow, and then a hymn to Neptune, Venus, and Cupid.

This is interrupted by the entrance of Oceanus and a train of Nereids.

The presence of all these immortals is too much for Endymion's human

senses: he swoons; a ring of Nereids lift and carry him tenderly away;

he is aware of a message of hope and cheer from his goddess, written in

starlight on the dark; and when he comes to himself, finds that he is

restored to earth, lying on the grass beside a forest pool in his native

Caria.

BOOK IV. In this book Endymion has to make his last discovery. He has to

learn that all transient and secondary loves, which may seem to come

between him and his great ideal pursuit and lure him away from it, are

really, when the truth is known, but encouragements to that pursuit,

visitations and condescensions to him of his celestial love in disguise.

The narrative setting forth this discovery is pitched in a key which,

following the triumphant close of the last book, seems curiously subdued

and melancholy. An opening apostrophe by the poet to the Muse of his

native land, long silent while Greece and Italy sang, but aroused in the

fulness of time to happy utterance, begins joyously enough, but ends on

no more confident note than this:--

Great Muse, thou know'st what prison

Of flesh and bone, curbs, and confines, and frets

Our spirit's wings: despondency besets

Our pillows; and the fresh to-morrow morn

Seems to give forth its light in very scorn

Of our dull, uninspir'd, snail-paced lives.

Long have I said, how happy he who shrives

To thee! But then I thought on poets gone,

And could not pray:--nor could I now--so on

I move to the end in lowliness of heart.--

Keats then tells how his hero, paying his vows to the gods, is

interrupted by the plaint of a forsaken Indian damsel which reaches him

through the forest undergrowth. (Such a damsel lying back on the grass

with her arms among her hair had dwelt, I think, in the poet's mind's

eye from pictures by or prints after Poussin ever since hospital and

early Hunt days, and had been haunting him when he scribbled his

attempted scrap of an Alexander romance in a fellow student's notebook).

Endymion listens and approaches: the poet foresees and deplores the

coming struggle between his hero's celestial love and this earthly

beauty disconsolate at his feet. The damsel, speaking to herself,

laments her loneliness, and tells how she could find it in her heart to

love this shepherd youth, and how love is lord of all. Endymion falls to

pitying and from pitying into loving her. Though without sense of

treachery to his divine mistress, he is torn by the contention within

him between this new earthly and his former heavenly flame. He goes on

to declare the struggle is killing him, and entreats the damsel to sing

him a song of India to ease his passing. Her song, telling of her

desolation before and after she was swept from home in the train of

Bacchus and his rout and again since she fell out of the march, is, in

spite of one or two unfortunate blemishes, among the most moving and

original achievements of English lyric poetry. Endymion is wholly

overcome, and in a speech of somewhat mawkish surrender gives himself to

the new earthly love, not blindly, but realizing fully what he forfeits.

He bids the damsel--

Do gently murder half my soul, and I

Shall feel the other half so utterly.

A cry of 'Woe to Endymion!' echoing through the forest has no sooner

alarmed the lovers than there is a sudden apparition of Mercury

descending. The gods intend for Endymion an unexpected issue from his

perplexities. Their messenger touches the ground with his wand and

vanishes: two raven-black winged horses rise through the ground where he

has touched,--the horses, no doubt, of the imagination, the same or of

the same breed as those 'steeds with streamy manes' that paw up against

the light and trample along the ridges of the clouds in _Sleep and

Poetry_. Endymion mounts the damsel on one and himself mounts the other:

they are borne aloft together,

--unseen, alone,

Among cool clouds and winds, but that the free,

The buoyant life of song, can floating be

Above their heads, and follow them untired.

The poet, seeming to realize that the most difficult part of his tale is

now to tell, again invokes the native Muse, and relates how the lovers,

couched on the wings of the raven steeds, enter on their flight a zone

of mists enfolding the couch of Sleep, who has been drawn from his cave

by the rumour of the coming nuptials of a goddess with a mortal. The

narrative is here very obscure, but seems to run thus. Alike the magic

steed and the lovers reclining on their wings yield to the influence of

sleep, but still drift on their aerial course. As they drift, Endymion

dreams that he has been admitted to Olympus. In his dream he drinks of

Hebe's cup, tries the bow of Apollo and the shield of Pallas; blows a

bugle which summons the Seasons and the Hours to a dance; asks whose

bugle it is and learns that it is Diana's; the next moment she is there

in presence; he springs to his now recognized goddess, and in the act he

awakes, and it is a case of Adam's dream having come true; he is aware

of Diana and the other celestials present bending over him. On the

horse-plume couch beside him lies the Indian maiden: the conflict

between his two loves is distractingly renewed within him, though some

instinct again tells him that he is not really untrue to either. He

embraces the Indian damsel as she sleeps; the goddess disappears; the

damsel awakes; he pleads with her, says that his other love is free from

all malice or revenge and that in his soul he feels true to both.

What is this soul then? Whence

Came it? It does not seem my own, and I

Have no self-passion nor identity.

This charge, be it noted, is one which Keats in his private thoughts was

constantly apt to bring against himself. Foreseeing disaster and the

danger of losing both his loves and being left solitary, Endymion

nevertheless rouses the steeds to a renewed ascent. He and the damsel

are borne towards the milky way, in a mystery of loving converse: the

crescent moon appears from a cloud, facing them: Endymion turns to the

damsel at his side and finds her gone gaunt and cold and ghostly: a

moment more and she is not there at all but vanished: her horse parts

company from his, towers, and falls to earth. He is left alone on his

further ascent, abandoned for the moment by both the objects of his

passion, the celestial and the human. His spirit enters into a region,

or phase, of involved and brooding misery and thence into one of

contented apathy: he is scarcely even startled, though his steed is, by

a flight of celestial beings blowing trumpets and proclaiming a coming

festival of Diana. In a choral song they invite the signs and

constellations to the festival: (the picture of the Borghese Zodiac in

Spence's _Polymetis_ has evidently given Keats his suggestion here).

Then suddenly Endymion hears no more and is aware that his courser has

in a moment swept him down to earth again.

He finds himself on a green hillside with the Indian maiden beside him,

and in a long impassioned protestation renounces his past dreams,

condemns his presumptuous neglect of human and earthly joys, and

declares his intention to live alone with her for ever and (not

forgetting to propitiate the Olympians) to shower upon her all the

treasures of the pastoral earth:--

O I have been

Presumptuous against love, against the sky,

Against all elements, against the tie

Of mortals each to each, against the blooms

Of flowers, rush of rivers, and the tombs

Of heroes gone! Against his proper glory

Has my own soul conspired: so my story

Will I to children utter, and repent.

There never liv'd a mortal man, who bent

His appetite beyond his natural sphere,

But starv'd and died. My sweetest Indian, here,

Here will I kneel, for thou redeemed hast

My life from too thin breathing: gone and past

Are cloudy phantasms. Caverns lone, farewell!

And air of visions, and the monstrous swell

Of visionary seas! No, never more

Shall airy voices cheat me to the shore

Of tangled wonder, breathless and aghast.

Here Keats spins and puts into the mouth of Endymion wooing the Indian

maiden a long, and in some at least of its verses exquisite, pastoral

fantasia recalling, and no doubt partly founded on, the famous passage

in Ovid, itself founded on one equally famous in Theocritus, where

Polyphemus woos the nymph Galatea.[11] Apparently, though it was through

sympathy with the human sorrow of the Indian damsel that Endymion has

first been caught, he proposes to enjoy her society now in detachment

from all other human ties as well as from all transcendental dreams and

ambitions.

But the damsel is aware of matters which prevent her from falling in

with her lover's desires. She puts him off, saying that she has always

loved him and longed and languished to be his, but that this joy is

forbidden her, or can only be compassed by the present death of both

(that is, to the mortal in love with the spirit of poetry and poetic

beauty no life of mere human and earthly contentment is possible); and

so she proposes to renounce him. Despondingly they wander off together

into the forest.

The poet pauses for an apostrophe to Endymion, confusedly expressed, but

vital to his whole meaning. His suffering hero, he says, had the tale

allowed, should have been enthroned in felicity before now (the word is

'ensky'd,' from _Measure for Measure_). In truth he has been so

enthroned for many thousand years (that is to say, the poetic spirit in

man has been wedded in full communion to the essential soul of Beauty

in the world): the poet, Keats himself, has had some help from him

already, and with his farther help hopes ere long to sing of his

'lute-voiced brother': that is Apollo, to whom Endymion is called

brother as being espoused to his sister Diana. This is the first

intimation of Keats's intention to write on the story of Hyperion's fall

and the advent of Apollo. But the present tale, signifies Keats, has not

yet got to that point, and must now be resumed.

Endymion rests beside the damsel in a part of the forest where every

tree and stream and slope might have reminded him of his boyish sports,

but his downcast eyes fail to recognize them. Peona appears; he dreads

their meeting, but without cause; interpreting things by their obvious

appearance she sweetly welcomes the stranger as the bride her brother

has brought home after his mysterious absence, and bids them both to a

festival the shepherds are to hold tonight in honour of Cynthia, in

whose aspect the soothsayers have read good omens. Still Endymion does

not brighten; Peona asks the stranger why, and craves her help with him;

Endymion with a great effort, 'twanging his soul like a spiritual bow',

says that after all he has gone through he must not partake in the

common and selfish pleasures of men, lest he should forfeit higher

pleasures and render himself incapable of the services for which he has

disciplined himself; that henceforth he must live as a hermit, visited

by none but his sister Peona. To her care he at the same time commends

the Indian lady: who consents to go with her, and remembering the

approaching festival of Diana says she will take part in it and

consecrate herself to that sisterhood and to chastity.

For a while they all three feel like people in sleep struggling with

oppressive dreams and making believe to think them every-day

experiences. Endymion tries to ease the strain by bidding them farewell.

They go off dizzily, he stares distressfully after them and at last

cries to them to meet him for a last time the same evening in the grove

behind Diana's temple. They disappear; he is left in sluggish desolation

till sunset, when he goes to keep his tryst at the temple, musing first

with bitterness, then with a resigned prescience of coming death (the

mood of the _Nightingale Ode_ appearing here in Keats's work for the

first time): then bitterly again:--

I did wed

Myself to things of light from infancy;

And thus to be cast out, thus lorn to die

Is sure enough to make a mortal man

Grow impious. So he inwardly began

On things for which no wording can be found;

Deeper and deeper sulking, until drown'd

Beyond the reach of music: for the choir

Of Cynthia he heard not, though rough briar

Nor muffling thicket interpos'd to dull

The vesper hymn, far swollen, soft and full,

Through the dark pillars of those sylvan aisles.

He saw not the two maidens, nor their smiles,

Wan as primroses gather'd at midnight

By chilly finger'd spring. 'Unhappy wight!

Endymion!' said Peona, 'we are here!

What wouldst thou ere we all are laid on bier?'

Then he embrac'd her, and his lady's hand

Press'd saying: 'Sister, I would have command,

If it were heaven's will, on our sad fate.'

At which that dark-eyed stranger stood elate

And said, in a new voice, but sweet as love,

To Endymion's amaze: 'By Cupid's dove,

And so thou shalt! and by the lily truth

Of my own breast thou shalt, beloved youth!'

And as she spake, into her face there came

Light, as reflected from a silver flame:

Her long black hair swell'd ampler, in display

Full golden; in her eyes a brighter day

Dawn'd blue and full of love. Aye, he beheld

Phoebe, his passion!

And so the quest is ended, and the mystery solved. _Vera incessu patuit

dea_: the forsaken Indian maiden had been but a disguised incarnation of

Cynthia herself. Endymion's earthly passion, born of human pity and

desire, was one all the while, had he but known it, with his heavenly

passion born of poetic aspiration and the soul's thirst for Beauty. The

two passions at their height and perfection are inseparable, and the

crowned poet and the crowned lover are one. But these things are still a

mystery to those who know not poetry, and when the happy lovers

disappear the kind ministering sister Peona can only marvel:--

Peona went

Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment.

The poem ends on no such note of joy and triumph over the attained

consummation as we might have expected and such as we found at the close

of the third book, at the point where the faculty and vision of the poet

had been happily enriched and completed by the gift of the learning and

beneficence of the sage. The fourth book closes, as it began, in a minor

key, leaving the reader, like Peona, in a mood rather musing than

rejoicing. Is this because Keats had tired of his task before he came to

the end, or because the low critical opinion of his own work which he

had been gradually forming took the heart out of him, so that as he drew

near the goal he involuntarily let his mind run on the hindrances and

misgivings which beset the poetic aspirant on his way to victory more

than on the victory itself? Or was it partly because of the numbing

influence of early winter as recorded in the last chapter? We cannot

tell.

But why take all this trouble, the reader may well have asked before

now, to follow the argument and track the wanderings of Endymion book by

book, when everyone knows that the poem is only admirable for its

incidental beauties and is neither read nor well readable for its story?

The answer is that the intricacy and obscurity of the narrative, taken

merely as a narrative, are such as to tire the patience of many readers

in their search for beautiful passages and to dull their enjoyment of

them when found; but once the inner and symbolic meanings of the poem

are recognized, even in gleams, their recognition gives it a quite new

hold upon the attention. And in order to trace these meanings and

disengage them with any clearness a fairly close examination and

detailed argument are necessary. It is not with simple matters of

personification, of the putting of initial capitals to abstract

qualities, that we have to deal, nor yet with any obvious and

deliberately thought-out allegory; still less is it with one purposely

made riddling and obscure; it is with a vital, subtly involved and

passionately tentative spiritual parable, the parable of the experiences

of the poetic soul in man seeking communion with the spirit of essential

Beauty in the world, invented and related, in the still uncertain dawn

of his powers, by one of the finest natural-born and intuitively gifted

poets who ever lived. This is a thing which stands almost alone in

literature, and however imperfectly executed is worth any closeness and

continuity of attention we can give it. Having now studied, to the best

of our power, the sources and scheme of the poem, with its symbolism and

inner meanings so far as they can with any confidence be traced, let us

pass to the consideration of its technical and poetical qualities and

its relation to the works of certain other poets and poems of Keats's

time.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In the old Grecian world, the Endymion myth, or rather an

Endymion myth, for like other myths it had divers forms, was rooted

deeply in the popular traditions both of Elis in the Peloponnese, and

of the Ionian cities about the Latmian gulf in Caria. The central

feature of the Carian legend was the nightly descent of the

moon-goddess Selene to kiss her lover, the shepherd prince Endymion,

where he lay spell-bound, by the grace of Zeus, in everlasting sleep

and everlasting youth on Mount Latmos. This legend was early

crystallized in a lyric poem of Sappho now lost, and thereafter

became part of the common heritage of Greek and Roman popular

mythology. The separate moon-goddess, Selene for the Greeks and Luna

for the Romans, got merged in course of time in the multiform

divinities of the Greek Artemis and the Roman Diana respectively; so

that in modern literatures derived from the Latin it is always of

Diana (or what is the same thing, of Cynthia or Phoebe) that the tale

is told. It is not given at length in any of our extant classical

writings, but only by way of allusion in some of the poets, as

Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Ovid, and in Cicero and some of

the late Greek prose-writers, as Lucian, Apollodorus, and Pausanias.

From these it passed at the Renaissance into the current European

stock of classical imagery and reference.

[2] In another place, Browne makes Endymion shut out from the favour

of Cynthia stand figuratively for Raleigh in disgrace with Elizabeth:

just as in Lyly's comedy the myth had been turned into an allegory of

contemporary court intrigue, with Elizabeth for Cynthia, Leicester

for Endymion, Tellus for Mary Queen of Scots, Eumenides for Sidney,

and so forth.

[3] _Endymion_, iii. 196-209.

[4] _Endymion_, ii. 569-572 and 908-916.

[5] _Metam._ i. 26-31, Englished thus by Sandys:--

Forthwith upsprung the quick and weightless Fire,

Whose flames unto the highest Arch aspire:

The next, in levity and peace, is Air:

Gross elements to thicker Earth repair

Self-clogg'd with weight: the Waters flowing round

Possess the last, and solid Tellus bound.

[6] Keats was more widely read in out-of-the-way French literature

than could have been expected from his opportunities, and there are

passages in _Endymion_ which run closely parallel to Gombauld's

romance, notably the first apparition of Cynthia, with the

description of her hair (_End._ i, 605-618), and the account of the

sudden distaste which afterwards seizes him for former pleasures and

companions. But these may be mere coincidences, and the whole series

of the hero's subsequent adventures according to Gombauld, his

dream-flight to the Caspian under the spell of the Thessalian

enchantress Ismene, and all the weird things that befall him there,

are entirely unlike anything that happens in Keats's poem.

[7] The authority for this story is the late Sir B. W. Richardson,

professing to quote verbatim as follows from Mr Stephens' own

statement to him in conversation.

'One evening in the twilight, the two students sitting together,

Stephens at his medical studies, Keats at his dreaming, Keats breaks

out to Stephens that he has composed a new line:--

A thing of beauty is a constant joy.

"What think you of that, Stephens?" "It has the true ring, but is

wanting in some way," replies the latter, as he dips once more into

his medical studies. An interval of silence, and again the poet:--

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

"What think you of that, Stephens?" "That it will live for ever."'

The conversation as thus related at second hand reads certainly as

though it had been more or less dressed up for effect, but we cannot

suppose the circumstance to have been wholly invented. A careful

reading of the first twenty-four lines of _Endymion_ will show that

they have close affinities with much both in _Sleep and Poetry_ and

'_I stood tip-toe_' in thought as well as style, and especially in

their manner of bringing together, by reason of the common property

of beauty, things otherwise so unlike as the cloak of weeds which

rivulets are conceived as making to keep themselves cool in

summertime (compare '_I stood tip-toe_' II. 80-84) musk-roses in a

woodland brake (compare _Sleep and Poetry_ I. 5), the life of great

spirits after death, and beautiful stories in general. My own

inference is that Keats, having written these two dozen lines some

time in 1816, used them the next spring as a suitable exordium for

_Endymion_, and added the following lines, 25-33, as a (somewhat

clumsy) transition to the actual beginning of the poem 'Therefore

with full happiness,' etc., as written at Carisbrooke.

[8] There is a certain, though slight enough, resemblance between

some of these underground incidents and those which happen in a

romance of travel, which Keats may very well have read, the _Voyage

d'Antenor_, then popular both in France and in an English

translation. Antenor is permitted by the Egyptian priests to pass

through the triple ordeal by fire, water, and air contrived by them

in the vast subterranean vaults under the temple of Osiris. The

points of most resemblance are the suspended guiding light seen from

within the entrance, the rushing of the water streams, and the ascent

by a path between balustrades. The _Voyage d'Antenor_ was itself

founded on an earlier and much rarer French romance, _Sethos_, and

both were freely and avowedly imitated by Thomas Moore in his prose

tale, the _Epicurean_ (1827). Mr Robert Bridges has noticed a point

in common between _Endymion_ and the _Epicurean_ in the sudden

breaking off or crumbling away of the balustrade under the wayfarer's

feet. This does not occur in _Sethos_ or _Antenor_, and was probably

borrowed by Moore from Keats.

[9] How familiar, both with the text and the translator's commentary,

is proved by his adopting as his own, almost literally, a phrase

which Sandys brings in by way of illustrative comment from the

_Imagines_ (a description of an imaginary picture-gallery) of

Philostratus. Philostratus, coming to a picture of Glaucus, tells how

the painter had given him 'thick and arched eyebrows which touched

one another.' Keats writes,--

his snow-white brows

_Went arching up_, and like two magic ploughs

Furrowed deep wrinkles in his forehead large.

