and again:—

At this he press’d His hands against his face, and then did rest His head upon a mossy hillock green, And so remain’d as he a corpse had been All the long day; save when he scantly lifted His eyes abroad, to see how shadows shifted With the slow move of time,—sluggish and weary Until the poplar tops, in journey dreary, Had reach’d the river’s brim. Then up he rose, And slowly as that very river flows, Walk’d towards the temple grove with this lament: ‘Why such a golden eve? The breeze is sent Careful and soft, that not a leaf may fall Before the serene father of them all Bows down his summer head below the west. Now am I of breath, speech, and speed possest, But at the setting I must bid adieu To her for the last time. Night will strew On the damp grass myriads of lingering leaves, And with them shall I die; nor much it grieves To die, when summer dies on the cold sward.’

That point about making, as it were, a dial-hand of a certain group of poplars with their moving shadows would have a special local interest if one could find the place which suggested it. The sun sets early in this valley in the winter. I know not if there is any group of trees still standing that could be watched thus lengthening out its afternoon shadow to the river’s edge.

Opposite the last line in the manuscript of Endymion Keats wrote the date November 28, whence it would appear that it had taken him some ten days at most to complete the required five hundred lines. He did not immediately leave Burford Bridge, but stayed on through the first week or ten days of December, setting to work at once, it would appear, on the revision of his long poem, and composing, we know, the ‘drear-nighted December’ lyric, and perhaps one or two others, before he returned to the fraternal lodgings at Hampstead. The scheme of a winter flight to Lisbon for the suffering Tom had been given up, and it had been arranged instead that George should take him to spend some months at Teignmouth. They were to be there by Christmas, and Keats timed his return so as to be with them for a week or two at Hampstead before they started. Endymion was not published until the following April, but inasmuch as with its completion there ends the first, the uncertain, experimental, now rapturously and now despondently expectant phase of Keats’s mind and art, let us make this our opportunity for studying it.

[1] ‘Sad stories’ in the original text of Richard II. The allusion is to the well-known incident of Shelley alarming an old lady in a stage coach by suddenly breaking out with this quotation. Whether Keats had been in his company at the time we do not know.

[2] ‘Our friend’ of course is Leigh Hunt.

[3] Houghton MSS.

[4] Paradise Lost, viii, 288-311.

[5] Ibid. viii, 452-490.