antly
used, came to him almost entirely through the medium of Elizabethan
translations and allusions. In this connexion it is interesting to read
his first fine sonnet, in which he celebrates his introduction to the
greatest of Greek poets in the translation of the rugged and forcible
Elizabethan, George Chapman:--

_On first looking into Chapman's Homer._

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Of the work upon which he was now engaged, the narrative-poem of
_Endymion_, we may give his own account to his little sister Fanny in a
letter dated September 10th, 1817:--

'Perhaps you might like to know what I am writing about. I will tell
you. Many years ago there was a young handsome Shepherd who fed his
flocks on a Mountain's Side called Latmus--he was a very contemplative
sort of a Person and lived solitary among the trees and Plains little
thinking that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in
Love with him.--However so it was; and when he was asleep she used to
come down from heaven and admire him excessively for a long time; and at
last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms to the top of
that high Mountain Latmus while he was a dreaming--but I dare say you
have read this and all the other beautiful tales which have come down
from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece.'

On his return to London he and his brother Tom, always delicate and now
quite an invalid, took lodgings at Hampstead. Here Keats remained for
some time, harassed by the illness of his brother and of several of his
friends; and in June he was still further depressed by the departure of
his brother George to try his luck in America.

In April, 1818, _Endymion_ was finished. Keats was by no means
satisfied with it but preferred to publish it as it was, feeling it to
be 'as good as I had power to make it by mys