It was the look and expression of Keats in reciting this same phrase,

the reader will remember, which so struck Bailey that he found

himself vividly recalling it thirty years later (see above, p. 144).

[10] Mr Mackail sees in this shell and its secret characters a

reminiscence of the mystic shell, which is also a book, carried in

the right hand of the sheikh who is also Don Quixote in the dream

narrated by Wordsworth in the third book of _The Prelude_. I owe so

very much of the interpretation above attempted to Mr Mackail that I

am bound to record his opinion: but as I shall show later (p. 251),

it is scarcely possible that any passages from _The Prelude_ should

have come to Keats's knowledge until after _Endymion_ was finished.

[11] Ovid, _Metam._ xiii, 810-840; Theocr. _Idyll_. xi, 30 _sqq._

CHAPTER VII

_ENDYMION._--II. THE POETRY: ITS QUALITIES AND AFFINITIES

Revival of Elizabethan usages--Avoidance of closed couplets--True

metrical instincts--An example--Rime too much his master--Lax use of

words--Flaws of taste and training--Faults and beauties

inseparable--Homage to the moon--A parallel from Drayton--Examples of

nature-poetry--Nature and the Greek spirit--Greek mythology

revitalized--Its previous deadness--Poetry of love and war--Dramatic

promise--Comparison with models--Sandys's _Ovid--Hymn to Pan_:

Chapman--Ben Jonson--The hymn in _Endymion_--'A pretty piece of

paganism'--Song of the Indian maiden--The triumph of Bacchus--A

composite: its sources--English scenery and detail--Influence of

Wordsworth--Influence of Shelley--_Endymion_ and

_Alastor_--Correspondences and contrasts--_Hymn to Intellectual

Beauty_--Shelley on _Endymion_--Keats and Clarence's dream--Shelley a

borrower--Shelley and the rimed couplet.

Throughout the four books of _Endymion_ we find Keats still working,

more even than in his epistles and meditations of the year before, under

the spell of Elizabethan and early Jacobean poetry. Spenser and the

Spenserians, foremost among them William Browne; Drayton in his

pastorals and elegies; Shakespeare, especially in his early poems and

comedies; Fletcher and Ben Jonson in pastoral and lyrical work like _The

Faithful Shepherdess_ or _The Sad Shepherd_; Chapman's version of Homer,

especially the _Odyssey_ and the _Hymns_, and Sandys's of the

_Metamorphoses_ of Ovid; these are the masters and the models of whom we

feel his mind and ear to be full. In their day the English language had

been to a large extent unfixed, and in their instinctive efforts to

enrich and expand and supple it, poets had enjoyed a wide range of

freedom both in maintaining old and in experimenting with new usages.

Many of the liberties they used were renounced by the differently minded

age which followed them, and the period from the Restoration, roughly

speaking, to the middle years of George III had in matters of literary

form and style been one of steadily tightening restriction and

convention. Then ensued the period of expansion, in which Wordsworth and

Coleridge and Scott had been the most conspicuous leaders, each after

his manner, in reconquering the freedom of poetry. Other innovators had

followed suit, including Leigh Hunt in that slippered, sentimental,

Italianate fashion of his own. And now came young Keats, not following

closely along the paths opened by any of these, though closer to Leigh

Hunt than to the others, but making a deliberate return to certain

definite and long abandoned usages of the English poets during the

illustrious half century from 1590-1640. He chose the heroic couplet,

and in handling it reversed the settled practice of more than a century.

He was even more sedulous than any of his Elizabethan or Jacobean

masters to achieve variety of pause and movement by avoiding the regular

beat of the closed couplet; while in framing his style he did not

scruple to revive all or nearly all those licences of theirs which the

intervening age had disallowed. There was a special rashness in his

attempt considering the slightness of his own critical equipment, and

considering also the strength of the long riveted fetters which he

undertook to break and the charges of affectation and impertinence which

such a revival of obsolete metrical and verbal usages--the marks of what

Pope had denounced as 'our rustic vein And splay-foot verse'--was bound

to bring against him.

First of his revolutionary treatment of the metre. He no longer uses

double or feminine endings, as in his epistles of the year before, with

a profusion like that of _Britannia's Pastorals_. They occur, but in

moderation, hardly more than a score of them in any one of the four

books. At the beginning he tries often, but afterwards gives up, an

occasional trick of the Elizabethan and earlier poets in riming on the

unstressed second syllables of words such as 'dancing' (rimed with

'string'), 'elbow' (with 'slow'), 'velvet' (with 'set'), 'purplish'

(with 'fish'). On the other hand he regularly resolves the 'tion' or

'shion' termination into its full two syllables, the last carrying the

rime, as--'With speed of five-tailed exhalations:' 'Before the deep

intoxication;' 'Vanish'd in elemental passion;' and the like. He admits

closed couplets, but very grudgingly, as a general rule in the

proportion of not more than one to eight or ten of the unclosed. He

seldom allows himself even so much of a continuous run of them as

this:--

Moreover, through the dancing poppies stole

A breeze most softly lulling to my soul;

And shaping visions all about my sight

Of colours, wings, and bursts of spangly light;

The which became more strange, and strange, and dim,

And then were gulph'd in a tumultuous swim:

Or this:--

So in that crystal place, in silent rows,

Poor lovers lay at rest from joys and woes.--

The stranger from the mountains, breathless, trac'd

Such thousands of shut eyes in order plac'd;

Such ranges of white feet, and patient lips

All ruddy,--for here death no blossom nips.

He mark'd their brows and foreheads; saw their hair

Put sleekly on one side with nicest care.

The essential principle of his versification is to let sentences,

prolonged and articulated as freely and naturally as in prose, wind

their way in and out among the rimes, the full pause often splitting a

couplet by falling at the end of the first line, and oftener still (in

the proportion of two or three times to one) breaking up a single line

in the middle or at any point of its course. Sense and sound flow

habitually over from one couplet to the next without logical or

grammatical pause, but to keep the sense of metre present to the ear

Keats commonly takes care that the second line of a couplet shall end

with a fully stressed rime-word such as not only allows, but actually

invites, at least a momentary breathing-pause to follow it. It is only

in the rarest cases that he compels the breath to hurry on with no

chance of stress or after-rest from a light preposition at the end of a

line to its object at the beginning of the next ('on | His left,' 'upon

| A dreary morning'), or from an auxiliary to its verb ('as might be |

Remembered') or from a comparative particle to the thing compared

('sleeker than | Night-swollen mushrooms'); a practice in which Chapman,

Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and their contemporaries indulged, as we have

seen, freely, and which afterwards developed into a fatal disease of the

metre. Keats's musical and metrical instincts were too fine, and his ear

too early trained in the 'sweet-slipping' movement of Spenser, to let

him fall often into this fault. To the other besetting fault of some of

these masters, that of a harsh and jolting ruggedness, he was still less

prone. Although he chooses to forgo that special effect of combined

vigour and smoothness proper to the closed couplet, he always knows how

to make a rich and varied music with his vowel sounds; while the same

fine natural instinct for sentence-structure as distinguishes the prose

of his letters makes itself felt in his verse, so that wherever he has

need to place a full stop he can make his sentence descend upon it

smoothly and skimmingly, like a seabird on the sea.[1] The long passage

quoted from Book III in the last chapter illustrates the narrative verse

of _Endymion_ in nearly all its moods and variations. Here is a

characteristic example of its spoken or dramatic verse. Endymion

supplicates his goddess from underground:--

O Haunter chaste

Of river sides, and woods, and heathy waste,

Where with thy silver bow and arrows keen

Art thou now forested? O Woodland Queen,

What smoothest air thy smoother forehead woos?

Where dost thou listen to the wide halloos

Of thy disparted nymphs? Through what dark tree

Glimmers thy crescent? Wheresoe'er it be,

'Tis in the breath of heaven: thou dost taste

Freedom as none can taste it, nor dost waste

Thy loveliness in dismal elements;

But, finding in our green earth sweet contents,

There livest blissfully. Ah, if to thee

It feels Elysian, how rich to me,

An exil'd mortal, sounds its pleasant name!

Within my breast there lives a choking flame--

O let me cool't the zephyr-boughs among!

A homeward fever parches up my tongue--

O let me slake it at the running springs!

Upon my ear a noisy nothing rings--

O let me once more hear the linnet's note!

Before mine eyes thick films and shadows float--

O let me 'noint them with the heaven's light!

Dost thou now lave thy feet and ankles white?

O think how sweet to me the freshening sluice!

Dost thou now please thy thirst with berry-juice?

O think how this dry palate would rejoice!

If in soft slumber thou dost hear my voice,

O think how I should love a bed of flowers!--

The first fifteen lines of the above are broken and varied much in

Keats's usual way: in the following fourteen it is to be noted how he

throws the speaker's alternate complaints of his predicament and prayers

for release from it not into twinned but into split or parted couplets,

making each prayer rime not with the complaint which calls it forth but

with the new complaint which is to follow it: a bold and to my ear a

happy sacrifice of obvious rhetorical effect to his predilection for the

suspended or delayed rime-echo.

Rime is to some poets a stiff and grudging but to others an officious

servant, over-active in offering suggestions to the mind; and no poet is

rightly a master until he has learnt how to sift those suggestions,

rejecting many and accepting only the fittest. Keats in _Endymion_ has

not reached nor come near reaching this mastery: in the flush and

eagerness of composition he is content to catch at almost any and every

suggestion of the rime, no matter how far-fetched and irrelevant. He had

a great fore-runner in this fault in Chapman, who constantly, especially

in the _Iliad_, wrenches into his text for the rime's sake ideas that

have no kind of business there. Take the passage justly criticized by

Bailey at the beginning of the third Book:--

There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men

With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen

Their baaing vanities, to browse away

The comfortable green and juicy hay

From human pastures; or, O torturing fact!

Who, through an idiot blink, will see unpack'd

Fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe

Our gold and ripe-ear'd hopes. With not one tinge

Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight

Able to face an owl's, they still are dight

By the blear-ey'd nations in empurpled vests,

And crowns, and turbans.

Here it is obviously the need of a rime to 'men' that has suggested the

word 'unpen' and the clumsy imagery of the 'baaing sheep' which follows,

while the inappropriate and almost meaningless 'tinge of sanctuary

splendour' lower down has been imported for the sake of the foxes with

fire-brands tied to their tails which 'singe' the metaphorical

corn-sheaves (they come from the story of Samson in the Book of Judges).

Milder cases abound, as this of Circe tormenting her victims:--

appealing groans

From their poor breasts went sueing to her ear

In vain; _remorseless as an infant's bier_

She whisk'd against their eyes the sooty oil.

Does yonder thrush,

Schooling its half-fledg'd little ones to brush

About the dewy forest, whisper tales.

Speak not of grief, young stranger, or _cold snails

Will slime the rose to-night_.

He rose: he grasp'd his stole,

With convuls'd clenches waving it abroad,

And in a voice of solemn joy, _that aw'd

Echo into oblivion_, he said:--

Yet hourly had he striven

To hide the cankering venom, that had _riven_

His fainting recollections.

The wanderer

Holding his forehead to keep off the _burr_

Of smothering fancies.

Endymion! the cave is secreter

Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall _stir_

No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise

Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling _cloys_

And trembles through my labyrinthine hair.

In some of these cases the trouble is, not that the rime drags in a

train of far-fetched or intrusive ideas, but only that words are used

for the rime's sake in inexact and inappropriate senses. Such laxity in

the employment of words is one of the great weaknesses of Keats's style

in _Endymion_, and is no doubt partly connected with his general

disposition to treat language as though it were as free and fluid in his

own day as it had been two hundred years earlier. The same disposition

makes him reckless in turning verbs into nouns (a 'complain,' an

'exclaim,' a 'shine,' a 'pierce,' a 'quell') and nouns into verbs (to

'throe,' to 'passion,' to 'monitor,' to 'fragment up'); in using at his

convenience active verbs as passive and passive verbs as active; and in

not only reviving archaic participial forms ('dight,' 'fight,' 'raft,'

etc.) but in giving currency to participles of the class Coleridge

denounced as demoralizing to the ear, and as hybrids equivocally

generated of noun-substantives ('emblem'd,' 'gordian'd,' 'mountain'd,'

'phantasy'd'), as well as to adjectives borrowed from Elizabethan use or

new-minted more or less in accordance with it ('pipy,' 'paly,' 'ripply,'

'sluicy,' 'slumbery,' 'towery,' 'bowery,' 'orby,' 'nervy,' 'surgy,'

'sparry,' 'spangly).' It was these and such like technical liberties

with language which scandalized conservative critics, and caused even De

Quincey, becoming tardily acquainted with Keats's work, to dislike and

utterly under-rate it. He himself came before long to condemn the style

of 'the slipshod Endymion.' Nevertheless the consequence of his

experiments in reviving or imitating the usages of the great Renaissance

age of English poetry is only in part to be regretted. His rashness led

him into almost as many felicities as faults, and the examples of the

happier liberties in _Endymion_ has done much towards enriching the

vocabulary and diction of English poetry in the nineteenth century.

Other faults that more gravely mar the poem are not technical but

spiritual: intimate failures of taste and feeling due partly to mere

rawness and inexperience, partly to excessive intensity and

susceptibility of temperament, partly to second-rateness of social

training and association. A habit of cloying over-luxuriance in

description, the giving way to a sort of swooning abandonment of the

senses in contact with the 'deliciousness' of things, is the most

besetting of such faults. Allied with it is Keats's treatment of love as

an actuality, which in this poem is in unfortunate and distasteful

contrast with his high conception of love in the abstract as the

inspiring and ennobling power of the world and all things in it. Add the

propensity to make Glaucus address Scylla as 'timid thing!' and

Endymion beg for 'one gentle squeeze' from his Indian maiden, with many

a like turn in the simpering, familiar mood which Keats at this time had

caught from or naturally shared with Leigh Hunt. It should, however, be

noted as a mark of progress in self-criticism that, comparing the drafts

of the poem with the printed text, we find that in revising it for press

he had turned out more and worse passages in this vein than he left in.

From flaws or disfigurements of one or other of these kinds the poem is

never free for more than a page or two, and rarely for so much, at a

time. But granting all weaknesses and immaturities whether of form or

spirit, what a power of poetry is in _Endymion_: what evidence,

unmistakeable, one would have said, to the blindest, of genius. Did any

poet in his twenty-second year ever write with so prodigal an activity

of invention, however undisciplined and unbraced, or with an imagination

so penetrating to divine and so swift to evoke beauty? Were so many

faults and failures ever interspersed with felicities of married sound

and sense so frequent and absolute, and only to be matched in the work

of the ripest masters? Lost as the reader may often feel himself among

the phantasmagoric intricacies of the tale, cloyed by its amatory

insipidities, bewildered by the redundancies of an invention stimulated

into over-activity by any and every chance feather-touch of association

or rime-suggestion, he can afford to be patient in the certainty of

coming, from one page to another, upon touches of true and fresh

inspiration in almost every strain and mode of poetry. Often the

inspired poet and the raw cockney rimester come inseparably coupled in

the limit of half a dozen lines, as thus in the narrative of Glaucus:--

Upon a dead thing's face my hand I laid;

I look'd--'twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe!

O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?

Could not thy harshest vengeance be content,

But thou must nip this tender innocent

Because I loved her?--_Cold, O cold indeed

Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed

The sea-swell took her hair._

or thus from the love-making of Cynthia:--

Now I swear at once

That I am wise, that Pallas is a dunce--

Perhaps her love like mine is but unknown--

O I do think that I have been alone

In chastity: yes, Pallas has been sighing,

_While every eve saw me my hair uptying,

With fingers cool as aspen leaves_.

In like manner the unfortunate opening of Book III above cited leads on,

as Mr de Selincourt has justly observed, to a passage in praise of the

moon which is among the very finest and best sustained examples of

Keats's power in nature-poetry. For quotation I will take not this but a

second invocation to the moon which follows a little later, for the

reason that in it the raptures and longings which the poet puts into the

mouth of his hero are really in a large measure his own:--

What is there in thee, Moon! that thou shouldst move

My heart so potently? When yet a child

I oft have dry'd my tears when thou hast smil'd.

Thou seem'dst my sister: hand in hand we went

From eve to morn across the firmament.

No apples would I gather from the tree,

Till thou hadst cool'd their cheeks deliciously:

No tumbling water ever spake romance,

But when my eyes with thine thereon could dance:

No woods were green enough, no bower divine,

Until thou liftedst up thine eyelids fine:

In sowing time ne'er would I dibble take,

Or drop a seed, till thou wast wide awake;

And, in the summer tide of blossoming,

No one but thee hath heard me blythly sing

And mesh my dewy flowers all the night.

No melody was like a passing spright

If it went not to solemnize thy reign.

Yes, in my boyhood every joy and pain

By thee were fashioned in the self-same end;

And as I grew in years, still didst thou blend

With all my ardours: thou wast the deep glen;

Thou wast the mountain-top--the sage's pen--

The poet's harp--the voice of friends--the sun;

Thou wast the river--thou wast glory won;

Thou wast my clarion's blast--thou wast my steed--

My goblet full of wine--my topmost deed:--

Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!

O what a wild and harmonized tune

My spirit struck from all the beautiful!

In the last two lines of the above Keats gives us the essential master

key to his own poetic nature and being. The eight preceding, from 'As I

grew in years' offer in their rhetorical form a curious parallel with a

passage of similar purport in Drayton's _Endimion and Phoebe_:--

Be kind (quoth he) sweet Nymph unto thy lover,

My soul's sole essence and my senses' mover,

Life of my life, pure Image of my heart,

Impression of Conceit, Invention, Art.

My vital spirit receives his spirit from thee,

Thou art that all which ruleth all in me,

Thou art the sap and life whereby I live,

Which powerful vigour doth receive and give.

Thou nourishest the flame wherein I burn,

The North whereto my heart's true touch doth turn.

Was Keats, then, after all familiar with the rare volume in which alone

Drayton's early poem had been printed, or does the similar turn of the

two passages spring from some innate affinity between the two poets,--or

perhaps merely from the natural suggestion of the theme?

In nature-poetry, and especially in that mode of it in which the poet

goes out with his whole being into nature and loses his identity in

delighted sympathy with her doings, Keats already shows himself a master

scarcely excelled. Take the lines near the beginning which tell of the

'silent workings of the dawn' on the morning of Pan's festival:--

Rain-scented eglantine

Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun;

The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run

To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass;

Man's voice was on the mountains; and the mass

Of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold,

To feel this sun-rise and its glories old.

The freshness and music and felicity of the first two lines are nothing

less than Shakespearean: in the rest note with how true an instinct the

poet evokes the operant magic and living activities of the dawn, single

instances first and then in a sudden outburst the sum and volume of them

all: how he avoids word-painting and palette-work, leaving all merely

visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and forms, as they

should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry alone is able to

deal, with those delights which are felt and divined rather than seen,

delights which the poet instinctively attributes to nature as though she

were as sentient as himself. It is like Keats here so to place and lead

up to the word 'old' as to make it pregnant with all the meanings which

it bore to him: that is with all the wonder and romance of ancient

Greece, and at the same time with a sense of awe, like that expressed in

the opening chorus of Goethe's _Faust_, at nature's eternal miracle of

the sun still rising 'glorious as on creation's day.'

It is interesting to note how above all other nature-images Keats, whose

blood, when his faculties were at their highest tension, was always apt

to be heated even to fever-point, prefers those of nature's coolness and

refreshment. Here are two or three out of a score of instances. Endymion

tells how he had been gazing at the face of his unknown love smiling at

him from the well:--

I started up, when lo! refreshfully,

There came upon my face in plenteous showers

Dew-drops, and dewy buds, and leaves, and flowers,

Wrapping all objects from my smothered sight,

Bathing my spirit in a new delight.

