striving to uprear Love's standard on the battlements of song.
His actual love scenes, as we have said, are the weakest, his ideal invocations to and celebrations of love among the strongest, things in the poem. One of these, already quoted, comes near the end of the first book: the second book opens with another: in the third book the incident of the moonlight spangling the surface of the sea and penetrating thence to the under-sea caverns where Endymion lies languishing is used to point an essential moral of the narrative:--
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.
When the poet interrupts for a passing moment his tale of the might and mysteries of love, celestial or human, and turns to images of war, we find, him able to condense the whole tragedy of the sack of Troy into three potent lines,--
The woes of Troy, towers smothering o'er their blaze, Stiff-holden shields, far-piercing spears, keen blades, Struggling, and blood, and shrieks.
From a passage like the following any reasonably sympathetic reader of Keats's day, running through the poem to find what manner and variety of promise it might contain, should have augured well of another kind of power, the dramatic and ironic, to be developed in due time. The speaker is the detected witch Circe uttering the doom of her revolted lover Glaucus:--
'Ha! ha! Sir Dainty! there must be a nurse Made of rose leaves and thistledown, express, To cradle thee, my sweet, and lull thee: yes, I am too flinty-hard for thy nice touch: My tenderest squeeze is but a giant's clutch. So, fairy-thing, it shall have lullabies Unheard of yet: and it shall still its cries Upon some breast more lily-feminine. Oh, no--it shall not pine, and pine, and pine More than one pretty, trifling thousand years. ... Mark me! Thou hast thews Immortal, for thou art of heavenly race: But such a love is mine, that here I chase Eternally away from thee all bloom Of youth, and destine thee towards a tomb. Hence shalt thou quickly to the watery vast; And there, ere many days be overpast, Disabled age shall seize thee: and even then Thou shalt not go the way of aged men; But live and wither, cripple and still breathe Ten hundred years: which gone, I then bequeath Thy fragile bones to unknown burial. Adieu, sweet love, adieu!'