Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, Came mother Cybele! alone--alone-- In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown About her majesty, and front death-pale, With turrets crown'd. Four maned lions hale The sluggish wheels; solemn their toothed maws, Their surly eyes brow-hidden, heavy paws Uplifted drowsily, and nervy tails Cowering their tawny brushes. Silent sails This shadowy queen athwart, and faints away In another gloomy arch.
The four lions instead of two must be a whim of Keats's imagination, and finds no authority either from Ovid or from ancient sculpture. Should any reader wish to pursue farther the comparison between Ovid in the _Metamorphoses_ and Keats in _Endymion_, let him turn to the passage of Ovid where Polyphemus tells Galatea what rustic treasures he will lavish upon her if she will be his,--the same passage from which is derived the famous song in Handel's _Acis and Galatea_: let him turn to this and compare it with the list of similar delights offered by Endymion to the Indian maiden when he is bent on forgoing his dreams of a celestial union for her sake, and he will see how they are dematerialized and refined yet at the same time made richer in colour and enchantment.
But let us for our purpose rather take, as illustrating the relations of Keats to his classic and Elizabethan sources, two of the incidental lyrics in his poem. There are four such lyrics in _Endymion_ altogether. Two of them are of small account,--the hymn to Neptune and Venus at the end of the third book, and the song of the Constellations in the middle of the fourth. The other two, the hymn to Pan in Book I and the song of the Indian maiden in Book IV, are among Keats's very finest achievements. The hymn to Pan is especially interesting in comparison with two of Keats's Elizabethan sources, Chapman's translation of the Homeric hymn and Ben Jonson's original hymns in his masque of _Pan's Anniversary_. Here is part of the Homeric hymn according to Chapman:--
Sing, Muse, this chief of Hermes' love-got joys, Goat-footed, two-horn'd, amorous of noise, That through the fair greens, all adorn'd with trees, Together goes with Nymphs, whose nimble knees Can every dance foot, that affect to scale The most inaccessible tops of all Uprightest rocks, and ever use to call On Pan, the bright-haired God of pastoral; Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe By lot all loftiest mountains crown'd with snow; All tops of hills, and cliffy highnesses, All sylvan copses, and the fortresses Of thorniest queaches here and there doth rove, And sometimes, by allurement of his love, Will wade the wat'ry softnesses. Sometimes (In quite oppos'd _capriccios_) he climbs The hardest rocks, and highest, every way Running their ridges. Often will convey Himself up to a watch-tow'r's top, where sheep Have their observance. Oft through hills as steep His goats he runs upon, and never rests. Then turns he head, and flies on savage beasts, Mad of their slaughters... (When Hesp'rus calls to fold the flocks of men) From the green closets of his loftiest reeds He rushes forth, and joy with song he feeds. When, under shadow of their motions set, He plays a verse forth so profoundly sweet, As not the bird that in the flow'ry spring, Amidst the leaves set, makes the thickets ring Of her sour sorrows, sweeten'd with her song, Runs her divisions varied so and strong.