, and Nature's profusion of object and of imagery.
And in this Keats thought--and surely he rightly thought--that he would
be getting closer to the spirit of a Grecian myth than by any
cut-and-dry process of tame repetition or pulseless decorum. He wanted
the dell of wild flowers, and not the _hortus siccus_.

"Endymion" was actually begun in the spring of 1817, much about the same
time when the volume "Poems" was published. The first draft was
completed (as we have said) on the 28th of November 1817, and by the end
of the winter which opened the year 1818 no more probably remained to be
done to it. The MS. was subjected to much revision and excision, so that
it cannot be alleged that Keats worked in a reckless temper, or without
such self-criticism as he could at that date bring to bear. It would
even appear, moreover, from the terms of a letter which he addressed to
Mr. Taylor, on April 27, 1818, that he allowed that gentleman to make
some volunteer corrections of his own. Haydon had spurred him on to the
ambitious attempt, which Hunt on the contrary deprecated. Shelley--so
the story goes--agreed with Keats that each of them should write an epic
within a space of six months. Shelley produced "The Revolt of Islam,"
Keats the "Endymion." Shelley proved to be the more rapid writer of the
two; for his poem of 4815 lines was finished by the early autumn of
1817, while Keats's, numbering 4,050 lines, went on through the winter
which opened 1818. A good deal of it had been done during Keats's
sojourn with Mr. Bailey, in Magdalen Hall, Oxford. Afterwards, on 8th
October 1817, he wrote to Bailey--"I refused to visit Shelley, that I
might have my own unfettered scope;" an expression which one might be
inclined to understand as showing that Shelley, having now completed
"The Revolt of Islam," had invited Keats to visit him at Marlow, and
there to proceed with "Endymion,"--not without the advantage it may well
be supposed, of Shelley's sympathizing but none the less stringent
counsel. Bailey's account of the facts may be given here. "He wrote and
I read--sometimes at the same table, sometimes at separate desks--from
breakfast till two or three o'clock. He sat down to his task, which was
about fifty lines a day, with his paper before him, and wrote with as
much regularity and apparently with as much ease as he wrote his
letters. Indeed, he quite acted up to the principle he lays down, 'That,
if poetry comes not as naturally as the