'babble,' I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy—their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I want to see again."

But though the landscape which Keats knew, and which he painted in as the background to his poetry, is an English landscape, he does not look at it with purely English eyes. He sees it through the glamour of the Greek mythology. His use of the Greek gods and goddesses, "not dead," as he says himself, "but in old marbles ever beautiful," is not a mere literary affectation. It is not a tradition picked up from Chaucer, Browne, and Fletcher. It is something vital and personal to Keats himself. He is not content to philosophise about Nature as did Wordsworth; he is not content with the "something far more deeply interfused; " he demands a conception of Nature such as will satisfy his highest sense of beauty, and touch a chord of almost personal affection. "Scenery is fine," he says, "but human nature is finer; the sward is richer for the tread of a real nervous English foot; the eagle's nest is finer for the mountaineer having looked into it." To Keats the highest beauty is that of a beautiful human being. Here he differs from Wordsworth, who feels nothing of Keats' desire to read human into natural beauty, and in a manner to interpenetrate and combine the two. Wordsworth at his best, reaches a height of spiritual insight, in dealing with the relations of man and Nature, which is beyond Keats; Keats at his best, attains a beauty "fullform'd, like Venus rising from the sea," which is beyond Wordsworth; the inferior manner of the one is marked by the lapse into mechanical theorising, that of the other by the lapse into a sensuousness over rich and even morbid. If Keats had never heard of the Greek mythology, he would still probably have sought to give a half-human, half-divine personality to the sun, and moon, and sea. But, as a matter of fact, he became acquainted with the

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whole pantheon of gods and goddesses in his early boyhood. He knew no Greek, but he worked diligently through the Æneid at school, and Tooke, Spence, and Lemprière did the rest. Mr. Cowden Clarke says of Lemprière's Dictionary that Keats " арpeared to learn" that book, and indeed only the most continuous and delighted poring over its pages could have given Keats that familiarity with Greek legend which he displays at every turn. There are occasional slips. Thus Keats makes Venus say, "Visit my Cytherea," when he means "Cythera," and, "Tellus feels her forehead's cumbrous load," which thus correctly appears in the text of the first edition of Endymion, is altered by the change of "her" to "his" in the list of errata prefixed to the volume. But even this is set right later. We find "Tellus and her briny robes" in the volume of 1820. These, however, are the only mistakes made in hundreds of allusions to the classical mythology. Keats must indeed have known much of Lemprière positively by heart. It is worth while to put one or two passages side by side. In the second book of Endymion Keats writes

At this, with madden'd stare,

And lifted hands, and trembling lips, he stood;
Like old Deucalion mountain'd o'er the flood,
Or blind Orion hungry for the morn.

Lemprière narrates, under " 'Deucalion," how the vessel in which Deucalion took refuge from the deluge was "tossed about during nine successive days, and at last stopped on the top of Mount Parnassus, where Deucalion remained till the waters had subsided; and under "Orion," how " Enopion intoxicated his illustrious guest, and put out his eyes on the sea-shore, where he had laid himself down to sleep. Orion, finding himself blind when he awoke, was conducted by the sound to a neighbouring forge, where he placed one of the workmen on his back, and by his directions went to a place where the rising sun was seen to the greatest advantage. Here he turned his face towards the luminary, and, as it is reported, immediately recovered his eyesight, and hastened to punish the perfidious cruelty of Enopion." Any one who cares to pursue this subject for himself, and will, for instance,

look out the Glaucus, Scylla, Hermes of Endymion, or the whole body of the dramatis persona of Hyperion in Lemprière, will easily convince himself of the far from recondite source of the great majority of Keats' classical allusions. This reliance upon Lemprière descends to small minutiæ. Thus it is the Pæon which Keats found in Lemprière-" Endymion married Chromia, daughter of Honus, or, according to some, Hyperipne, daughter of Arcas, by whom he had three sons, Pæon, Epeus, and Æolus "—and not, as might conceivably be suggested, the Paana of Spenser (F. Q. iv. 8, 49) which in all probability is responsible for his Peona.

Was then Byron right in speaking of Keats as "versifying Lemprière?" He was right in the letter and wrong in the spirit. The remark is true in the sense in which it is true that Shakspere versified Holinshed. Here is what Lemprière says about Saturn and the golden age. "Saturn, unmindful of his son's kindness, conspired against him when he heard that he raised cabals against him, but Jupiter banished him from his throne, and the father fled for safety into Italy. Janus, who was then King of Italy, received Saturn with every mark of attention, and made him his partner on the throne; and the King of Heaven occupied himself in civilising the barbarous manners of the people of Italy, and the teaching them agriculture and the useful and liberal arts. His reign there was so mild and popular, so beneficent and virtuous, that mankind have called it the 'golden age,' to intimate the happiness and tranquillity which the earth then enjoyed." The reader who will compare this passage with Hyperion, i. 106-112 will better understand out of what sand Keats sifted the fine gold of his verse. In the same way

a prosy sentence of Lemprière's about Pan as "the emblem of fecundity," and "the principle of all things," was probably the germ of that great ode to Pan in the first book of Endymion, wherein the poet interprets the Greek idea in a way at once so sympathetic and so modern, and personifies in Pan the spirit that informs the lonely places of the earth, that is half seen in its mysterious sights, and is the—

Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds
That come a swooning over hollow grounds
And wither drearily on barren moors.

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But this natural bent and instinct of Keats to personify Nature, to see it in the Greek way, is perhaps most clearly traceable in the many passages on the moon scattered throughout his poems. Of course Endymion depends on one long identification of the moon with the "Silver huntress, chaste and fair." But even in the juvenile volume of 1817 the mythological turn which Keats always shows in speaking of the moon is already strongly marked. The single passage in which he is content to dwell on the purely physical appearances of the moon, without importing some idea of personality, is that in which he speaks of—

the moon lifting her silver rim Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim Coming into the blue with all her light.

The other passages are―

and

and

Or the coy moon, when in the waviness
Of whitest clouds she does her beauty dress,
And staidly paces higher up and higher,
Like a sweet nun in holy-day attire.

To see high, golden corn wave in the light
When Cynthia smiles upon a summer's night,
And peers among the cloudlets jet and white,
As though she were reclining in a bed

Of bean blossoms, in heaven freshly shed.

E'en now, dear George, while this for you I write,
Cynthia is from her silken curtains peeping

So scantly that it seems her bridal night,

And she her half-discover'd revels keeping.

These passages strike the note which is struck still more strongly in the Endymion. Thus Keats makes Endymion say

What is there in thee, Moon! that thou shouldst move

My heart so potently? When yet a child

I oft have dried my tears when thou hast smiled.

Thou seem'dst my sister: hand in hand we went

From eve to morn across the firmament.

No apples would I gather from the tree,

Till thou hadst cool'd their cheeks deliciously:

No tumbling water ever spake romance,

But when my eyes with thine thereon could dance:
No woods were green enough, no bower divine,
Until thou liftedst up thine eyelids fine.

And here is the passage in which the identification of the goddess and the moon is carried to the furthest possible point, a passage, moreover, which contains three lines which rank among the most beautiful in the poem

Full facing their swift flight, from ebon streak,
The moon put forth a little diamond peak,
No bigger than an unobserved star,

Or tiny point of fairy scimetar;

Bright signal that she only stoop'd to tie
Her silver sandals, ere deliciously

She bow'd into the heavens her timid head.

Slowly she rose, as though she would have fled,
While to his lady meek the Carian turn'd,
To mark if her dark eyes had yet discern'd
This beauty in its birth-Despair! despair!
He saw her body fading gaunt and spare

In the cold moonshine. Straight he seized her wrist;
It melted from his grasp; her hand he kiss'd,

And, horror! kiss'd his own-he was alone.

The mythologizing vein of Keats was then something natural and proper to the man. It was mainly fed upon a prosy classical dictionary, a schoolboy's knowledge of the Æneid, and Chapman's translation of Homer. But Greek art also helped Keats to come near to Greek life. His sonnets on the Elgin Marbles show how he studied the greatest existing monuments of Greek art, and his friendship with Haydon was here a most fortunate thing for him. Haydon was perhaps the first Englishman who rightly understood the full beauty and importance of the Elgin Marbles, and Keats saw them under the most competent possible direction. It is to be noted also in this connection that the Greek Vase which inspired Keats was no figment of his imagination, but had a real existence, and is now, it is said, under the arcade at the south front of