ENDYMION.

BOOK III.

HERE are who lord it o'er their fellow-men

With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen

Their baaing vanities, to browse away

The comfortable green and juicy hay

From human pastures; or, O torturing fact!

Who, through an idiot blink, will see unpack'd
Fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe

Our gold and ripe-ear'd hopes. With not one tinge
Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight
Able to face an owl's, they still are dight

By the blear-eyed nations in empurpled vests,
And crowns, and turbans. With unladen breasts,
Save of blown self-applause, they proudly mount
To their spirit's perch, their being's high account,
Their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their thrones-
Amid the fierce intoxicating tones

Of trumpets, shoutings, and belabour'd drums,
And sudden cannon. Ah! how all this hums,
In wakeful ears, like uproar past and gone
Like thunder clouds that spake to Babylon,
And set those old Chaldeans to their tasks.
Are then regalities all gilded masks?
No, there are throned seats unscalable
But by a patient wing, a constant spell,

5

10

15

20

(1) Woodhouse notes that " Keats said, with much simplicity, It will be easily seen what I think of the present ministers, by the beginning of the third Book.' Perhaps the Quarterly Reviewer had heard of that simple saying.

(5) The draft reads O devilish fact! - and in the next line with for through. (19) The draft has almost in place of past and.

(21-3) The following rejected reading is from the draft:

Or by ethereal things that, unconfin'd,
Can make a ladder of the eternal wind,
And poise about in cloudy thunder-tents
To watch the abysm-birth of elements.
Aye, 'bove the withering of old-lipp'd Fate
A thousand Powers keep religious state,
In water, fiery realm, and airy bourne;
And, silent as a consecrated urn,
Hold spherey sessions for a season due.
Yet few of these far majesties, ah, few!
Have bar'd their operations to this globe-
Few, who with gorgeous pageantry enrobe
Our piece of heaven whose benevolence
Shakes hand with our own Ceres; every sense
Filling with spiritual sweets to plenitude,

As bees gorge full their cells. And, by the feud

40

'Twixt Nothing and Creation, I here swear, Eterne Apollo! that thy Sister fair

Is of all these the gentlier-mightiest.

When thy gold breath is misting in the west,

She unobserved steals unto her throne,

45

And there she sits most meek and most alone;

As if she had not pomp subservient ;

As if thine eye, high Poet! was not bent
Towards her with the Muses in thine heart;
As if the ministring stars kept not apart,

(31-2) The draft yields the rejected couplet

In the several vastnesses of air and fire;
And silent, as a corpse upon a pyre.

(34) The draft reads

How few of these far majesties, how few! (38-9) These two lines stood thus in the draft

and each

every

With spiritual honey fills to plenitude...

}

sense

50

(41) At the end of this line Keats wrote in the original draft, as if to localize the oath he was recording, "Oxford, Septr. 5."

(42) The word eterne seems to be another reminiscence of Spenser: see Faerie Queene, Book III, Canto vi, Stanza 47:

Yet is eterne in mutabilitie,...

(44) The draft reads

When thy gold hair falls thick about the west.

(49) The draft has Upon in place of Towards.

(50) This attribution of an active life of ministration to the stars is a recurrence of the idea in Book II, lines 184-5

by all the stars

That tend thy bidding...

Waiting for silver-footed messages.

O Moon! the oldest shades 'mong oldest trees
Feel palpitations when thou lookest in:

O Moon! old boughs lisp forth a holier din
The while they feel thine airy fellowship.
Thou dost bless every where, with silver lip
Kissing dead things to life. The sleeping kine,
Couch'd in thy brightness, dream of fields divine:
Innumerable mountains rise, and rise,
Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes;

55

60

And yet thy benediction passeth not

One obscure hiding-place, one little spot

Where pleasure may be sent: the nested wren
Has thy fair face within its tranquil ken,
And from beneath a sheltering ivy leaf
Takes glimpses of thee; thou art a relief
To the poor patient oyster, where it sleeps
Within its pearly house. The mighty deeps,
The monstrous sea is thine the myriad sea!
O Moon! far-spooming Ocean bows to thee,
And Tellus feels his forehead's cumbrous load.

(52) In the draft,

Waiting the oldest shadows { 'mong}

(56-7) The draft reads

old trees.

Thou dost bless all things- -even dead things sip

A midnight life from thee.

(63) In the draft, wrought for sent; and in the next line there is the cancelled reading, Quiet behind dark ivy leaves...

(69) The draft reads

The monstrous sea is thine-the monstrous sea!

(70) In the draft old occurs in place of far. The word spooming for spuming, though not ordinarily found in dictionaries, was quite in Keats's line of reading. Thus Beaumont and Fletcher in The Double Marriage (Act II, Scene 1) have Down with the foresail too, we'll spoom before her.

Dryden, in The Hind and the Panther, has

When virtue spooms before a prosperous gale
My heaving wishes help to fill the sail.

And Brooke, in Constantia, has

The wind fresh blowing from the Syrian shore

Swift through the floods her spooming vessel bore.

(71) In the manuscript and in the corrected copy, his; but her was printed in the first edition, and corrected as an erratum, -the only one in some copies. The mistake arose through a pencilled marginal suggestion made in the printer's copy, not in Keats's writing.

Cynthia where art thou now? What far abode Of green or silvery bower doth enshrine

Such utmost beauty? Alas, thou dost pine

For one as sorrowful: thy cheek is pale

75

For one whose cheek is pale: thou dost bewail

His tears, who weeps for thee. Where dost thou sigh?

Ah! surely that light peeps from Vesper's eye,

Or what a thing is love! 'Tis She, but lo!

How chang'd, how full of ache, how gone in woe!
She dies at the thinnest cloud; her loveliness

80

Is wan on Neptune's blue: yet there's a stress
Of love-spangles, just off yon cape of trees,
Dancing upon the waves, as if to please
The curly foam with amorous influence.
O, not so idle for down-glancing thence
She fathoms eddies, and runs wild about
O'erwhelming water-courses; scaring out
The thorny sharks from hiding-holes, and fright'ning
Their savage eyes with unaccustom'd lightning.
Where will the splendour be content to reach?
O love! how potent hast thou been to teach
Strange journeyings! Wherever beauty dwells,
In gulph or aerie, mountains or deep dells,
In light, in gloom, in star or blazing sun,

Thou pointest out the way, and straight 'tis won.
Amid his toil thou gav'st Leander breath;

Thou leddest Orpheus through the gleams of death;
Thou madest Pluto bear thin element;

(74) Cancelled reading of the draft, Thine for Such.

(77-8) In the draft there was a false rhyme here, seen and remedied in copying

out:

Where art thou Ah

Surely that light is from the Evening star...

(86-7) The draft shows more than one tentative for this passage, thus:

stays it

Nor {there sleeps } the idleness — but glancing thence...

Nor cradled idly - but down glancing thence...
Yet not so idle for down glancing thence

It mingles and starts about unfathomed...

(89-90) In the draft this couplet reads —

Enormous sharks from hiding-holes, and fright'ning
The whale's large eyes with unaccustomed lightning.

(94-95) The draft reads thus —

In air, or living flame- or magic shells,
In earth, or mist, in star or blazing sun,...

And now, O winged Chieftain! thou hast sent
A moon-beam to the deep, deep water-world,
To find Endymion.

On gold sand impearl'd

With lilly shells, and pebbles milky white,
Poor Cynthia greeted him, and sooth'd her light
Against his pallid face: he felt the charm
To breathlessness, and suddenly a warm

Of his heart's blood: 'twas very sweet; he stay'd
His wandering steps, and half-entranced laid
His head upon a tuft of straggling weeds,

To taste the gentle moon, and freshening beads,
Lash'd from the crystal roof by fishes' tails.
And so he kept, until the rosy veils
Mantling the east, by Aurora's peering hand
Were lifted from the water's breast, and fann'd
Into sweet air; and sober'd morning came
Meekly through billows: - when like taper-flame
Left sudden by a dallying breath of air,
He rose in silence, and once more 'gan fare
Along his fated way.

Far had he roam'd,

With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam'd,
Above, around, and at his feet; save things
More dead than Morpheus' imaginings:
Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large
Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe;
Rudders that for a hundred years had lost
The sway of human hand; gold vase emboss'd
With long-forgotten story, and wherein
No reveller had ever dipp'd a chin

100

105

110

115

120

125

But those of Saturn's vintage; mouldering scrolls,
Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls

130

Who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude