As near as an immortal’s sphered words Could to a mother’s soften were these last: And yet I had a terror of her robes, And chiefly of the veils that from her brow Hung pale, and curtain’d her in mysteries, That made my heart too small to hold its blood. This saw that Goddess, and with sacred hand Parted the veils. Then saw I a wan face, Not pin’d by human sorrows, but bright-blanch’d By an immortal sickness which kills not; It works a constant change, which happy death Can put no end to; deathwards progressing To no death was that visage; it had past The lilly and the snow; and beyond these I must not think now, though I saw that face. But for her eyes I should have fled away; They held me back with a benignant light, Soft, mitigated by divinest lids Half-clos’d, and visionless entire they seem’d Of all external things; they saw me not, But in blank splendour beam’d, like the mild moon, Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not What eyes are upward cast.

The aspirant now adoringly entreats her to disclose the tragedy that he perceives to be working in her brain: she consents, and from this point begins the original Hyperion re-cast and narrated as a vision within the main vision, with comments put into the mouth of the prophetess. But the scheme, which under no circumstances, one would say, could have been a prosperous one, was soon abandoned, and this, the last of Keats’s great fragments, breaks off near the beginning of the second book.

[1] Carm. iii. 4, which probably Keats knew also at first hand.

[2] The daughter of Styx is Victory, and ‘halecret’ is a corslet.

[3] The passage ending, ‘the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.’

[4]

With duller steel than the Persèan sword They cut away no formless monster’s head.

[5] See the letter to Taylor quoted above, pp. 380, 381.

[6] Auctores Mythographi Latini, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742. Keats’s copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and passed after his death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Archdeacon Bailey (Houghton MSS.). The passage about Moneta which had wrought in Keats’s mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hyginus.