Coming to a place where a brook issues from a cave, he says to himself--

'Tis the grot

Of Proserpine, when Hell, obscure and hot,

Doth her resign; and where her tender hands

She dabbles on the cool and sluicy sands:

A little later, and

Now he is sitting by a shady spring,

And elbow-deep with feverous fingering,

Stems the upbursting cold.

For many passages where the magic of nature is mingled instinctively and

inseparably with the magic of Greek mythology, the prayer of Endymion to

Cynthia above quoted (p. 210) may serve as a sample: and all readers of

poetry know the famous lines where the beautiful evocation of a natural

scene melts into one, more beautiful still, of a scene of ancient life

and worship which comes floated upon the poet's inner vision by an

imagined strain of music from across the sea:--

It seem'd he flew, the way so easy was;

And like a new-born spirit did he pass

Through the green evening quiet in the sun,

O'er many a heath, through many a woodland dun,

Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams

The summer time away. One track unseams

A wooded cleft, and, far away, the blue

Of ocean fades upon him; then, anew,

He sinks adown a solitary glen,

Where there was never sound of mortal men,

Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences

Melting to silence, when upon the breeze

Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet,

To cheer itself to Delphi.[2]

Often in thus conjuring up visions of the classic past, Keats effects

true master strokes of imaginative concentration. Do we not feel half

the romance of the _Odyssey_, with the spell that is in the sound of the

vowelled place-names of Grecian story, and the breathing mystery of

moonlight falling on magic islands of the sea, distilled into the one

line--

Aeaea's isle was wondering at the moon?

And again in the pair of lines--

Like old Deucalion mountain'd o'er the flood

Or blind Orion hungry for the morn,

do not the two figures evoked rise before us full-charged each with the

vital significance of his story? Mr de Selincourt is no doubt right in

suggesting that in the Orion line Keats's vision has been stimulated by

the print from that picture of Poussin's which Hazlitt has described in

so rich a strain of eulogy.

One of the great symptoms of returning vitality in the imagination of

Europe, as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth, was its

re-awakening to the significance and beauty of the Greek mythology. For

a hundred years and more the value of that mythology for the human

spirit had been forgotten. There never had been a time when the names of

the ancient, especially the Roman, gods and goddesses were used so often

in poetry, but simply in cold obedience to tradition and convention;

merely as part of the accepted mode of speech of persons classically

educated, and with no more living significance than belonged to the

trick of personifying abstract forces and ideas by putting capital

initials to their names. So far as concerned any real effect upon men's

minds, it was tacitly understood and accepted that the Greek mythology

was 'dead.' As if it could ever die; as if the 'fair humanities of old

religion,' in passing out of the transitory state of things believed

into the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had

not put on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first.

Faiths, as faiths, perish one after another; but each in passing away

bequeaths for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has

contained of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. The polytheism of

ancient Greece, embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest

gifted human race to explain its earliest experiences of nature and

civilization, of the thousand moral and material forces, cruel or

kindly, which environ and control the life of man on earth, is rich

beyond measure in such elements; and if the modern world at any time

fails to value them, it is the modern mind which is in so far dead and

not they. Some words of Johnson's written forty years before Keats's

time may help us to realize the full depth of the deadness from which in

this respect it had to be awakened:--

He (Waller) borrows too many of his sentiments and illustrations from

the old Mythology, for which it is in vain to plead the example of

ancient poets: the deities, which they introduced so frequently, were

considered as realities, so far as to be received by the imagination,

whatever sober reason might even then determine. But of these images

time has tarnished the splendour. A fiction, not only detected but

despised, can never afford a solid basis to any position, though

sometimes it may furnish a transient allusion, or slight illustration.

To rescue men's minds from this mode of deadness was part of the work of

the English poetical revival of 1800 and onwards, and Keats was the poet

who has contributed most to the task. Wordsworth could understand and

expound the spirit of Grecian myths, and on occasion, as in his cry for

a sight of Proteus and a sound of old Triton's horn, could for a moment

hanker after its revival. Shelley could feel and write of Apollo and Pan

and Proserpine, of Alpheus and Arethusa, with ardent delight and lyric

emotion. But it was the gift of Keats to make live by imagination,

whether in few words or many, every ancient fable that came up in his

mind. The couple of lines telling of the song with which Peona tries to

soothe her brother's pining are a perfect example alike of appropriate

verbal music and of imagination following out a classic myth, that of

the birth and nurture of Pan, from a mere hint to its recesses and

finding the human beauty and tenderness that lurk there:--

'Twas a lay

More subtle cadenced, more forest wild

Than Dryope's lone lulling of her child:

Even in setting before us so trite a personification as the god of love,

Keats manages to escape the traditional and the merely decorative, and

to endow him with a new and subtle vitality--

awfully he stands;

A sovereign quell is in his waving hands;

No sight can bear the lightning of his bow;

His quiver is mysterious, none can know

What themselves think of it; from forth his eyes

There darts strange light of varied hues and dyes:

A scowl is sometimes on his brow, but who

Look full upon it feel anon the blue

Of his fair eyes run liquid through their souls.

Keats in one place defines his purpose in his poem, if only he can find

strength to carry it out, as a

striving to uprear

Love's standard on the battlements of song.

His actual love scenes, as we have said, are the weakest, his ideal

invocations to and celebrations of love among the strongest, things in

the poem. One of these, already quoted, comes near the end of the first

book: the second book opens with another: in the third book the incident

of the moonlight spangling the surface of the sea and penetrating thence

to the under-sea caverns where Endymion lies languishing is used to

point an essential moral of the narrative:--

O love! how potent hast thou been to teach

Strange journeyings! Wherever beauty dwells,

In gulph or aerie, mountains or deep dells,

In light, in gloom, in star or blazing sun,

Thou pointest out the way, and straight 'tis won.

When the poet interrupts for a passing moment his tale of the might and

mysteries of love, celestial or human, and turns to images of war, we

find, him able to condense the whole tragedy of the sack of Troy into

three potent lines,--

The woes of Troy, towers smothering o'er their blaze,

Stiff-holden shields, far-piercing spears, keen blades,

Struggling, and blood, and shrieks.

From a passage like the following any reasonably sympathetic reader of

Keats's day, running through the poem to find what manner and variety of

promise it might contain, should have augured well of another kind of

power, the dramatic and ironic, to be developed in due time. The speaker

is the detected witch Circe uttering the doom of her revolted lover

Glaucus:--

'Ha! ha! Sir Dainty! there must be a nurse

Made of rose leaves and thistledown, express,

To cradle thee, my sweet, and lull thee: yes,

I am too flinty-hard for thy nice touch:

My tenderest squeeze is but a giant's clutch.

So, fairy-thing, it shall have lullabies

Unheard of yet: and it shall still its cries

Upon some breast more lily-feminine.

Oh, no--it shall not pine, and pine, and pine

More than one pretty, trifling thousand years.

... Mark me! Thou hast thews

Immortal, for thou art of heavenly race:

But such a love is mine, that here I chase

Eternally away from thee all bloom

Of youth, and destine thee towards a tomb.

Hence shalt thou quickly to the watery vast;

And there, ere many days be overpast,

Disabled age shall seize thee: and even then

Thou shalt not go the way of aged men;

But live and wither, cripple and still breathe

Ten hundred years: which gone, I then bequeath

Thy fragile bones to unknown burial.

Adieu, sweet love, adieu!'

A vein very characteristic of Keats at this stage of his mind's growth

is that of figurative confession or self-revelation. Many passages in

_Endymion_ give poetical expression to the same alternating moods of

ambition and humility, of exhilaration, depression, or apathy, which he

confides to his friends in his letters. One of the most striking and

original of these pieces of figurative psychology studied from his own

moods is the description of the Cave of Quietude in Book IV:--

There lies a den,

Beyond the seeming confines of the space

Made for the soul to wander in and trace

Its own existence, of remotest glooms.

Dark regions are around it, where the tombs

Of buried griefs the spirit sees, but scarce

One hour doth linger weeping, for the pierce

Of new-born woe it feels more inly smart:

And in these regions many a venom'd dart

At random flies; they are the proper home

Of every ill: the man is yet to come

Who hath not journeyed in this native hell.

But few have ever felt how calm and well

Sleep may be had in that deep den of all.

There anguish does not sting; nor pleasure pall:

Woe-hurricanes beat ever at the gate,

Yet all is still within and desolate.

... Enter none

Who strive therefore: on the sudden it is won.

To the student of _Endymion_ there are few things more interesting than

to observe Keats's technical and spiritual relations to his Elizabethan

models in those places where he has one or another of them manifestly in

remembrance. Here is the passage in Sandys's _Ovid_ which tells how

Cybele, the Earth-Mother, punished the pair of lovers Hippomenes and

Atalanta for the pollution of her sanctuary by turning them into lions

and yoking them to her car:--

The Mother, crown'd

With towers, had struck them to the Stygian sound,

But that she thought that punishment too small.

When yellow manes on their smooth shoulders fall;

Their arms, to legs; their fingers turn to nails;

Their breasts of wondrous strength: their tufted tails

Whisk up the dust; their looks are full of dread;

For speech they roar: the woods become their bed.

These Lions, fear'd by others, Cybel checks

With curbing bits, and yokes their stubborn necks.

This is a typical example of Ovid's brilliantly clever, quite

unromantic, unsurprised, and as it were unblinking way of detailing the

marvels of an act of transformation. Keats's recollection of it--and

probably also of a certain engraving after a Roman altar-relief of

Cybele and her yoked lions--inspires a vision of intense imaginative

life expressed in verse of a noble solemnity and sonority:--

Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below,

Came mother Cybele! alone--alone--

In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown

About her majesty, and front death-pale,

With turrets crown'd. Four maned lions hale

The sluggish wheels; solemn their toothed maws,

Their surly eyes brow-hidden, heavy paws

Uplifted drowsily, and nervy tails

Cowering their tawny brushes. Silent sails

This shadowy queen athwart, and faints away

In another gloomy arch.

The four lions instead of two must be a whim of Keats's imagination, and

finds no authority either from Ovid or from ancient sculpture. Should

any reader wish to pursue farther the comparison between Ovid in the

_Metamorphoses_ and Keats in _Endymion_, let him turn to the passage of

Ovid where Polyphemus tells Galatea what rustic treasures he will lavish

upon her if she will be his,--the same passage from which is derived the

famous song in Handel's _Acis and Galatea_: let him turn to this and

compare it with the list of similar delights offered by Endymion to the

Indian maiden when he is bent on forgoing his dreams of a celestial

union for her sake, and he will see how they are dematerialized and

refined yet at the same time made richer in colour and enchantment.

But let us for our purpose rather take, as illustrating the relations of

Keats to his classic and Elizabethan sources, two of the incidental

lyrics in his poem. There are four such lyrics in _Endymion_ altogether.

Two of them are of small account,--the hymn to Neptune and Venus at the

end of the third book, and the song of the Constellations in the middle

of the fourth. The other two, the hymn to Pan in Book I and the song of

the Indian maiden in Book IV, are among Keats's very finest

achievements. The hymn to Pan is especially interesting in comparison

with two of Keats's Elizabethan sources, Chapman's translation of the

Homeric hymn and Ben Jonson's original hymns in his masque of _Pan's

Anniversary_. Here is part of the Homeric hymn according to Chapman:--

Sing, Muse, this chief of Hermes' love-got joys,

Goat-footed, two-horn'd, amorous of noise,

That through the fair greens, all adorn'd with trees,

Together goes with Nymphs, whose nimble knees

Can every dance foot, that affect to scale

The most inaccessible tops of all

Uprightest rocks, and ever use to call

On Pan, the bright-haired God of pastoral;

Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe

By lot all loftiest mountains crown'd with snow;

All tops of hills, and cliffy highnesses,

All sylvan copses, and the fortresses

Of thorniest queaches here and there doth rove,

And sometimes, by allurement of his love,

Will wade the wat'ry softnesses. Sometimes

(In quite oppos'd _capriccios_) he climbs

The hardest rocks, and highest, every way

Running their ridges. Often will convey

Himself up to a watch-tow'r's top, where sheep

Have their observance. Oft through hills as steep

His goats he runs upon, and never rests.

Then turns he head, and flies on savage beasts,

Mad of their slaughters...

(When Hesp'rus calls to fold the flocks of men)

From the green closets of his loftiest reeds

He rushes forth, and joy with song he feeds.

When, under shadow of their motions set,

He plays a verse forth so profoundly sweet,

As not the bird that in the flow'ry spring,

Amidst the leaves set, makes the thickets ring

Of her sour sorrows, sweeten'd with her song,

Runs her divisions varied so and strong.

And here are two of the most characteristic strophes from Ben Jonson's

hymns:--

Pan is our all, by him we breathe, we live,

We move, we are; 'tis he our lambs doth rear,

Our flocks doth bless, and from the store doth give

The warm and finer fleeces that we wear.

He keeps away all heats and colds,

Drives all diseases from our folds:

Makes every where the spring to dwell,

The ewes to feed, their udders swell;

But if he frown, the sheep (alas)

The shepherds wither, and the grass.

Strive, strive to please him then by still increasing thus

The rites are due to him, who doth all right for us.

* * * * *

Great Pan, the father of our peace and pleasure,

Who giv'st us all this leisure,

Hear what thy hallowed troop of herdsmen pray

For this their holy-day,

And how their vows to thee they in Lycaeum pay.

So may our ewes receive the mounting rams,

And we bring thee the earliest of our lambs:

So may the first of all our fells be thine,

And both the breastning of our goats and kine.

As thou our folds dost still secure,

And keep'st our fountains sweet and pure,

Driv'st hence the wolf, the tod, the brock,

Or other vermin from the flock.

That we preserv'd by thee, and thou observ'd by us,

May both live safe in shade of thy lov'd Maenalus.

Comparing these strophes with the hymn in _Endymion_, we shall realize

how the Elizabethan pastoral spirit, compounded as it was of native

English love of country pleasures and Renaissance delight in classic

poetry, emerged after near two centuries' occultation to reappear in the

poetry of Keats, but wonderfully strengthened in imaginative reach and

grasp, richer and more romantic both in the delighted sense of nature's

blessings and activities and in the awed apprehension of a vast mystery

behind them. The sense of such mystery is nowhere else expressed by

Keats with such brooding inwardness and humbleness as where he invokes

Pan no longer as a shepherd's god but as a symbol of the World-All.

Wordsworth, when Keats at the request of friends read the piece to him,

could see, or would own to seeing, nothing in it but a 'pretty piece of

paganism,' though indeed in the more profoundly felt and imagined lines,

such as those with which the first and fifth strophes open, the

inspiration can be traced in great part to the influence of Wordsworth

himself:--

O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang

From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth

Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death

Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness;

Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress

Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken;

And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken

The dreary melody of bedded reeds--

In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds

The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth;

Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth

Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx--do thou now,

By thy love's milky brow!

By all the trembling mazes that she ran,

Hear us, great Pan!

O thou, for whose soul-soothing quiet, turtles

Passion their voices cooingly 'mong myrtles,

What time thou wanderest at eventide

Through sunny meadows, that outskirt the side

Of thine enmossed realms: O thou, to whom

Broad leaved fig trees even now foredoom

Their ripen'd fruitage; yellow girted bees

Their golden honeycombs; our village leas

Their fairest blossom'd beans and poppied corn;

The chuckling linnet its five young unborn,

To sing for thee; low creeping strawberries

Their summer coolness; pent up butterflies

Their freckled wings; yea, the fresh budding year

All its completions--be quickly near,

By every wind that nods the mountain pine,

O forester divine!

Thou, to whom every faun and satyr flies

For willing service; whether to surprise

The squatted hare while in half sleeping fit;

Or upward ragged precipices flit

To save poor lambkins from the eagle's maw;

Or by mysterious enticement draw

Bewildered shepherds to their path again;

Or to tread breathless round the frothy main,

And gather up all fancifullest shells

For thee to tumble into Naiads' cells,

And being hidden, laugh at their out-peeping;

Or to delight thee with fantastic leaping,

The while they pelt each other on the crown

With silvery oak apples, and fir cones brown--

By all the echoes that about thee ring,

Hear us, O satyr king!

O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears,

While ever and anon to his shorn peers

A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn,

When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn

Anger our huntsmen: Breather round our farms,

To keep off mildews, and all weather harms:

Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,

That come a swooning over hollow grounds,

And wither drearily on barren moors:[3]

Dread opener of the mysterious doors

Leading to universal knowledge--see,

Great son of Dryope,

The many that are come to pay their vows

With leaves about their brows!

Be still the unimaginable lodge

For solitary thinkings; such as dodge

Conception to the very bourne of heaven,

Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven,

That spreading in this dull and clodded earth

Gives it a touch ethereal--a new birth:

Be still a symbol of immensity;

A firmament reflected in a sea;

An element filling the space between;

An unknown--but no more: we humbly screen

With uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending,

And giving out a shout most heaven rending,

Conjure thee to receive our humble Paean,

Upon thy Mount Lycean!

The song of the Indian maiden in the fourth book is in a very different

key from this, more strikingly original in form and conception, and but

for a weak opening and one or two flaws of taste would be a masterpiece.

Keats's later and more famous lyrics, though they have fewer faults, yet

do not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of

imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords

of the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of

the best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the

immemorial romance of India and the East; a power like that of

Coleridge, and perhaps partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest

weird and beautiful associations almost with a word; clear visions of

Greek beauty and wild wood-notes of northern imagination; all these

elements come here commingled, yet in a strain perfectly individual.

Keats calls the piece a 'roundelay,'--a form which it only so far

resembles that its opening measures are repeated at the close. It begins

by invoking and questioning sorrow in a series of dreamy musical stanzas

of which the imagery embodies, a little redundantly and confusedly, the

idea expressed elsewhere by Keats with greater perfection, that it is

Sorrow which confers upon beautiful things their richest beauty. From

these the song passes to tell what has happened to the singer:--

To Sorrow,

I bade good-morrow,

And thought to leave her far away behind;

But cheerly, cheerly,

She loves me dearly;

She is so constant to me, and so kind:

I would deceive her

And so leave her,

But ah! she is so constant and so kind.

Beneath my palm tree, by the river side,

I sat a weeping: in the whole world wide

There was no one to ask me why I wept,--

And so I kept

Brimming the water-lily cups with tears

Cold as my fears.

Beneath my palm trees, by the river side,

I sat a weeping: what enamour'd bride,

Cheated by shadowy wooer from the clouds,

But hides and shrouds

Beneath dark palm trees by a river side?

It is here that we seem to catch an echo, varied and new-modulated but

in no sense weakened, from Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_,--

A savage place, as holy as enchanted

As e'er beneath the waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon lover.

Then, with another change of measure comes the deserted maiden's tale of

the irruption of Bacchus on his march from India; and then, arranged as

if for music, the challenge of the maiden to the Maenads and satyrs and

their choral answers:--

'Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye!

So many and so many, and such glee?

Why have ye left your bowers desolate,

Your lutes, and gentler fate?'

'We follow Bacchus! good or ill betide,

We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide:

Come hither, lady fair, and joined be

To our wild minstrelsy!'

'Whence came ye jolly Satyrs! Whence came ye!

So many, and so many, and such glee?

Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left

Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?'

'For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree;

For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms,

And cold mushrooms;

For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth;

Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth!

