he might have wished to suppress it as a crude and juvenile experiment:

A young bird's flutter from a wood.

A couple of years from its publication; and the singer reappeared before the world with the Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, Isabella, and a galaxy of lovely odes! In the brief interval he had achieved perfection! Not the faintest symptom of youthful extravagance— forcible weakness-is to be traced. The orderliness and harmony of treatment are unimpeachable. To warmth is added a refined delicacy. There is sensuousness still, but never in excess. Between Endymion and its immediate successors, whatever the dates of their composition, the contrast is extraordinary. Yet, when I refer it and them to their common author, I doubt much that the later wonders could ever have come into visible, recognized existence without the prior partial failure!

Endymion is a miscellany—a nursery garden of imagination. It provided a seed-bed for the blooms to follow, several even now germinating. But it did much more. The difference in years between its poet and the poet of the Eve of St. Agnes is little. In respect of the conception of the two, it is nothing. As between them in the completed form, it means an absolute transformation of the creative spirit. Moving and breathing, Endymion laid bare to its author all the snares and perils of his exuberant fancy. While it demonstrated his powers to himself, and spurred his pride, it warned, threatened, and shamed. With its grotesquenesses, the more apparent for the beauties, full before his eyes, his fastidiously sensitive self was secured against repeating offences of rank efflorescence of imagery, confusion of thought, rawness of colour and tone. If never in the history of verse has fancy been accorded more liberty, and has

abused it less, than in Keats's later work, the main credit I believe to be due to the poet's shock at being confronted by his own creation flaunting in the broad day of type its dishevelled and unabashed charms. It may almost be said that in no famous English poem is want of method, measure, proportion, more flagrant than in Endymion. 'Post', and, in my opinion, 'propter' Endymion, on the other hand, no quality in the writer is more conspicuous than completeness of workmanship. That stands out from the multitude of admirable properties in the gallery of his masterpieces. Atmosphere, lights, shades, perspective, are all in their right places. Imagination always satisfies, and never cloys.

The temple of his poet-being, thus re-edified, he dedicated to the goddess Beauty, with Melancholy for her chief ministress dainty Melancholy :

She dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips;

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.5

We have no right to be astonished at his inclination to the pensiveness, the remoteness, the solitariness of soul, which he intends by 'Melancholy'. Intellectually, even apart from disease, he was framed to take little interest in the world into which he was born. He thought and felt himself into another, two centuries earlier. In that world itself he troubled his fancy with none of the active cares and struggles. Its very books he did not read as an antiquary

or student. The air of it which be breathed he had distilled for his individual use. Its gardens which he paced he had himself enclosed and planted. Over the whole he drew an atmosphere, a veil, of slumberous calm-not from Spring, but from more companionable Autumn:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometime like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies."

If mirth ever feigns to inspire him, it is not easily distinguishable from sadness. At all events, it is that of the bygone past; an echo from

reposing

Souls of poets dead and gone,"

on Elysian lawns

Browsed by none but Dian's fawns;
Underneath large blue-bells tented,
Where the daisies are rose-scented;
Where the nightingale doth sing
Not a senseless, tranced thing,
But divine melodious truth;
Philosophic numbers smooth;
Tales and golden histories

Of heaven and its mysteries; 8

yet still at times sighing to one another :

What Elysium have we known,

Happy field or mossy cavern,

Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? 9

Or it may be monumental gaiety; imprisoned in sculptured stone, amid myrrh-scented funeral ashes:

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe, or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone;
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal-yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn ?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.10

Melancholy, after all, with its frozen revelry; though not so lingeringly, hauntingly saddening as the full life of the Nightingale song :

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk;
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Darkling I listen; and for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown: