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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’ 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’ 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’ 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’ very finest achievements. The hymn to Pan is especially interesting in comparison with two of Keats’ 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

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