Be kind (quoth he) sweet Nymph unto thy lover, My soul’s sole essence and my senses’ mover, Life of my life, pure Image of my heart, Impression of Conceit, Invention, Art. My vital spirit receives his spirit from thee, Thou art that all which ruleth all in me, Thou art the sap and life whereby I live, Which powerful vigour doth receive and give. Thou nourishest the flame wherein I burn, The North whereto my heart’s true touch doth turn.

Was Keats, then, after all familiar with the rare volume in which alone Drayton’s early poem had been printed, or does the similar turn of the two passages spring from some innate affinity between the two poets,—or perhaps merely from the natural suggestion of the theme?

In nature-poetry, and especially in that mode of it in which the poet goes out with his whole being into nature and loses his identity in delighted sympathy with her doings, Keats already shows himself a master scarcely excelled. Take the lines near the beginning which tell of the ‘silent workings of the dawn’ on the morning of Pan’s festival:—

Rain-scented eglantine Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun; The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass; Man’s voice was on the mountains; and the mass Of nature’s lives and wonders puls’d tenfold, To feel this sun-rise and its glories old.

The freshness and music and felicity of the first two lines are nothing less than Shakespearean: in the rest note with how true an instinct the poet evokes the operant magic and living activities of the dawn, single instances first and then in a sudden outburst the sum and volume of them all: how he avoids word-painting and palette-work, leaving all merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined rather than seen, delights which the poet instinctively attributes to nature as though she were as sentient as himself. It is like Keats here so to place and lead up to the word ‘old’ as to make it pregnant with all the meanings which it bore to him: that is with all the wonder and romance of ancient Greece, and at the same time with a sense of awe, like that expressed in the opening chorus of Goethe’s Faust, at nature’s eternal miracle of the sun still rising ‘glorious as on creation’s day.’

It is interesting to note how above all other nature-images Keats, whose blood, when his faculties were at their highest tension, was always apt to be heated even to fever-point, prefers those of nature’s coolness and refreshment. Here are two or three out of a score of instances. Endymion tells how he had been gazing at the face of his unknown love smiling at him from the well:—

I started up, when lo! refreshfully, There came upon my face in plenteous showers Dew-drops, and dewy buds, and leaves, and flowers, Wrapping all objects from my smothered sight, Bathing my spirit in a new delight.

Coming to a place where a brook issues from a cave, he says to himself—

’Tis the grot Of Proserpine, when Hell, obscure and hot, Doth her resign; and where her tender hands She dabbles on the cool and sluicy sands:

A little later, and