akes us feel the monotony of her days and
nights of grief.

PAGE 76. l. 432. _leafits_, leaflets, little leaves. An old botanical
term, but obsolete in Keats's time. Coleridge uses it in l. 65 of 'The
Nightingale' in _Lyrical Ballads_. In later editions he altered it to
'leaflets'.

l. 436. _Lethean_, in Hades, the dark underworld of the dead. Compare
the conception of melancholy in the _Ode on Melancholy_, where it is
said to neighbour joy. Contrast Stanza lxi.

l. 439. _cypress_, dark trees which in Italy are always planted in
cemeteries. They stand by Keats's own grave.

PAGE 77. l. 442. _Melpomene_, the Muse of tragedy.

l. 451. _Baaelites of pelf_, worshippers of ill-gotten gains.

l. 453. _elf_, man. The word is used in this sense by Spenser in _The
Faerie Queene_.

PAGE 78. l. 467. _chapel-shrift_, confession. Cf. l. 64.

ll. 469-72. _And when . . . hair._ The pathos of this picture is
intensified by its suggestions of the wife- and mother-hood which Isabel
can now never know. Cf. st. xlvii, where the idea is still more
beautifully suggested.

PAGE 79. l. 475. _vile . . . spot._ The one touch of descriptive
horror--powerful in its reticence.

PAGE 80. l. 489. _on . . . things._ Her love and her hope is with the
dead rather than with the living.

l. 492. _lorn voice._ Cf. st. xxxv. She is approaching her lover. Note
that in each case the metaphor is of a stringed instrument.

l. 493. _Pilgrim in his wanderings._ Cf. st. i, 'a young palmer in
Love's eye.'

l. 503. _burthen_, refrain. Cf. _Tempest_, I. ii. Ariel's songs.

NOTES ON THE EVE OF ST. AGNES.

See Introduction to _Isabella_ and _The Eve of St. Agnes_, p. 212.

St. Agnes was a martyr of the Christian Church who was beheaded just
outside Rome in 304 because she refused to marry a Pagan, holding
herself to be a bride of Christ. She was only 13--so small and slender
that the smallest fetters they could find slipped over her little wrists
and fell to the ground. But they stripped, tortured, and killed her. A
week after her death her parents dreamed that they saw her in glory with
a white lamb, the sign of purity, beside her. Hence she is always
pictured with lambs (as her name signifies), and to the place of her
martyrdom two lambs are yearly taken on the anniversary and blessed.
Then their wool is cut off and woven by the nuns into the archbishop's
cloak, or pallium (see l. 70).

For the legend connected with the Eve of the Saint's anni