appealing groans From their poor breasts went sueing to her ear In vain; remorseless as an infant’s bier She whisk’d against their eyes the sooty oil. Does yonder thrush, Schooling its half-fledg’d little ones to brush About the dewy forest, whisper tales. Speak not of grief, young stranger, or cold snails Will slime the rose to-night. He rose: he grasp’d his stole, With convuls’d clenches waving it abroad, And in a voice of solemn joy, that aw’d Echo into oblivion, he said:— Yet hourly had he striven To hide the cankering venom, that had riven His fainting recollections. The wanderer Holding his forehead to keep off the burr Of smothering fancies. Endymion! the cave is secreter Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys And trembles through my labyrinthine hair.

In some of these cases the trouble is, not that the rime drags in a train of far-fetched or intrusive ideas, but only that words are used for the rime’s sake in inexact and inappropriate senses. Such laxity in the employment of words is one of the great weaknesses of Keats’s style in Endymion, and is no doubt partly connected with his general disposition to treat language as though it were as free and fluid in his own day as it had been two hundred years earlier. The same disposition makes him reckless in turning verbs into nouns (a ‘complain,’ an ‘exclaim,’ a ‘shine,’ a ‘pierce,’ a ‘quell’) and nouns into verbs (to ‘throe,’ to ‘passion,’ to ‘monitor,’ to ‘fragment up’); in using at his convenience active verbs as passive and passive verbs as active; and in not only reviving archaic participial forms (‘dight,’ ‘fight,’ ‘raft,’ etc.) but in giving currency to participles of the class Coleridge denounced as demoralizing to the ear, and as hybrids equivocally generated of noun-substantives (‘emblem’d,’ ‘gordian’d,’ ‘mountain’d,’ ‘phantasy’d’), as well as to adjectives borrowed from Elizabethan use or new-minted more or less in accordance with it (‘pipy,’ ‘paly,’ ‘ripply,’ ‘sluicy,’ ‘slumbery,’ ‘towery,’ ‘bowery,’ ‘orby,’ ‘nervy,’ ‘surgy,’ ‘sparry,’ ‘spangly).’ It was these and such like technical liberties with language which scandalized conservative critics, and caused even De Quincey, becoming tardily acquainted with Keats’s work, to dislike and utterly under-rate it. He himself came before long to condemn the style of ‘the slipshod Endymion.’ Nevertheless the consequence of his experiments in reviving or imitating the usages of the great Renaissance age of English poetry is only in part to be regretted. His rashness led him into almost as many felicities as faults, and the examples of the happier liberties in Endymion has done much towards enriching the vocabulary and diction of English poetry in the nineteenth century.

Other faults that more gravely mar the poem are not technical but spiritual: intimate failures of taste and feeling due partly to mere rawness and inexperience, partly to excessive intensity and susceptibility of temperament, partly to second-rateness of social training and association. A habit of cloying over-luxuriance in description, the giving way to a sort of swooning abandonment of the senses in contact with the ‘deliciousness’ of things, is the most besetting of such faults. Allied with it is Keats’s treatment of love as an actuality, which in this poem is in unfortunate and distasteful contrast with his high conception of love in the abstract as the inspiring and ennobling power of the world and all things in it. Add the propensity to make Glaucus address Scylla as ‘timid thing!’ and Endymion beg for ‘one gentle squeeze’ from his Indian maiden, with many a like turn in the simpering, familiar mood which Keats at this time had caught from or naturally shared with Leigh Hunt. It should, however, be noted as a mark of progress in self-criticism that, comparing the drafts of the poem with the printed text, we find that in revising it for press he had turned out more and worse passages in this vein than he left in.

From flaws or disfigurements of one or other of these kinds the poem is never free for more than a page or two, and rarely for so much, at a time. But granting all weaknesses and immaturities whether of form or spirit, what a power of poetry is in Endymion: what evidence, unmistakeable, one would have said, to the blindest, of genius. Did any poet in his twenty-second year ever write with so prodigal an activity of invention, however undisciplined and unbraced, or with an imagination so penetrating to divine and so swift to evoke beauty? Were so many faults and failures ever interspersed with felicities of married sound and sense so frequent and absolute, and only to be matched in the work of the ripest masters? Lost as the reader may often feel himself among the phantasmagoric intricacies of the tale, cloyed by its amatory insipidities, bewildered by the redundancies of an invention stimulated into over-activity by any and every chance feather-touch of association or rime-suggestion, he can afford to be patient in the certainty of coming, from one page to another, upon touches of true and fresh inspiration in almost every strain and mode of poetry. Often the inspired poet and the raw cockney rimester come inseparably coupled in the limit of half a dozen lines, as thus in the narrative of Glaucus:—

Upon a dead thing’s face my hand I laid; I look’d—’twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe! O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy? Could not thy harshest vengeance be content, But thou must nip this tender innocent Because I loved her?—Cold, O cold indeed Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed The sea-swell took her hair.

or thus from the love-making of Cynthia:—

Now I swear at once That I am wise, that Pallas is a dunce— Perhaps her love like mine is but unknown— O I do think that I have been alone In chastity: yes, Pallas has been sighing, While every eve saw me my hair uptying, With fingers cool as aspen leaves.

In like manner the unfortunate opening of Book III above cited leads on, as Mr de Sélincourt has justly observed, to a passage in praise of the moon which is among the very finest and best sustained examples of Keats’s power in nature-poetry. For quotation I will take not this but a second invocation to the moon which follows a little later, for the reason that in it the raptures and longings which the poet puts into the mouth of his hero are really in a large measure his own:—

What is there in thee, Moon! that thou shouldst move My heart so potently? When yet a child I oft have dry’d my tears when thou hast smil’d. Thou seem’dst my sister: hand in hand we went From eve to morn across the firmament. No apples would I gather from the tree, Till thou hadst cool’d their cheeks deliciously: No tumbling water ever spake romance, But when my eyes with thine thereon could dance: No woods were green enough, no bower divine, Until thou liftedst up thine eyelids fine: In sowing time ne’er would I dibble take, Or drop a seed, till thou wast wide awake; And, in the summer tide of blossoming, No one but thee hath heard me blythly sing And mesh my dewy flowers all the night. No melody was like a passing spright If it went not to solemnize thy reign. Yes, in my boyhood every joy and pain By thee were fashioned in the self-same end; And as I grew in years, still didst thou blend With all my ardours: thou wast the deep glen; Thou wast the mountain-top—the sage’s pen— The poet’s harp—the voice of friends—the sun; Thou wast the river—thou wast glory won; Thou wast my clarion’s blast—thou wast my steed— My goblet full of wine—my topmost deed:— Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon! O what a wild and harmonized tune My spirit struck from all the beautiful!

In the last two lines of the above Keats gives us the essential master key to his own poetic nature and being. The eight preceding, from ‘As I grew in years’ offer in their rhetorical form a curious parallel with a passage of similar purport in Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe:—