Leaving great verse unto a little clan.
O give me their old vigour!
“Therefore,” says he,
’Tis with full happiness that I
Will trace the story of Endymion.
The very music of the name has gone
Into my being.
Had he studied Greek as language, and Greek as style, he would, we may believe, have avoided earlier his one great fault, the fault of excess, extravagance, and riot. What Keats thought of the great Greek writers whose Greek he could not read, may be gathered from his lines to Homer:
Standing aloof in giant ignorance,
Of thee I hear, and of the Cyclades,