[9] How familiar, both with the text and the translator's commentary, is proved by his adopting as his own, almost literally, a phrase which Sandys brings in by way of illustrative comment from the _Imagines_ (a description of an imaginary picture-gallery) of Philostratus. Philostratus, coming to a picture of Glaucus, tells how the painter had given him 'thick and arched eyebrows which touched one another.' Keats writes,--
his snow-white brows _Went arching up_, and like two magic ploughs Furrowed deep wrinkles in his forehead large.
It was the look and expression of Keats in reciting this same phrase, the reader will remember, which so struck Bailey that he found himself vividly recalling it thirty years later (see above, p. 144).
[10] Mr Mackail sees in this shell and its secret characters a reminiscence of the mystic shell, which is also a book, carried in the right hand of the sheikh who is also Don Quixote in the dream narrated by Wordsworth in the third book of _The Prelude_. I owe so very much of the interpretation above attempted to Mr Mackail that I am bound to record his opinion: but as I shall show later (p. 251), it is scarcely possible that any passages from _The Prelude_ should have come to Keats's knowledge until after _Endymion_ was finished.
[11] Ovid, _Metam._ xiii, 810-840; Theocr. _Idyll_. xi, 30 _sqq._
_ENDYMION._--II. THE POETRY: ITS QUALITIES AND AFFINITIES
Revival of Elizabethan usages--Avoidance of closed couplets--True metrical instincts--An example--Rime too much his master--Lax use of words--Flaws of taste and training--Faults and beauties inseparable--Homage to the moon--A parallel from Drayton--Examples of nature-poetry--Nature and the Greek spirit--Greek mythology revitalized--Its previous deadness--Poetry of love and war--Dramatic promise--Comparison with models--Sandys's _Ovid--Hymn to Pan_: Chapman--Ben Jonson--The hymn in _Endymion_--'A pretty piece of paganism'--Song of the Indian maiden--The triumph of Bacchus--A composite: its sources--English scenery and detail--Influence of Wordsworth--Influence of Shelley--_Endymion_ and _Alastor_--Correspondences and contrasts--_Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_--Shelley on _Endymion_--Keats and Clarence's dream--Shelley a borrower--Shelley and the rimed couplet.