ly,
is however abundant and superabundant; and no one who peruses "Endymion"
with a true sense for poetic endowment and handling can fail to see that
it is peculiarly the work of a poet. The versification, though far from
faultless, is free, surging, and melodious--one of the devices which the
author most constantly employs with a view to avoiding jogtrot
uniformity being that of beginning a new sentence with the second line
of a couplet. On every page the poet has enjoyed himself, and on most of
them the reader can joy as well. The lyrical interludes, especially the
hymn to Pan, and the chaunt of the Bacchante (which comprises a sort of
verse-transcript of Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne"), are singularly
wealthy in that fancy which hovers between description and emotion. The
hymn to Pan was pronounced by Wordsworth, _viva voce_, to be "a pretty
piece of paganism"--a comment which annoyed Keats not a little. Shelley
(in his undispatched letter to the editor of the _Quarterly Review_)
pointed out, as particularly worthy of attention, the passages--"And
then the forest told it in a dream" (book ii.); "The rosy veils mantling
the East" (book iii.); and "Upon a weeded rock this old man sat" (book
iii.) The last--relating to Glaucus and his pictured cloak--is
certainly remarkable; the other two, I should say, not more remarkable
than scores of others--as indeed Shelley himself implied.

To sum up, "Endymion" is an essentially poetical poem, which sins, and
greatly or even grossly does it sin, by youthful indiscipline and by
excess. To deny these blemishes would be childish--they are there, and
must be not only admitted, but resented. The faults, like the beauties,
of the poem, are positive--not negative or neutral. The work was in fact
(as Keats has already told us) a venture of an experimental kind. At the
age of twenty-one to twenty-two he had a mind full of poetic material;
he turned out his mind into this poetic romance, conscious that, if some
things came right, others would come wrong. We are the richer for his
rather overweening experiment; we are not to ignore its conditions, nor
its partial failure, but we have to thank him none the less. If "a thing
of beauty is a joy for ever," a thing of alloyed beauty is a joy in its
minor degree.

The next long poem of Keats--"Isabella, or the Pot of Basil"--is a vast
advance on "Endymion" in sureness of hand and moderation of work: it is
in all respects the better poem, and ju