[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’Anténor, then popular both in France and in an English translation. Anténor 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’Anténor 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 Anténor, 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,—