Come hither, lady fair, and joined be

To our mad minstrelsy!'

'Over wide streams and mountains great we went,

And save when Bacchus kept his ivy tent,

Onward the tiger and the leopard pants,

With Asian elephants:

Onward these myriads--with song and dance,

With zebras striped, and sleek Arabians' prance,

Web-footed alligators, crocodiles,

Bearing upon their scaly backs, in files,

Plump infant laughers mimicking the coil

Of seamen, and stout galley-rowers' toil:

With toying oars and silken sails they glide,

Nor care for wind and tide.

[Illustration: PL. V

'Onward the tiger and the leopard pants

With Asian elephants'

FROM A SARCOPHAGUS RELIEF AT WOBURN ABBEY]

It is usually said that this description of Bacchus and his rout was

suggested by Titian's famous picture of Bacchus and Ariadne (after

Catullus) which is now in the National Gallery, and which Severn took

Keats to see when it was exhibited at the British Institution in 1816.

But this will account for a part at most of Keats's vision. Tiger and

leopard panting along with Asian elephants on the march are not present

in that picture, nor anything like them. Keats might have found

suggestions for them in the text both of Godwin's little handbook just

quoted and in Spence's _Polymetis_: but it would have been much more

like him to work from something seen with his eyes: and these animals,

with Indian prisoners mounted on the elephants, are invariable features

of the triumphal processions of Bacchus through India as represented on

a certain well-known type of ancient sarcophagus. From direct sight of

such sarcophagus reliefs or prints after such Keats, I feel sure, must

have taken them,[4] while the children mounted on crocodiles may have

been drawn from the plinth of the famous ancient recumbent statue of the

Nile, and the pigmy rowers, in all likelihood, from certain reliefs

which Keats will have noticed in the Townley collection at the British

Museum: so that the whole brilliant picture is a composite (as we shall

see later was the case with the Grecian Urn) which had shaped itself

from various sources in Keats's imagination and become more real than

any reality to his mind's eye. But I am holding up the reader, with this

digression as to sources, from the fine rush of verse with which the

lyric sweeps on to tell how the singer dropped out of the train of

Bacchus to wander alone into the Carian forest, and finally, returning

to the opening motive, ends as it began with an exquisite strain of

lovelorn pathos:--

Come then, sorrow!

Sweetest sorrow!

Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast:

I thought to leave thee,

And deceive thee,

But now of all the world I love thee best.

There is not one,

No, no, not one

But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid;

Thou art her mother

And her brother,

Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade.

An intensely vital imaginative feeling, such as can afford to dispense

with scholarship, for the spirit of Greek and Greco-Asiatic myths and

cults inspires these lyrics respectively; and strangely enough the

result seems in neither case a whit impaired by the fact that the

nature-images Keats invokes in them are almost purely English.

Bean-fields in blossom and poppies among the corn, hemlock growing in

moist places by the brookside, field mushrooms with the morning dew

upon them, cowslips and strawberries and the song of linnets, oak,

hazel and flowering broom, holly trees smothered from view under the

summer leafage of chestnuts, these are the things of nature that he has

loved and lived with from a child, and his imagination cannot help

importing the same delights not only into the forest haunts of Pan but

into the regions ranged over by Bacchus with his train of yoked tiger

and panther, of elephant, crocodile and zebra.

Contemporary influences as well as Elizabethan and Jacobean are

naturally discernible in the poem. The strongest and most permeating is

that of Wordsworth, not so much to be traced in actual echoes of his

words, though these of course occur, as in adoptions of his general

spirit. We have recognized a special instance in that deep and brooding

sense of mystery, of 'something far more deeply interfused,' of the

working of an unknown spiritual force behind appearances, which finds

expression in the hymn to Pan. Endymion's prayer to Cynthia from

underground in the second book will be found to run definitely and

closely parallel with Wordsworth's description of the huntress Diana in

his account of the origin of Greek myths (see above, pp. 125-6). When

Keats likens the many-tinted mists enshrouding the litter of Sleep to

the fog on the top of Skiddaw from which the travellers may

With an eye-guess towards some pleasant vale

Descry a favourite hamlet faint and far,

we know that his imagination is answering to a stimulus supplied by

Wordsworth. But it is for the undercurrent of ethical symbolism in

_Endymion_ that Keats will have owed the most to that master. Both

Shelley and he had been profoundly impressed by the reading of _The

Excursion_, published when Shelley was in his twenty-second year and

Keats in his nineteenth, and each in his own way had taken deeply to

heart Wordsworth's inculcation, both in that poem and many others, of

the doctrine that a poet must learn to go out of himself and to live

and feel as a man among fellow men,--that it is a kind of spiritual

suicide for him to attempt to live apart from human sympathies,

Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!

A large part of _Endymion_, as we have seen, is devoted to the

symbolical setting forth of this conviction. For the rest, that

essential contrast between the mental processes and poetic methods of

the elder and the younger man which we have noted in discussing Keats's

first volume continues to strike us in the second. In interpreting the

relations of man to the natural world, Wordsworth's poetry is intensely

personal and 'subjective,' Keats's intensely impersonal and 'objective.'

Wordsworth expounds, Keats evokes: the mind of Wordsworth works by

strenuous after-meditation on his experiences of life and nature and

their effect upon his own soul and consciousness: the mind of Keats

works by instantaneous imaginative participation, instinctive and

self-oblivious, in nature's doings and beings, especially those which

make for human refreshment and delight.

The second contemporary influence to be considered is that of Shelley.

Shelley's _Alastor_, it will be remembered, published early in 1816, had

been praised by Hunt in _The Examiner_ for December of that year, and in

the following January Hunt printed in the same paper Shelley's _Hymn to

Intellectual Beauty_. In the course of that same December and January

Keats had seen a good deal of Shelley at Hunt's and taken part with him

in many talks on poetry. It is certain that Keats read and was impressed

by _Alastor_: doubtless he also read the _Hymn_. How much did either or

both influence him in the composition of _Endymion_? Mr Andrew Bradley

thinks he sees evidence that _Alastor_ influenced him strongly. That

poem is a parable, as _Endymion_ is, of the adventures of a poet's soul;

and it enforces, as much of _Endymion_ does, the doctrine that a poet

cannot without ruin to himself live in isolation from human sympathies.

But there the resemblance between the two conceptions really ends. In

_Alastor_ the poet, having lived in solitary communion 'with all that is

most beautiful and august in nature and in human thought and the world's

past' (the words are Shelley's own prose summary of the imagined

experiences which the first part of the poem relates in splendid verse),

is suddenly awakened, by a love-vision which comes to him in a dream, to

the passionate desire of finding and mating with a kindred soul, the

living counterpart of his dream, who shall share with him the delight of

such communion. The desire, ever unsatisfied, turns all his former joys

to ashes, and drives him forth by unheard-of ways through monstrous

wildernesses until he pines and dies, or in the strained Shelleyan

phrase, 'Blasted by his disappointment, he descends into an untimely

grave.' The essence of the theme is the quest of the poetic soul for

perfect spiritual sympathy and its failure to discover what it seeks.

Shelley does not make it fully clear whether the ideal of his poet's

dream is a purely abstract entity, an incarnation of the collective

response which he hopes, but fails, to find from his fellow creatures at

large; or whether, or how far, he is transcendentally expressing his own

personal longing for an ideally sympathetic soul-companion in the shape

of woman. Both strains no doubt enter into his conception; so far as the

private strain comes in, many passages of his life furnish a mournfully

ironic comment on his dream. But in any case his conception is

fundamentally different from that of Keats in _Endymion_. The essence of

Keats's task is to set forth the craving of the poet for full communion

with the essential spirit of Beauty in the world, and the discipline by

which he is led, through the exercise of the active human sympathies and

the toilsome acquisition of knowledge, to the prosperous and beatific

achievement of his quest.

It is rather the preface to _Alastor_ than the poem itself which we can

trace as having really worked in the mind of Keats. In it the evil fate

of those who shut themselves out from human sympathies is very

eloquently set forth, in a passage which is only partly relevant to the

design of the poem, inasmuch as its warning is addressed not only to the

poet in particular but to human beings in general. The passage may have

had some influence on Keats when he framed the scheme of _Endymion_:

what is certain is that we shall find its thoughts and even its words

recurring forcibly to his mind in an hour of despondency some thirty

months later: let us therefore postpone its consideration until then.

For the rest, it is not difficult to show correspondence between some of

the descriptive passages of _Alastor_ and _Endymion_, especially those

telling of the natural and architectural marvels amid which the heroes

wander. Endymion's wanderings we are fresh from tracing. Alastor before

him had wandered--

where the secret caves

Rugged and dark, winding amid the springs

Of fire and poison, inaccessible

To avarice or pride, their starry domes

Of diamond and of gold expand above

Numerous and immeasurable halls,

Frequent with crystal columns, and clear shrines

Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite.

But these are the kind of visions which may rise spontaneously in common

in the minds of almost any pair of youthful dreamers. Shelley's poetic

style is of course as much sounder and less experimental than that of

Keats at this time as his range and certainty of penetrating and

vivifying imagination are, to my apprehension at least, less: he had a

trained and scholarly feeling both for the resources of the language and

for its purity, and Keats might have learnt much from him as to what he

should avoid. But as we have seen, Keats was firmly on his guard against

letting any outside influence affect his own development, and would not

visit Shelley at Marlow during the composition of _Endymion_, in order

'that he might have his own unfettered scope' and that the spirit of

poetry might work out its own salvation in him.

As to the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, written though it was by

Shelley under the fresh impression of the glory of the Alps and also in

the first flush of his acquaintance with and enthusiasm for Plato, I

think Keats would have felt its strain of aspiration and invocation too

painful, too near despair, to make much appeal to him, and that

Shelley's

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon,

would have seemed to him something abstract, remote, and uncomforting.

His own imagination insisted on the existence of something in the

ultimate nature of the universe to account for what he calls the 'wild

and harmonised tune' which he found his spirit striking from all the

scattered and broken beauties of the world. Vague and floating his

conception of that something might be, but it was extraordinarily

intense, partaking of the concentrated essence of a thousand thrilling

joys of perception and imagination. He had read no Plato, though he was

of course familiar enough with Spenser's mellifluous dilution of

Platonic and neo-Platonic doctrine in his four _Hymns_. In _Endymion_,

as in the speculative passages of the letters we have quoted, his mind

has to go adventuring for itself among those ancient, for him almost

uncharted, mysteries of Love and Beauty. He does not as yet conceive

himself capable of anything more than steppings, to repeat his own sober

phrase, of the imagination towards truth. He does not light, he does not

expect to light, upon revelations of truth abstract or formal, and seems

to waver between the Adam's dream idea of finding in some transcendental

world all the several modes of earthly happiness 'repeated in a finer

tone' but yet retaining their severalness, and an idea, nearer to the

Platonic, of a single principle of absolute or abstract Beauty, the

object of a purged and perfected spiritual contemplation, from which all

the varieties of beauty experienced on earth derive their quality and

oneness. But in his search he strikes now and again, for the attentive

reader, notes of far reaching symbolic significance that carry the mind

to the verge of the great mysteries of things: he takes us with him on

exploratory sweeps and fetches of figurative thought in regions almost

beyond the reach of words, where we gain with him glimmering

adumbrations of the super-sensual through distilled and spiritualized

remembrance of the joys of sense-perception at their most intense.

So much for Keats's possible debt to Shelley in regard to _Endymion_.

There is an interesting small debt to be recorded on the other side,

which critics, I think, have hitherto failed to notice. Shelley,

notwithstanding his interest in Keats, did not read _Endymion_ till a

year or more after its publication. He had in the meantime gone to live

in Italy, and having had the volume sent out to him at Leghorn, writes:

'much praise is due to me for having read it, the author's intention

appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. Yet

it is full of the highest and finest gleams of poetry: indeed,

everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described

in it. I think if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it,

I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought, of

which there is now no danger.' Nothing can be more just; and in the same

spirit eight months later, in May 1820, he writes, 'Keats, I hope, is

going to show himself a great poet; like the sun, to burst through the

clouds, which, though dyed in the finest colours of the air, obscured

his rising.' About the same time, having heard of Keats's haemorrhage and

sufferings and of their supposed cause in the hostility of the Tory

critics, Shelley drafted, but did not send, his famous indignant letter

to the editor of the _Quarterly Review_. In this draft he shows himself

a careful student of _Endymion_ by pointing out particular passages for

approval. One of these passages is that near the beginning of the third

book describing the wreckage seen by the hero as he traversed the ocean

floor before meeting Glaucus. Everybody knows, in Shakespeare's _Richard

III_, Clarence's dream of being drowned and of what he saw below the

sea:--

What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!

What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!

Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;

Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw'd upon;

Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,

Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,

All scatter'd in the bottom of the sea.

Keats, no doubt remembering, and in a sense challenging, this passage,

wrote,--

Far had he roam'd,

With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam'd,

Above, around, and at his feet; save things

More dead than Morpheus' imaginings:

Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large

Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe;

Rudders that for a hundred years had lost

The sway of human hand; gold vase emboss'd

With long-forgotten story, and wherein

No reveller had ever dipp'd a chin

But those of Saturn's vintage; mouldering scrolls,

Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls

Who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude

In ponderous stone, developing the mood

Of ancient Nox;--then skeletons of man,

Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,

And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw

Of nameless monster.

Jeffrey in his review of the _Lamia_ volume has a fine phrase about this

passage. It 'comes of no ignoble lineage,' he says, 'nor shames its high

descent.' How careful Shelley's study of the passage had been, and how

completely he had assimilated it, is proved by his, doubtless quite

unconscious, reproduction and amplification of it in the fourth act of

_Prometheus Unbound_, which he added as an afterthought to the rest of

the poem in December 1819. The wreckage described is not that of the

sea, but that which the light flashing from the forehead of the infant

Earth-spirit reveals at the earth's centre.

The beams flash on

And make appear the melancholy ruins

Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships;

Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears,

And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels

Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry

Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,

Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems

Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin!

The wrecks beside of many a city vast,

Whose population which the earth grew over

Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie,

Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons,

Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes

Huddled in gray annihilation, split,

Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these,

The anatomies of unknown winged things,

And fishes which were isles of living scale,

And serpents, bony chains, twisted around

The iron crags, or within heaps of dust

To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs

Had crushed the iron crags; and over these

The jagged alligator, and the might

Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once

Were monarch beasts.

The derivation of this imagery from the passage of Keats seems evident

alike from its general conception and sequence and from details like the

anchors, beaks, targes, the prodigious primeval sculptures, the

skeletons of behemoth and alligator and antediluvian monsters without

name. Another possible debt of Shelley to _Endymion_ has also been

suggested in the list of delights which the poet, in the closing passage

of _Epipsychidion_, proposes to share with his spirit's mate in their

imagined island home in the AEgean. If Shelley indeed owes anything to

_Endymion_ here, he has etherealized and transcendentalized his original

even more than Keats did Ovid. Possibly, it may also be suggested, it

may have been Shelley's reading of _Endymion_ that led him at this time

to take two of the myths handled in it by Keats as subjects for his own

two lyrics, _Arethusa_ and the _Hymn to Pan_ (both of 1820); but he may

just as well have thought of these subjects independently; and in any

case they are absolutely in his own vein, nor was their exquisite

leaping and liquid lightness of rhythm a thing at any time within

Keats's compass. It would be tempting to attribute to a desire of

emulating and improving on Keats Shelley's beautifully accomplished use

of the rimed couplet with varied pause and free overflow in the _Epistle

to Maria Gisborne_ (1819) and _Epipsychidion_ (1820), but that he had

already made a first experiment in the same kind with _Julian and

Maddalo_, written before his copy of _Endymion_ had reached him, so that

we must take his impulse in the matter to have been drawn not

intermediately through Keats but direct from Leigh Hunt.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Why will my friend Professor Saintsbury, in range of reading and

industry the master of us all, insist on trying to persuade us that

in the metre of _Endymion_ Keats owed something to the _Pharonnida_

of William Chamberlayne? There is absolutely no metrical usage in

Keats's poem for which his familiar Elizabethan and Jacobean masters

do not furnish ample precedent: he differs from them only in taking

more special care to avoid any prolonged run of closed couplets. I do

not believe he could have brought himself to read two pages of

_Pharonnida_. But that is only an opinion, and the matter can be

decided by a simple computation on the fingers. The fact is that

there are no five pages of _Pharonnida_ which do not contain more of

those unfortunate rimings on 'in' and 'by' and 'to' and 'on' and 'of'

followed by their nouns in the next line, or worse still, on 'to'

followed by its infinitive,--on 'it' and 'than' and 'be' and 'which,'

and all the featherweight particles and prepositions and auxiliaries

and relatives impossible to stress or pause on for a moment,--than

can be found in any whole book of _Endymion_. It is also a fact that

the average proportion of lines not ending with a comma or other

pause is in _Pharonnida_ about ten to one, and in _Endymion_ not more

than two and a half to one. That the sentence-structure of

_Pharonnida_ is as detestably disjointed and invertebrate as that of

_Endymion_ is graceful and well-articulated I hesitate to insist,

because that again is a matter of ear and feeling, and not, like my

other points, of sheer arithmetic.

[2] The flaw here is of course the use of the forced rime-word

'unseam.' The only authority for the word is Shakespeare, who uses it

in _Macbeth_, in a sufficiently different sense and context--

'Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps.'

The vision in Keats's mind was probably of a track dividing, or as it

were ripping apart, the two sides of a valley.

[3] 'All the strange, mysterious and unaccountable sounds which were

heard in solitary places, were attributed to Pan, the God of rural

scenery' (Baldwin's _Pantheon_, ed. 1806, p. 104). Keats possessed a

copy of this well-felt and well-written little primer of mythology,

by William Godwin the philosopher writing under the pseudonym Edward

Baldwin; and the above is only one of several suggestions directly

due to it which are to be found in his poetry.

[4] Two classes of sarcophaguses are concerned, those figuring the

triumph of Bacchus and Hercules with their Indian captives, and those

which show the march of Silenus and his rout of fauns and maenads.

Now it so happens that an excellent original of each class, and with

them also a fine Endymion sarcophagus, had been bought by the Duke of

Bedford from the Villa Aldobrandini in 1815 and were set up in his

grand new gallery at Woburn five years later. Where they were housed

in the meanwhile is not recorded, but wherever it was Haydon could

easily have obtained access to them, (the Duke's agent in the

purchase having been also secretary to Lord Elgin) and I cannot

resist the conviction, purely conjectural as it is, that Keats must

have seen them in Haydon's company some time in the winter of

1816/17, and drawn inspiration from them both in this and some other

passages of _Endymion_. The Triumph relief is the richest extant of

its class, especially in its multitude of sporting children: see

plate opposite.

CHAPTER VIII

DECEMBER 1817-JUNE 1818: HAMPSTEAD AND TEIGNMOUTH: EMIGRATION OF GEORGE

KEATS

Hampstead again: stage criticism--Hazlitt's lectures--Life at Well

Walk--Meeting with Wordsworth--The 'immortal dinner'--Lamb forgets

himself--More of Wordsworth--A happy evening--Wordsworth on

Bacchus--Disillusion and impatience--Winter letters--Maxims and

reflections--Quarrels among friends--Haydon, Hunt and Shelley--A

prolific February--Rants and sonnets--A haunting memory--Six weeks at

Teignmouth--Soft weather and soft men--_Isabella_ or _the Pot of

Basil_--Rich correspondence--Epistle to Reynolds--Thirst for

knowledge--Need of experience--The two chambers of thought--Summer

plans--Preface to _Endymion_--A family break-up--To Scotland with

Brown.